Chapter Nine

None of her team was on the streets today. No intelligent creature was going to be moving around in the chem-storms rain. Most of the buildings in the Uppercity had been coated in a thin plasticine shell that protected them from the infrequent bouts of acidic rain, chemicals strong enough to eat flesh, metal, and stone falling from the sky. There was still going to be damage, and there were still going to be bones in the street from people who had not gotten to shelter fast enough. Even in the damp halls of the Undercity, people were going to be unwilling to leave the safety of their homes. There were plenty of places that the acid rain would seep through and drip down even into the lowest levels. And acid burns could leave nasty scars even on Kitsune.

Natalia hated the rain; she had lost her first man to it, a Siren named Kenta Aiko. That storm had come up unexpectedly, like this one. Kenta’s partners Cassidy Aiko and Allison Yu had managed to race into a tiny lift stop that had been coated in Plasticine. There had only been room for two, Kenta had pushed his sisters into the tube and protected them from the acid with his body, standing between them and the rain.

It had taken a long while for him to die, his entire back had melted away, and his spine had been visible in the spots that it hadn’t been eaten away by the vicious acid. Cassidy still had scars on her hands from where she had held her brother up, held him as he died, held him as a shield against death, crying as they waited for the rain to stop.

Natalia glanced around her small windowless war room. The white walls were covered in notes about their various projects as Shido laboriously worked his way through databases searching out information on one topic or another. A few of the other members of the team were also slogging their way through information, sitting around the large worktable.

Even though they suspected Marigold Sullivan was dead, she was still one of the topics of their labors. Though why a girl that had been born in one of the more affluent communes, or baby farms as the Kitsune thought of the human dominated neighborhoods which were full of women doing their best have as many ‘pure’ human children as possible, would have thought fleeing to the Undercity would have saved her, Natalia didn’t know.

Those parts of her people’s records were sealed. The Kitsune, Humans and Sirens raised by the military would never be told if they were ‘donated’ to the government or if they were the results of a government breeding programs. Not that Natalia cared, she had a family, and they were with her

Natalia sighed, thinking of families, and looked down at her comp-screen. She was looking at a handsome fifth dan Kitsune male with an excellent military record. He was the fourth she had read about. She rubbed her temples. She knew it didn’t matter how many pictures she looked at; she might as well throw a dart at the list. She didn’t want to breed.

She liked kids; she had even joined Cassidy in volunteering at the crèches from time to time. She just couldn’t tolerate the idea that one of these males would touch her, would more than touch her. She almost thanked god when her wrist unit went off.

“Major Natalia Yu.” she said almost eagerly.

“Major, Specialist Anderson’s replacement is here, he’s waiting in the commons.” said Miyako in her best honey toned voice. Natalia was always impressed at how well Miyako could tune her speech; the other Kitsune woman was good enough to fool most voice analyzers.

With the power of a major pushing it, Meredith’s transfer and her request for a replacement comp-tech had been completed almost impossibly fast. Natalia had been curious who the powers that be would assign to her team, and now she’d get to find out. She powered down her comp, gleefully abandoning her mate hunt. While artificial insemination worked for both humans and Sirens, it did not work for Kitsune. For some reason implanted egg cells were always rejected, so Kitsune had to be created “the old fashion way” with a male, a female, and a bed. She almost shuttered thinking about it but managed to control herself as she walked into the main room.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

Standing in the front room with Miyako was a young human male with brown hair that had been buzz cut so short Natalia could see his scalp. Natalia resisted the urge to go down to personnel and start shooting. The young man was just that, young. He didn’t even look old enough to grow a beard, and Natalia was willing to bet a month of cred-chips that this was his first assignment and his first time working with the human sub-races. His face had gone as pale as a Siren’s when he had seen the rust color of her uniform.

She walked up to him and waited for him to introduce himself. The human looked like he was ready to run back to his mother. “What is your name Specialist?” Natalia asked after a full minute had passed, trying to tell him with her voice tone that he should have done his introduction without being asked.

“Specialist Douglas Acern from Comp-central reporting for duty.” He said, standing stiffly at attention, emphasis on stiff.

“At ease.” Natalia said. Gaia, this kid is terrified, what does he think I’m going to do, eat him? Blech, he reeks of fear.

“Alright, most of the team is in the war-room, follow me. We’ll get you introduced” Natalia walked back into the war-room; she heard the boy swallow as he noticed her bare-neck. She stopped and turned to him. She knew, to the uninitiated, the Kitsune seemed almost psionic in their ability to read people. But with hyper-tuned senses it was easy to read micro-expressions, or smell the changes in a person’s scent signature, and seeing that she was unmarked was terrifying the boy even more.

“We are ISF, Specialist Acern. Information is a major part of our job. We must be able to go anywhere, so we don’t wear seals. If we need them, we have temps issued by the military that will fool any scanner.” She turned and continued walking back to the war-room, her footsteps muffled by the thick white carpet.

She coughed to draw her people’s attention. “Team this is our new comp-tech Specialist Douglas Acern.” Natalia watched as her team winced, sighed, or became aggravated as they looked at the terrified human. She doubted the daisy boy caught any of the quickly covered reactions, even from the humans on the team.

“My lieutenants are Shido Yu, who will be your direct superior, and Takada Aiko.” The Kitsune and Siren males both nodded their heads.

“Your colleagues on our Siren intelligence team, at least the ones that are here at the moment, are Aaron Nori, Haru Miko, and Noriko Aiko.” She gestured at each in turn. “There are two more Sirens, Regin Aiko who is running errands, and Cassidy Aiko who has been temporarily reassigned to the breeding program and won’t be returning for several months yet.”

“The members of our strike team that are here are Allison, Osamu, and Miyako Yu, whom you’ve already met. Our human member is Lucas Herald. Not here are Gregory Yu and Saki St. James.” Natalia walked around the table in the middle of the room to her comp station and sat down “Lastly there are our snipers, Specialist Kylee Sparowhawk, and Sergeant Robert Rogers who are both human, and as usual down at the range.”

She smiled warmly at the boy “Welcome to the family. Shido will brief you and get you up to speed.” She sighed as Shido led him out of the room, and to his new quarters.

A few hours of research later had gleaned them a bit of information. “Well, new boy comes from Perth.” Shido declared, after glancing lazily about to make sure Douglas Acern wasn’t in the room. “And his credentials are solid. If he can get over his fear, I think he’d work out.”

“Except for the fact that he’s damn near phobic of us.” Natalia pointed out. “Do you think he’d respond well to counseling?”

“I think it’s worth a shot. It isn’t the kid’s fault that he got shipped up here, with us. Frankly, looking at his record, he’d even requested to be put into human only units so I can’t even imagine what sort of medications personnel were abusing when they assigned him.”

“Wonderful.” Natalia groaned and shook the concerns of their new computer technician out of her mind. “Give me a status report on our current missions.”

“Well, Marigold hasn’t turned up on any cameras, in any public places, or in Leo custody. I’m leaning more and more towards her being dead.” Shido stated, turning back to his computer logs.

Natalia turned to Takada, the ersatz leader of her Sirens. “The Diana project needs us for another set of screenings, but that’s not for another few days.” He informed her. “I’ve already made sure all of us have a day off before hand, though if you’ll allow us to stop the random crowd swimming for this nurse it’d probably make our lives easier.”

Natalia frowned, considering his request. “Not completely, no, but put only one Siren on random scan duty each day. The higher ups are still pressuring me about this, but I’m not wasting too much energy on a woman who likely became a Feral entre. Anything else?”

Everyone shook their heads.

“Good work team. You are dismissed. We will re-start patrols in Sydney and Melbourne tomorrow, or as soon as the rain stops, whichever comes first. I think we’ll focus on the shopping zones” She allowed herself a guilty little grin as her people chuckled. The Kitsune Major checked the time on her wrist unit. “Let’s go order dinner.”