2.29.

“We located him on the edge of the exclusion field. Something spooked him and he’s currently running away,” Morrison reported.

Major Mary Phillips sat in the mobile command center on loan from the FBI for this operation. While there were multiple agencies involved, she was the official representative of the ESF. That said, she understood that her role was only to provide intelligence and support in regards to known and theoretical alien technology which the target might have access to.

The target, a twelve year old child, she thought. She felt disgusted with herself, but more disgusted with the people who had seen fit to use child soldiers as spies. She understood the context; humanity was fighting for its freedom against alien oppressors at the time, and the prosecutors of that war had felt like every option was on the table.

Perhaps she was viewing the past through rose colored glasses, but she thought that the punishment did not fit the crime. The people who had ordered the class of scout trooper trainees to be ‘harvested’ had died a natural death centuries, if not millennia, before their crimes were prosecuted. When they were prosecuted, the people who paid the price were not the ones who committed the crimes, but the clones of those people who had been revived after the fact.

It left a foul taste in her mouth.

But that didn’t change the fact that Eodar, or John as he had taken to calling himself, was a threat which needed to be neutralized. While efforts were being taken to bring him in alive – taking a spy alive was always preferable to killing them, even when they weren’t children – the fact remained that he possessed advanced technology which made him a danger to the public.

She was glad that the decision to balance the threat to public safety vs the rights of the accused and the value of the intelligence he possessed was in the hands of the lead agent, Morrison, who was presently monitoring the operation through several monitors and receiving occasional reports from the others in the cramped vehicle.

“Confirmation of the target. He just ripped apart a vehicle and turned it into a powered suit of armor,” Morrison said. “All units, engage. Deadly force is authorized. I repeat, the target is in a densely populated urban area with dangerous weapons. Use of deadly force is authorized. I repeat …”

Mary sent a signal of her own to the Yonohoan team that was standing by.

And there it was, she thought. The death of innocence.

~~~~~

Eodar ran through the night, sprinting at speeds that rivaled the automobiles of this world with the help of his armor. He couldn’t outrun the helicopter, however, and the squad cars were coordinating to box him in. The officers inside tried to set up roadblocks, firing at him with their weapons as he approached.

He knocked them aside with a blast from his impulse weapon, sending men and cars flying. He hoped that he wasn’t killing anyone in his escape, but there was no question in his mind that his mission required him to escape, and if that meant defending himself then that was simply how things must be.

He’d never killed anyone before. He knew that he might have to, ever since he’d been recruited as a scout, but he wasn’t looking forward to it.

The bullets pinged and ricocheted of his armor, but the advanced alloys and bullet proof polymers kept him from feeling more than a slight impact. Still, he activated his projectile shield, which used the impulse generator in his suit to create a whirling wall of force to deflect incoming projectiles. The effect wasn’t absolute, but it turned some shots into misses, and many of the hits into glancing blows.

It also drained his suit’s energy at a steady rate, which was the only reason he hesitated to use it. He only had the chemical energy of the gas tank and the car’s battery which he had used to make the suit as energy sources, and while the fuel cells in his armor were far more effective than the internal combustion engines of this world, they weren’t limitless or near limitless like a strange-matter reactor.

The Rocktala in his suit cracked their tactical network and began relaying their strategies into his own wetware, directing him where to go so that their response would be weakest. He put his trust in the learning software/hardware of the Rocktala and focused all of his mental efforts on his escape.

He dashed through buildings, over barricades, and blew apart road blocks as he fled.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

More helicopters appeared in the night sky. He tried engaging his stealth systems, but the Rocktala informed him that they had switched to infra-red devices to track him, rendering the active camouflage of his suit useless. Frustrated, he deactivated it to conserve power.

He saw the weapon aboard one of the helicopters activate and knew what was about to happen before it happened. He assumed the blast position as the energy from the weapon struck the impulse field generated by his projectile screen. The resulting explosion was equivalent to a pound of plastic explosives.

He was launched through the air, flailing. His body skipped against the pavement once, twice, and then crashed into the wall of a toy store. He spent a moment to recover from his disorientation, then got back up and sprinted for one of the alternative exits. He activated the suit’s stealth systems before he hit the street in the hopes that he would be able to escape the damn overwatch of the helicopters.

~~~~~~

“What the hell was that explosion?” Morrison demanded. “Who authorized the use of explosive weaponry? This is a crowded city people, and there might be civilians caught in the crossfire.”

“There was no explosives, sir. We fired the Kirata beam aboard Overwatch three. It seems that it has a different effect on the kid’s tech than it does on our own,” came the response from one of the technicians helping to monitor the situation.

“Goddamn it,” Morrison shouted. He turned to Mary. “Did you know that would happen?”

“If I had, I would have included it in my information regarding the proper use of the weapon. All I know about the Kirata beam is that it generates an effect similar to an EMP pulse. It must have interfered with the force field that he’s using to deflect our bullets,” Mary stated calmly.

“All units all units, do not use alien tech to take down the target. I repeat, Earth weapons only,” Morrison shouted into the command channel.

Mary calmly watched the situation unfold. The disgust in herself and the situation hadn’t gone away. But she felt validated that John/Eodar was proving to be every bit the threat that they’d feared he was.

Even if he was only twelve years old.

Or was he millennia?

Well, he’d only lived for twelve years at least.

And unless the situation changed drastically, that was regrettably all he was likely to get. She consoled herself by reminding herself of all the attempts that had been made to bring him in peacefully.

The reassurances tasted like ashes.

~~~~~

He made it three blocks before the helicopters found him again. The spotlight hit his location and he realized that he hadn’t gotten away cleanly. He deactivated the stealth systems once more in order to conserve his dwindling energy supply.

He was at sixty percent of the reserves that he had started with and falling at a steady pace. The kirata beam had taken out a good chunk of energy to defend against. Fortunately the brief period in which the enemy hadn’t had his location had allowed him to escape the confines that they had been establishing around him.

He continued to run. He hadn’t kept up his training on earth, but he had been trained to run fifty miles in three times gravity as a trooper trainee. His nanites kept his body in top condition, and he remembered the lessons he had learned on that hellish high-gravity world.

How to run until he hit the wall.

How to smash through the wall and keep running.

Never stop. Not ever. Not until the mission is complete.

Escaping is the mission. The mission is escape. That is all that there is.

Escape or death.

He would not be taken alive.

Suddenly, a new sort of light passed over head. It was silent. Small and sleek, it weaved its way through the helicopters and sped into the air before Eodar. From it fell two meteors, which impacted the ground before him with the familiar flash of an ICARIS.

He swallowed. Before him stood two soldiers wearing infantry armor.

He knew that he was about to die.

He refused to make it easy for the enemy.

‎