Colonel Mark Halis was not a happy man as he paced the small confines of his camp tent. The cause of his unease was the tiny communication device he had snapped in his ear.
"Colonel, your target is Six, it has already clawed out and destroyed its tracker but before that happened it was headed towards the city center. I believe it means to hide somewhere in the wreckage. But that is not an option," the sweet female voice in his ear dropped an octave. "You will find it and bring it back to me or you will not come back at all, is that clear?"
"Very clear ma'am, the dogs have its scent so it's only a matter of time. But ma'am, if I may, Six is going to make pretty quick work of my squad and me. If you want this thing back, you're going to have to send back up before we engage." He ran his hand through the short bristle of blonde hair that passed for his haircut and swore under his breath as he waited for the General to respond.
"That is why I sent with you those six new grenades. They contain a sedative designed to incapacitate Six and Six alone. Simple, get her into the open and gas the entire area. You and your men will be able to walk right through it, but if she takes one whiff of it it will lock her nervous system down. Then I think you big brave soldiers should have no trouble bringing it back to me." The line went dead and Halis swore again.
Did General Hayworth forget what she was asking them to do? He'd seen Six when the thing was still in the facility. It had been tiny, not much bigger than a ten-year-old. Yet even then, no one could go near it. The last three men who tried ended up spread over the walls and the ceiling. The facilities manager had had to taze the thing before its cage could be cleaned.
The thing that had brought a chill to his spine the most were its eyes. Yellow pools of light in a sea of black hair, those eyes had glowed with intelligence that none of the others had seemed to grasp. That thing was thinking, grasping, learning weaknesses, everything it needed to escape. Now he was being sent to retrieve it? He'd told them back then that the best thing they could have done was to put a bullet in its head and be done with it. But General Hayworth would have none of that, said something about it being her pet project, and that had led all of them here.
"What's the opp, Colonel?" His weapons specialist Nathan Peters asked, and Halis realized he had walked back to his squad while his head had been somewhere else.
"Listen to me very closely and don't forget a word I say," every head on his seven-man team turned to look at him. "We are going after Six." He let the words sink in and waited for their replies.
"But that thing killed thirty-five people breaking out of the base, and now they want it back?" Thorton, his communication officer spat out.
"Not they, her. General Hayworth wants her pet back and we've been sent out to snap the leash back onto its collar."
"But sir, she'll carve us into tiny pieces before we lay a finger on her." Martin Stegs, his new man spoke up.
"It is not a she, it is an it. General Hayworth grew that thing in her lab. Do not even try to humanize it because there is no point. I watched that thing kill three men once, and it did it within five seconds. So treat it like an animal and we might just survive this."
"Okay, we have to get Six. How are we going to play it, Colonel?"
"We'll figure that out when we find it. Once we do, we'll have a little surprise for it." He patted his tactical vest where the six new grenades were strapped.
"Sir, the dogs have its scent. If we let them go, they'll have it pinned in a couple of hours." Chaves, his canine trainer told him as he walked towards the dogs cages.
"Yeah, and if we're not there to back them up, we'll lose all three of them. So no, we all advance together. We're not on a timeline here, all she wants is it back, so far she hasn't said anything about when."
For the rest of that day the seven man squad moved with the utmost care towards the city center. The three massive dogs out front keeping the men on Six's trail. Just as the sun was touching the western horizon, all three dogs came to a stop, muzzles pointed at the same spot.
"They're on point, but all three of them are pointing at that hole in the road." Chaves whispered into his head set.
"I'm not sending anything down into that death trap. All we need to do is get this gas down there and this mission is over." Halis grabbed one of the small metal tubes from his vest, pulled the tiny pin and rolled it towards the hole. It began to spew its contents before it was even half way there, then tipped over the edge into the blackness.
"Now all we have to do is wait. Hastings, do you have it on thermal?" Halis asked over the secure frequency they all shared over their headsets.
"I've got nothing, sir. Unless you want me to bring every Rougarian within a few miles down on our heads, I can't power the scanner up enough to get through all this concrete, sorry."
"Then we wait. Either it comes out or we'll go down after it."
* * *
Clinging to the surface of a building ninety stories above the ground, he looked like a darker shadow among the shadow where he sat crouched. Sitting on the surface of any building is not something a human being is supposed to be able to do. Yet he hadn't been human in many, many years, at least not totally human.
Again he looked down at the seven men as they inched their way closer to where he knew the young girl had hidden.
"What do you think they're going to do once they have her?" He muttered to himself and as had always been the case for the last six months, his mind answered him.
"Nothing good, they're packing enough firepower to take on a small army. I believe it was as you thought, she's being hunted." The voice was a low alto, crisp and precise. It came from his prison.
His vision spanned the quarter mile that separated him from the scene unfolding before him with crystal clarity.
But this is not seeing, he thought to himself.
The shell that now imprisoned his head trickled sight and sound directly into his optic and auditory nerves, giving him senses unrivaled in human history.
He touched the concrete he was anchored to. At his touch he could tell how much damage the building had sustained, how many inches it swayed in the ever present winds.
But this is not feeling. His prison now interrupted what his fingers could no longer touch and told his nervous system what the feeling was.
He was covered in head to toe black, an ever moving piece of darkness that he could never escape. It had had over a hundred and fifty years to integrate itself into every part of his nervous system. It was like a second skin, a pool of ebony that flowed over him like a black ocean.
Not that it didn't have its uses. Take, for instance, his position now. He was nearly nine hundred feet in the air, attached to the side of a swaying building as if he were a spider. He neither felt the biting wind nor the vertigo such a position would normally give. The part of his prison that touched the vertical surface had sunk hundreds of microscopic spikes over an inch into the concrete. He could not have moved from that spot, let alone fell without a mental command from him and him alone. He could have even stood out from the building horizontally and gravity would not have affected him. His prison would have held him in that position for as long as his mind wanted.
Not that he wanted to at this point. Right then, all he wanted was what he'd wanted for the last two days. Find out why these men were hunting this young woman. He craned his neck to the left to watch the sun begin to slip below the horizon. He looked to his right, watched as the shadows crept over the urban graveyard that had once been a thriving city.
We need to get closer. The thought was no sooner in his mind than the spikes withdrew from the wall and he dropped. Had he not practiced with his suit/prison for the last six months, he would have panicked. But as it was, his mind was as clear as a crystal bell. The wind that rushed past him didn't concern him, neither did the blackened husks of skyscrapers rushing by on all sides of him. Fear didn't really have much effect on someone who could do what he could, not for a long time.
So he dropped like a stone towards the hard concrete below. Another mental command and twin wings grow from his shoulders. In less than a second they snapped to their full spread and his downward momentum was transformed into forward thrust. He now sailed above the shorter building or around the taller until what he'd seen from his perch came into view. A five story building, with its front facade facing the ruined highway.
Like a shadow, and as silent the wings disappeared and with as much noise as a leaf touching down he landed on the flat tar gravel roof. The black of his suit blended him in well with the shadows that lengthened and darkened as the sun slowly set. So he crouched at the edge of the roof and waited.
After a few minutes, he watched one of the men take a grenade from off his vest and roll it towards the hole. It began to spew a pinkish blue mist then the canister disappeared from sight. Everyone in the area held their breath and waited. Seconds ticked by one after another until they saw mist begin to curl out of the hole itself.
It's got to be filling the entire cavern down there. He thought as a scream pierced the twilight.
It was the sound of a hunter brought to bay by the hounds, a cornered predator, and it sent shivers down his spine. Because as he'd learned many years ago, the most dangerous part of any hunt is when the prey is cornered. Add the fact that these guys were hunting a predator and the threat level just skyrocketed.
The scream came again, and without warning a figure appeared over the hole in the road. She stood no more than five feet tall and the same physical traits that held his attention before had his eyes glued to her now.
Jet black hair covered her entire body, yellow eyes, claws and a mouth full of fangs completed the spell. To him, she was glorious. He was so engrossed in watching he didn't notice the seven men get up from their prone positions and advance. But he couldn't help but notice the three monstrous blurs of speed that accelerated towards her as the three dogs were unleashed.
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