Picturing the enemy’s location in her mind, Serros grimly thumbed the activation switch on her second to last K–Grenade and sent is sailing overhead in an arcing, backward toss. As they caught the cries of “Grenade!” and “Move!,” Avara and K’llan hugged the ground and took sight with their riffles. One by one, they began to methodically take out the fifteen or so evading Karukai.
One, a person Avara assumed to be the Karukai Captain based on the orders she was issuing, tossed two K–Grenades at Serros and Z’arr’s position. Avara countered by neatly shooting each of the slow–sailing grenades, causing them to explode mid–way between their position and the enemy’s.
The result was the issuance of yet another shower of glass from all surrounding sides as the detonation reverberated throughout the passageway. The Captain then made it her goal to take out the skilled Karukai commander, issuing a relentless spray of rifle–fire. Yet the shorter statured woman was able to evade the bullets and take cover behind the wall of the junction’s left corridor.
For an instant, it appeared that Avara and K’llan’s efforts were going to be stymied, with both the remaining Karukai forces and the Nova Squad members dug–in and pinned down in their respective cover–points. In answer to the quandary, Serros gave the Lieutenant a very specific signal and as one, they sheathed their bodies in the dark–azure shroud of a K–Shield. Like avenging specters, the two flew across the separating span and directly engaged the Karukai.
Outpacing the rapidity of a hummingbird and moving with the fluidity of falling water, Avara used her borrowed Karukai pistol to crack off two shots directly into the throat of a half–risen Karukai soldier whose mind had only barely registered her peril. Flesh tore and blood gushed free from the fatal would. The liquid blended with the crimson tone of the pale skinned woman’s armor as she dropped back to the ground in what resembled a staged free–fall in a Vid.
The Human Quorum Shield was already twisting to face her next three opponents, including the one she’d identified earlier as the unit’s commanding officer. One soldier, a tall Karukai woman with long, arcing cinnamon hued marks on her left cheek, managed to raise her own pistol and begin shooting.
To Avara’s enhanced vision and speed, the bullets resembled long, silvery buttons languidly working through thick honey. With almost casual ease, Serros shifted her head to the left to avoid the slow–crawling threat and then fired her own shots, squarely tagging the Karukai’s left shoulder. As the enemy fell back from the slashing injury, Captain Serros then rocket–launched an open palm to the chin of the second soldier, cracking her head back with life–rending force, leaving only she and the final officer behind.
Out of the corner of her eye, Serros spied K’llan engaged with the last three Karukai on her side of the corridor cross–roads.
The Karukai officer, revealing the unsuspected ownership of an Arca DSA herself, capitalized on the Human’s distraction by raining rifle–fire all along Serros’s body. Avara could feel the power of each slug, yet the K–Shield absorbed every bruising impact and then reflected the bullet–fire more or less back to its origin.
The rebounding slugs shredded into the Karukai commander and the still whimpering soldier whom Avara had previously taken down.
Hostiles defeated, Avara turned to find that K’llan had similarly finished off her own adversaries and with thoughts bent towards conservation, the duo dropped their shields. The rich–blue faded to mere wisps before disappearing altogether within moments.
Moving quickly, Captain Serros scooped up several K–Grenades that were either still attached to Karukai harnesses or rolling loose–leaf on the glass–sheeted floor. She also snagged and mag–clipped a second pistol as well as several CDs. K’llan did the same, though by unspoken agreement she gave the majority of the grenades she retrieved to Avara, who still had the task of taking out an entire army of tanked Greys.
After mere seconds had been spent in retrieval and preparation, it was time for the two to separate and address their distinct objectives. Despite her certainty that as laid out, the course they had decided upon represented the best chance for success and survival, Avara found it hard to bid her companion goodbye.
Especially knowing that realistically, this moment could very well represent their final parting.
Though showered with dust and debris, face faintly flushed from exertion and her lustrous, sapphire–hued hair having slipped free of all restraint, in that moment, teetering between life and death, Avara was pierced by the Vosaia’s extraordinary beauty. Captured by the complexities of K’llan’s glittering, lilac colored eyes, more than ever, Avara felt the splendor of this woman’s soul.
It was a loveliness that easily transcended her undeniable physical presence, encapsulated the very essence of each distinct element that comprised the totality of who she was.
Without thought or censure, Avara swiftly closed the distance between them and after pulling K’llan to her heart in a single, quick maneuver, crushed the Vosaia’s lips with her own, hard.
For one, shining moment, Avara held the pose, allowing the depth of her regard to be communicated, allowing herself to fully experience K’llan’s unfettered response before releasing the kiss.
With her palms locked to Avara’s head and gaze rippling with intensity, K’llan whispered passionately, “This is not goodbye, Avara Serros. Do you understand? This is not goodbye.”
“I understand, K’llan Z’arr.” Avara answered, her normally smooth alto rough with emotion.
“Be sure that you do.” K’llan’s tone both challenge and promise.
With a nod, Avara silently stepped away from K’llan. When she’d mastered herself enough to speak once more, Captain Serros, switching gears, brusquely uttered “Maintain communication on our closed channel. If not before, we will meet outside with the prisoners and gain control of the starfighters.”
“Yes. Stay safe.”
“You too.” Avara responded, and then having once more activated her DSA, shot off down the corridor’s left hallway. Her target was laid bare before her: the unnamed room that housed the entrance to the army that Karukai scientists had bred to wreak destruction and despair upon the peoples and worlds she had sworn no less than three separate oaths to protect until her last, spent breath.
*
Continuing her pace, Avara reached the door to the room that she and K’llan had determined to be the entrance to the tank sublevel in less than a minute after parting ways from Z’arr. The white door was plain, featuring a single plaque that designated the space as “Storage.”
Yet in stark contrast to the room’s supposedly innocuous purpose, a detachment of four Karukai soldiers stood smartly to attention, barring access. Deciding the time for subtly was well over, Avara re–clipped her Karukai pistol and drew both DZR assault rifles right before cornering the hallway and then Arca speeding down the long–corridor towards the guards and her goal.
Streams of controlled bursts of rife–fire mercilessly slashed into the hallway and Karukai flesh alike as the soldiers tried but failed to respond in time. Moving low to the ground, Avara was able to avoid the few shots the quartet had been able to reply with before she stood over their fallen forms.
Two were still alive, their moans of pain gurgling between blood–frothed lips. One was attempting to move towards her abandoned rifle, tracking a bloody smear along the once–pristine, snow hued floor. Tamping down the part of her soul that even after all of these years as a solider and operative still shrieked at the taking of life, Avara efficiently fired two more short bursts, ending their misery.
Serros replaced the rifles at her back and quickly scanning the dead, added a few more K–Grenades to her growing supply then moved to the portal. It had been locked down, but with the code Lieutenant Z’arr had crafted, Avara was able to gain entry in fairly short order.
The interior of the room was entirely unremarkable. Precisely labeled, steel–colored metal crates stood neatly stacked throughout, organized s
o as to create walkways in–between the piles. Though nothing appeared out of the ordinary and certainly no entryway to a massive underground complex was visible, after actuating her Arca TXL Enhancement and converting her visual range to X–Ray mode, Captain Serros was just able to make out the half–blurred outline of a double–door inset into the floor.
Careful to keep her back to the wall, Avara quickly knelt down and, after finding a secreted lever behind a crate, suddenly the entire back center floor began to shift and reorganize itself. Taking stacks of crates with it, the floor split into three segments and pushed upward and then outward, each unfolding like an accordion.
When the floor sections had ceased their transformation, an open portal the size of an air–car was center–positioned in the back half of the storage room. A straight coursed yet multi–flight, open–slatted staircase of white durexium plunged into the faint gloom beyond.
Nadir DZR held at the ready, Avara took a deep breath and began the decent, opting for silence rather than speed. Time seemed to crawl as she made her way down the clock–wise turning stairs. After she’d exhausted forty or so feet of movement, Avara came to a platform that continued left, right, and forward of her position.
Yet it wasn’t reaching the main level of her destination that immediately gave pause to Captain Avara Serros, but instead, it was the unbelievable sight that greeted her.
Rows upon rows of loaded Cloning–Tanks affixed to hydraulic–lift trees filled the entirety of the massive, subterranean complex for acre after acre, as far as the natural eye could see. Each tank held what appeared to be post–pubescent yet still adolescent, entirely hairless, gray–skinned female clones. Every still developing clone was peacefully sleeping in pale blue, viscous life–sustaining liquid, a sort of advanced amniotic fluid.
They were all connected to numerous wires and tubes while faces were covered by firmly affixed masks. Serros knew that the light in the warehouse was deliberately kept dim to not tax sensitive eyes unready for the harsh illumination of free–moving life. Each tree was multi–level, spanning some twenty feet from floor to ceiling and, issuing a rough calculation, Serros guessed that respectively, every tree sustained and housed some five hundred or more clones.
And there were thousands of them.
The ramifications were simply staggering and for a moment, the Quorum Shield Operative had to work hard to break the data down into manageable compartments, rather than an overwhelming mass. She needed level–headed clarity just as she needed more information and a way to shut this humanoid assembly line down.
Serros carefully noted that the main travel–ways of the room were comprised of a tri–level series of durexium walk–ways, some fifteen feet in width and set into a cross pattern. Each thoroughfare was connected to numerous smaller walkways shooting off from the main branches. Peering throughout the warehouse, Avara could spy only a few Karukai at work, most scientists or medical staff based on the lack of armor and weapons. Not to mention the fact that they were almost uniformly attired in tight fitting, red and white lab–suits and coats. She marked no guards.
Decision made, Avara cautiously yet quickly stalked along the length of the centermost, wide–railed walkway. Her goal was what was obviously, based on the number of console stations, the cloning warehouse’s central tank Control Hub.
Reaching her destination, only a single Karukai Scientist was present, scanning some readings, her brow furrowed in concentration and hands occupied with one of the central console’s orange, holo–projected keyboards. Her pale skin seemed especially stark in the reflected blue–white light of the cloning tanks.
Looking quickly to ensure that they were entirely out of sight, Avara quietly came up behind the doctor and expertly slammed the butt of her rifle to the scientist’s temple. With a faint groan stifled by Serros’s gauntleted hand, the woman quickly lapsed into unconsciousness and with Serros’s assistance, crumpled to the ground. Serros then tucked the body underneath and into the recesses of the console.
It took only a quick scan of the current status readings of the tank occupants to ascertain that the Greys were close to maturation, probably only a few weeks out until they would be ready for harvesting. Harvest would be followed by six months of training and conditioning and then deployment to whatever strategic military ends the Triarchy intended.
Moving rapidly to confirm the method employed to supply the rather vast quantities of power required to support and manage the tanks, Avara poured over the data like a drowning person desperately sucking in air.
There!
There were six main power cores where energy was conducted from all of those outside generators K’llan and she had taken note of while surveying the Outpost’s premises. If Avara could overload those power cores, not only would the critical maintenance of tank life–systems be interrupted and result in the death of each developing clone, but the back–feed from the power increase should fry the regulators and actually result in the destruction of the clone tank–trees as well.
Not to mention most of the entire facility.
If the Karukai wanted to continue their work at Outpost J2, they’d have to practically start from scratch. It was an unlikely scenario due to the now irrefutable reality of compromised secrecy. Avara hurriedly crafted and then sent a hack initiating the energy–flow change, priming the system to overload.
For good measure, she added no less than three security layers that would take even an experienced hacker at least an hour or more to disable. Now Avara would have to manually set each power core to overload, making sure that the changes could not be reversed.
Considering, she figured that once set, the entire tank–house would be blown to mere memory in less than twelve minutes.
At most.
With the technical details answered and means determined, for the first time since learning of the tank–bred army, Avara let the emotional implication of what she intended to do fully rise to the fore. She felt her intellect, her very soul, scream with the realization of what this deed would mean: nothing short of mass homicide. An act of contained genocide.
Every slumbering clone was a person, a sentient, thinking and feeling person, no matter what the Karukai would claim. And Avara intended to do everything in her power to ensure that each individual clone drew her last breath in less than a quarter of an hour.
Yet if she didn’t stop the Greys here, before they were awoken, how many hundreds of thousands, how many millions would suffer, would die?
The psychological programming that each clone was bred and designed with was just as strong as the physical hardening of body and the tempering of reflexes. The programming forced each Grey to follow Karukai orders with an absolutism that verged on fanaticism.
And what was even worse, if, just if, a Grey could ever conceive of rebelling against her Karukai masters, of refusing an order, every Karukai Clone was embedded with a microscopic, bio–tech chip that not only allowed for tracking, but was also an atomic–sized explosive. When the command was keyed, the explosive immediately detonated, taking away life more easily than it had been granted.
At the thought, the unforgettable image of the unmasked Karukai agent on Ophere in the Adrenix processing center came to mind, and the explosion that all but atomized her in death.
No, despite the ache in her heart, the bitter taste of ash in her mouth that spoke of the evil, and it was an evil she was about to commit, Captain Serros knew what her duty was to the literally trillions of people and hundreds of systems she had sworn to protect, what her oath demanded.
So engrossed was she in her soul–searching, that it was only after Serros heard the unmistakable blam––blam–blam of kobalt–powered pistol fire, that she comprehended she was no longer alone and that her presence had been discovered.
Saved from certain death by experience and Arca forged precognition, Avara shot out over the central control console and side–railing to the floor some twelve feet below, noting as she landed that just for a mo
ment, her left leg threatened to give. Casting a cursory scan, she realized that at least two bullets had managed to graze across her thigh, singeing into armor and synth–skin alike, yet fortunately, not taking up residence within her dermis.
Activating her Arca speed, Avara launched forward on the lower center platform level in a zig–zag pattern towards the origin of the pistol fire, all the while fiercely casting her gaze to catch sight of her enemies. Just above her, about forty–paces away from her original position, were two Karukai females. They were attired in blood–red and black elite armor, chevrons of gold and onyx lanced by a jagged slash of lightning visible on each Karukai’s shoulder and right pectoral.
“Varda!” Serros spat the name like the curse it was, knowing she would have to adapt her strategy accordingly.
As she ran, a hail of fire dogged her every step, sparking off the durexium grating and rails like campfire sparks gone wild after a recklessly stoked fire flew into rebellion. Around her, the sound of shattered glass permeated the building again and again as the two Varda shot and only fractionally missed.
Just as she was about to come directly under her enemies, Serros flexed her leg muscles and, excising complete control of movement, veered to the left and launched upward twenty–five feet to the top of a mid–point positioned clone tank. Having twisted in air, the Shield Operative gracefully landed front–first and immediately opened fire with determined ruthlessness. Now on the defensive, the Varda split and dove to the flooring of the wide cat–walk, returning fire as they again found their feet.
Yet Avara was no longer in the same position. Instead, she had leapt once more, this time behind both Varda and onto the same walkway, Stingers out and popping shot after shot.
With great skill and matching Arca enhanced speed and agility, the two Karukai, one slender and pale as a birch tree, the other of shorter stature and somewhat bulky in build who in appearance reminded Serros of a miniature, snow covered oak, worked to take her down.
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