The Assassin

    Far out in the cold depths of space, there lies a ship. Cold and lifeless, it waits. The only passenger held in cryo stasis until she is called upon. Within the ship, a small console lights up. The communications panel displays a signal.

    CYRAX AGENT 293, CODENAME: SPYDER… ACTIVATE.

    There is a hiss as the cryo chamber opens.  A robotic hand reaches out with an electronic whir, it’s motors ever so slightly degraded for lack of use. Stepping out of the pod for the first time in years, Spyder runs a systems check.

NEURAL INTERFACE: OPERATIONAL

NUTRIENT DISTRIBUTION SYSTEM: ONLINE

ZERO POINT POWER CORE: DEACTIVATED

BACKUP POWER SYSTEMS: 100% CAPACITY

ELECTRIC MOTION SYSTEMS: MAINTENANCE REQUIRED

HYDRAULIC MOTION SUPPORT: DISENGAGED

CYRAX NEURAL CONTROL SYSTEM: ONLINE

SCANNING ARRAY: ERROR: SYSTEM DAMAGED

    Spyder heads towards her workroom on board the ship. As she walks, she checks the mainframe to see why she was woken up.

    CODENAME SPYDER HAS BEEN SELECTED FOR IMMEDIATE DEPLOYMENT. MISSION DETAILS TO FOLLOW.

    The doors to the workroom open, revealing a bed surrounded by mechanical arms for maintenance purposes. There are several screens on the left wall, but they’re turned off. The general lack of dust on the ship leaves Spyder able to see her reflection. She appears to be a pale girl of maybe 13 or 14, with white hair and violet eyes. Appearances can be deceiving, however. In reality, Spyder is mostly robotic. The skin and hair are synthetic, layered over a metal endoskeleton. Housed within is the only truly organic component, her brain, and even that’s been wired with a neural interface, and some control devices.

    She considers for a moment, how that came to be the case. Many years ago, even she doesn’t know how long, there was a girl of the age Spyder appears to be. She was the daughter of a wealthy politician, one who made it his life's work to end the growing ecological crisis on Genesis, the 5th colony of the U.P.E., United Planets of Earth. Unfortunately, several large mining conglomerates took issue with his efforts, and sent a request to the best known agency of contracted mercenaries out there, Cyrax.

    Little is known about Cyrax, outside of how to contract one of their agencies. Nobody has ever been able to trace their whereabouts, follow their agents, nor discern how or where they’re hired from.  The only way to get information on Cyrax’s recruitment method, is the way the young girl, nine years old at the time, did.

    The politician woke up one morning, only to find his daughter missing, the window melted through by someone, or something.  Checking security footage yielded nothing but a looped video, the system having been apparently hacked by the unseen intruder.

    Later, as the man, broken-hearted and disheveled, gave a speech about the topic, his guards came under fire. Each of them was methodically slain, all with perfect headshots. The man ran. His bodyguards had said they couldn’t stop the killer, told him to run, so he did. 

    But not fast enough.

    The man was stopped by a short, hooded figure, wielding a rifle as long as they were tall. The figure reached a hand up and pulled down her hood. 

    The man broke.

    The figure had his daughter’s face. She cried, and pleaded, begging someone or something to stop, to not make her do it.

    CODENAME SPYDER WILL COMPLY.

The gun came up, the shot was fired, and the girl’s mind was broken.

    Ever since then, Spyder had gone on to become one of Cyrax’s top agents. Her efficiency rating second to none other in the agency. As some of her internal mechanisms were repaired and replaced by the maintenance machines, Spyder wiped a single tear from her eye. No emotion. It only leads to pain.

    MAINTENANCE CYCLE: COMPLETE

MISSION DETAILS RECEIVED…

    TYPE: TERMINATION        TARGET: Knairen Fyxal

    DETAILS: TARGET IS A HIGH RANKING OFFICER IN PALOREXIAN MILITARY FORCE. EXPECT HEAVY RESISTANCE AT TARGET LOCATION. TARGET IS A PALOREXIAN MALE WITH GREEN EYES, OFF-WHITE SCALES, AND PRONOUNCED SPINAL RIDGES, RANK IS BRIGADIER GENERAL. CURRENTLY STATIONED AT EDEN BASE Σ-5.  TARGET IS KNOWN TO FAVOR A TYPE-7 IMPULSE BLASTER AS A PRIMARY WEAPON. CONFIGURE ARMOR FOR ENERGY DISPERSION.

    Spyder skimmed through the details. Interesting, she thought. This is the first time they’ve sent me after a palorexian. Few ever get that important, what with their planet being destroyed and all. The Palorexian homeworld of Palor was destroyed during the 3rd machine uprising, leaving the remaining inhabitants scattered through the stars. Many sought refuge with the U.P.E. where they were welcomed with relatively open arms. It seems like this particular individual had risen enough in the ranks to form a military unit.

    Spyder left the maintenance room and headed for the armory. She needed her weapon.

The doors open, revealing an arsenal of different weapons. In the center, on a display was a rifle as long as Spyder was tall. 

    The weapon was quite famous within Cyrax. Kinslayer was its name, and it had a well deserved reputation. One shot was all that was ever needed. The weapon earned its name when Spyder used it to kill her father. It was an Ares-ῼ magnetically enhanced sniper rifle. To call it a sniper rifle really doesn’t do it justice, though. It was a handheld railgun.

    She took the gun and checked it over. Everything seemed to be working, so she swung it over her shoulder, where it maglocked to her back. Then she went too a shelf and pulled out an impulse pistol, six frag grenades, two pulse grenades, an EMP device, and a hackers kit. Securing all of these onto various slots and magnetic clamps on her body, she then headed towards the cockpit of her ship.

    When she entered the cockpit, the control panels lit up all at once, preparing for flight. Spyder sat down in the flight seat and grabbed hold on the controls. The navigation computer had already plotted a route to Eden, all she had to do was confirm and engage the hyperdrives. She checked over the plotted route, just to make sure. Many a ship had been destroyed due to navigational failure.

    Finding no issues, Spyder confirmed the route and pressed the hyperdrive button. There was a pause, and then space folded in on itself. The ship blasted through the lightspeed barrier and began its journey to Eden. The navigation system reported an ETA of four hours.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

    Spyder considered for a moment, then turned to another panel, scrolling through a few entries until she found one she liked and tapped it. The music player came to life, her playlist “Echelon” providing some small modicum of comfort. Music was one of the few pleasures that the mainframe allowed Spyder.

Spyder's Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5VsgMRttvQ&t=1429s

    As the ship approached its destination, she paused for a moment, thinking about her old life. Not for the first time, she wondered what her name had been. The mainframe had carefully erased any names of family, friends, and even Spyder herself. To the mainframe, she was a tool, and tools don’t need family, or friends, or an identity. Above all, the mainframe made sure its tools knew that they were utterly expendable. Too many failures, and they are recycled, and a recruitment order is issued. She shuddered. Recruitment missions were the worst. Nobody deserved to have something like this done to them. Especially not the children that Cyrax so often preferred.

    Spyder shook herself away from those thoughts. Too much pain behind them. Far better to simply distract herself. She stood up from the pilots seat and headed back down towards the armory. Adjacent to the armory was her practice room, and waiting inside were five high quality practice robots. The robots were imposing pieces of technology, reminiscent of a mountainous humanoid. In the event of an intruder aboard the ship, their training safeties could be disabled in order to neutralize the intruder. 

    Spyder stepped into the room and sent a signal to the machines to start up at level 5. The machines stepped forward, choosing melee practice weapons from a rack on the wall, then settled into combat stances.

“Begin.”

    At that signal, they all rushed Spyder at once. The robots were large, and no doubt they had strength, she’d seen them crush reinforced sample containers in their fists, but they were slow, and their intelligence was dulled by the non-lethal training protocols. Spyder leapt up over them, and deployed her signature.

    She wasn’t called “Spyder” for nothing. Eight mechanical limbs unfolded from her back and mag-locked to the ceiling. The movement was so abrupt and fast that the training bots failed to track it. They looked around for a moment, searching for their target, before she dropped down behind the bot with the mace and kicked its head off. One of the machines turned around just in time to catch the chrom cranium with its own faceplate, throwing it off balance while Spyder ducked beneath the strike of the bot holding a halberd and severed the control wires in its shoulder joint, its left arm going limp. Two other bots, both holding swords attempted to rush her, but were pierced clean through the chest by two of the spider legs. The bot now holding its allies severed head had the unusually bright idea of throwing the head at the lights to douse the room in darkness.

    This plan backfired spectacularly, as Spyder’s night vision was far superior to the remaining two robots, one of whom was crippled. Both were destroyed in a single attack, when Spyder drop kicked the first one into the second with enough force to crush both of them.

    At that point the match was deemed over, and the emergency lights kicked on. The training room’s self-repair systems set about fixing the lights and the thoroughly trashed robots. The mainframe offered Spyder its score of the battle, but she declined, not interested in statistics.

    The ship's computer then reported that there were only a few more minutes left in the jump, and advised that she return to the cockpit, in the event of local authorities making hostile action. She entered the system just after a patrol passed through her area, the next one not due for another half hour. Immediately she activated the cloaking system. 

    Spyder’s ship, the Enigma, was notorious for being virtually impossible to detect when its cloaking array was activated. The systems blacked out almost every possible form of detection known to man, leaving only a void where it should be. In space, this would go totally unnoticed, but once in atmosphere, it often became suspicious when an apparent vacuum existed where it obviously should not.

    The ship moved towards the 4th planet, Eden. It’s systems were set to silent mode, its propulsion a simple short burst from the pulse engines, and then a drift. As it was coasting towards the planet, Spyder began making plans for her mission.  According to her intel, the target left base once every week to visit his family. Every time he made this trip, he passed through a long tunnel through a mountain. This made Spyder’s job far easier, as it was a simple matter to blow a tunnel, as opposed to breaking into a military base. She checked the ships cargo hold, looking for explosives.

    THERMAL CORE MINE x50

    ANTIMATTER CHARGE X1

    NUCLEAR PULSE BOMB X5

    SEISMIC SHIFT CHARGE X5

    MAGMA FRAG GRENADE X50

    EMP DISCHARGE GRENADE X50

    Spyder looked over her options, her gaze locked onto the seismic charges. Perfect, she thought, a mountain range is already something caused by tectonic activity, and these charges mimic an earthquake almost perfectly. With any luck, the fools will brush this off as an unfortunate, natural disaster. 

    Spyder was shaken from her thoughts as the Enigma entered Eden's atmosphere, causing some turbulence. The ship slipped into the atmosphere virtually silently, not far away from the base, in the dead of night. With the cloaking system adjusted to read atmosphere instead of a void, she was somewhat more vulnerable to detection, but it didn’t matter. Enigma landed safely in the mountains, out of view of any construction.

    Spyder grabbed her equipment, and immediately set to work. She scuttled down the mountains with her mechanical spider legs, making what would normally be a several day climb in a few hours. Once at the bottom, she searched for the tunnel entrance. Finding it easily, she slipped inside, and began planting the charges at regular intervals in the tunnel. Once that was done, it became a waiting game. Much like the predators her codename came from, Spyder was a very patient person.

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    Knairen was tired. He had been doing this for many years now, and while successful, his military career was weighing on him. He looked older than he was, and felt older than he looked. At least he was here on base and not out fighting the remnants of the most recent machine uprising. This last one had been particularly bloody.

    After finishing the last few papers on his desk, he stood up and left his office. It was time to visit his family for the weekend. That was another positive to being stationed on base, he was never very far from his wife, Zecelia, and his son, Drek. He smiled, Drek was turning into a fine young man. Soon enough he’ll be headed to university, studying veterinary medicine. Knairen couldn’t have been more proud of his son.

    As he got in his car, one of the other soldiers on base, Lieutenant Barnes, stopped to talk to him. “Commander, headed to visit the family again?” Knairen smiled. Barnes had family nearby too, and they often spoke to each other about their families. It was one of the few things he had in common with the human, they both cared deeply for their families. “That’s right, Barnes. Drek will be off to university soon, and this may be my last chance to see him before then.” Barnes nodded, then said “Well enjoy your visit, Commander. I’ll keep these folks in line while you’re gone. Have a good night, sir.” Knairen returned the well-wishes, then pulled out of base, stopping only a moment at the security gate to have his authorization approved.

    Ten minutes later, he came to the tunnel. As he was driving through, he noticed a series of red lights up ahead, apparently affixed to the tunnel ceiling. He only had a moment to consider them before the pulsing light became a solid red…

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    Spyder waited for two days before the vehicle of her target appeared on sensors. Several others had passed through, but she knew which one she was watching for. The vehicle passed underneath her little hidey-hole and into the tunnel. She waited five minutes, to ensure he was far enough in, before she detonated the seismic charges. 

    There was a low rumble as the mountains shook, the quake probably having registered upwards of a 5 on the richter scale. The tunnel completely collapsed, and sensor readouts confirmed that, not only had Knairen’s car, and its sole passenger, been flattened by falling rocks, but the seismic charges had successfully disintegrated, wiping out any traces of them having been there at all.

    Perhaps an anticlimactic mission, but Spyder had never been one for loud and flashy attacks, always preferring to make her move as quietly as possible, and preferably in a way that looks like an accident, so that her victims never knew she was there.

    All that was left now was to return to the Enigma, make her escape from the planet, and report her success to the mainframe.