by K.Z. Freeman
***
He entered the facility like he had the first time. Through the front gate. There was a hazardous environments cleanup crew on site, spread out in the corridors and research rooms. He came in low, hunched and slow. His cloaking matrix strained his batteries and required much in terms of power for its upkeep, but the benefits of being able to hear what the men were saying and the ability to stealthily end them, far outweighed that particular concern. More than twenty throats had to be cut for him to actually get to the front gate. The silos and hangars outside were dotted with men and before he reached the actual main entrance below the ground, he had stopped counting the casualties.
He moved over the now inactive tram-line, and had become a movement indistinct from shadow if one didn’t know what he was looking at. He was a play of shade, a shift in reality near impossible to spot.
“I hate this job,” said one of the cleanup men, rolling a tray with two carcasses and placing another on top of the first. His voice was muffled behind the hazmat suit. “And now the guys outside seem to have cut us off. We’ve been doing this for hours, I need a shift change.”
The one who aided the first grunted as the two picked up a third and placed the body on the tray. He then said, “I hear the same guy who hit the facility down in Denver did this.”
“Shit,” said the first. “These poor bastards didn’t deserve this. But damn, you sure just one person did this?”
“That’s what I’ve heard.”
Dealing with the cleanup crew was no less difficult than killing all the scientists the day before. A shot to the heart burst open their suits and made them scream inside their helmets. Some just rolled to the ground without a word and didn’t get back up. He enabled his aim-adjustment systems and resonance implants and allowed the system to self-calibrate. A second was enough as triangles flashed in his vision and his field of view pulsed for a moment. The implant locked onto any heartbeat and steadied his arm as he took aim for a perfect heart-shot. None of them, not even their comrades knew what had hit their friends, until they felt the very same thing themselves. For this he used the now outdated, gunpowder and shell-based weapons to kill, the silenced gunshots making him all the more impossible to spot while cloaked. Dealing with the military guarding the cleanup crew was a bit more of a challenge. Yet the days of bullets were over, at least when it came to highly armored targets – that era had died out when the first true railgun was invented in 2034. The progression was logical, for the military wanted something that could bust through a wall without loss of kinetic energy. And they got it. Hell, they got it and then wished they hadn’t. It took no less than a week for the technology to become available on the black market. The only problem was, the military’s tech was slightly more advanced and, as Saul ducked behind cover, they were trying to use that very technology to kill him as well. They had a way of seeing through his cloak by using magnetic-field scanners. He knew this and had jumped down from the magway suspended two meters above the main walkway and ran into one of the branching corridors.
The black market had been kind to him in more ways than one, his years of being a hitman allowing him to purchase all kinds of tech which gave him an edge over anyone and everyone on the battlefield. He had found out the authorities knew what hits and what jobs he had performed on the count of them being so signature, that only one with his kind of implants could do them in such a way and so efficiently.
With a subtle shift of the head, his vision shifted for a moment. For half a second he was blind, his sight a mesh of black and white particles like a television tuned to a dead channel. Yet when his vision flickered back, the walls came transparent, a mesh of neon outlines. They weren’t fully invisible or unseen, and one could still move about without bumping into objects. Behind a bend in the corridor about fifty meters ahead, he could see a quad of soldiers squatting behind cover, fiddling with the settings on their railguns, adjusting them form maximum firepower. He adjusted his mind-to-muscle tissue calibration implant by navigating through a set of internally displayed menus and set the locking mechanisms to a brainwave function. He took aim and shot the wall where the soldiers were. In a line of spiraling light, the rail sliced the air and hit the smooth surface. He saw the soldier bend forward as the wall burst behind him and took his head with it. Saul’s arm recalibrated and locked, automatically readjusted his aim for the next person in line. All he had to do was pull the trigger. Like a sound of discharging electrical current buried within a colossal machine, muted yet powerful, the railgun sounded again and the remaining three men didn’t even have the time to react or move aside. The wall behind them shredded and showered them with metal chaff as their heads simply disappeared, one by one. Saul walked to their side and ran after the three fleeing men of the cleanup crew. He was going to have to chase them down, extract a bit of wanted and sought after information. He had to know where the fragment has been taken, if anywhere, and what they knew about it. His contractor had demanded the data, and this time he would do the job properly. He had everything under control, he could spot the ethereal outlines of their bodies as they ran further down the corridor and around the bend. He set a tracking beacon on their bodily functions and the system displayed three lines over the floor, dotted and subtle, following the figures.
The lighting was poor, set to the lowest setting and only every third lamp shone above him. The echoes of the runners died out and he picked up his speed, when something happened which he did not expect. The wall to his left burst open from the other side, showering him with bits as a massive, heavily armored figure came thundering through. Shoulder first, the brute emerged unscathed, the specs of concrete and flecks of iron thrown along with the massive body. Dust trailed off the contours of its armor and Saul fired from the hip. The railgun’s blast dissipated like smoke against the almost three meter tall machine… surely it had to be a machine. As Saul saw this he knew he was dead. The thing’s trigger finger clicked and its chaingun began its pre-fire cycle. A moment later, the corridor resounded with a relentless, mechanized chug. Smiles and frowns were drawn over the wall behind him where the bullets hit as the soldier moved the gun in side-sweeping motions. The material was torn as each mass-reactive shell produced a mini explosion and echoed through the hallway. He ran for his life. Saul’s head would have long since been clipped, spliced in half if it weren’t for his suit. A moment before the chaingun began to fire, he had shifted through a menu and cursed inwardly as he saw he only had five hundred intercept fragments left. His footsteps carried him further away from the sluggish soldier behind, his ears ringing as now hundreds of strategically placed pits over the back of his suit calibrated with movement sensors and intercepted each sonic bullet that flew his way. But the calibration was off, the chaingun’s bullets traveling at a slightly faster speed than what had been added to the system. He heard the whirling of the suit’s inner workings and felt as the bullets detonated inches over his back. Eyes locked on the fragment-counter as he ran, firing off an occasional burst of rail. He had to turn off the hand-to-eye adjustment systems to conserve energy and had redirected the necessary amplage to the intercept systems for a more speedy and fully focused adjustments. With the power conservation system on high, his movements added to the necessary recharging of power supplies. The last bullet before he finally managed to make the corner grazed his shoulder, its explosion throwing him over the wall. His right ear rang and throbbed and he was curtain his eardrum had popped, until hearing slowly came back to him. Saul picked himself up and began to move. He could hear the heavy footsteps thumping behind. The counter on his inner screen read zero, flickered, he had no more intercept fragments left. The next bullet will be fatal. He grabbed an EMP nade from his belt and squeezed it. It expunged a hiss of depressurization as the mechanism charged and he chucked it over his shoulder. It clanked as it hit the massive thing in the chest just as the soldier made the corner. The grenade bounced to the ground. It didn’t go off. The chaingun whirled again. Saul made it t
o the next bend just in time as the wall to his left was torn into shreds by shells. Large pieces of it bounced and rolled over the floor. The area before him opened up into a hall. He enabled his tracking systems and went after the three scientists. Their route was a luminous, dotted line over the floor. A sound of mechanized footsteps behind him slowly died out and faded into the distance as he passed windowed rooms and research areas. All of them were empty and he knew everyone had been alerted to his presence. He ran and followed the line.
Chapter 2