“Once we land on the island, we’ll be in and out of the facility. No dawdling. We are simply locating the target and taking it back with us,” said Ursun, a tall, bald, red-bearded man, to the mercenaries before him.

He had the look of a typical veteran; muscular and quietly confident. There were several prominent scars across his face. He held onto a leatherine-covered hook that hanged down from the ceiling with his right hand, making him appear taller and even more commanding. The large tiltjet that he was aboard, named the Titian, offered a spacious bay for the mercenaries to work and rest within.

“We can expect the Queen’s forces to show up around an hour after we infiltrate the lab. Even though it appears to have been abandoned for quite some time, we can be sure that she’s still monitoring the lab and the island it’s on.” Leanna explained.

She was a stylishly-bespectacled woman who stood near Ursun, her bearded superior. Her elegant, dignified face looked upon the three teammates who were in front of her. Her lengthy, naturally-green hair was tied up into a bun, and she held a small stack of papers in her arms.

“We don’t even know what this target even is, do we?” Srell yelled.

He was a rather wild-looking man who sat before Leanna and Ursun. His eyes always had a look of alertness about them, and his wiry brown hair was perpetually unkempt.

“Yeah, the dang thing might be too big to bring back to the ship…” Lorias shook his head indignantly.

He tended to be the neigh-sayer of the group, despite his angelic appearance. He had a habit of frequently sweeping his long, golden-blonde hair out of his face, which annoyed Leanna to no end.

“These files Gnapp was able to obtain say that it’s contained within a standard-sized Rejuv Pod, so we should be able to handle it. You guys really should completely read over mission files.” Leanna waved up the stack of papers she’d been holding, then threw them before Lorias and Srell onto the metallic floor of the tiltjet bay that they stood in.

“That’s our Data Girl! Always prepared so we don’t have to be!” Srell shouted before he and Lorias started to fight over the papers.

They greedily scooped them up and began quickly scanning over them for the details Leanna mentioned. Ursun chuckled while he watched the two of them, but his attention soon wandered over to a young man quietly sitting by the window beside Lorias.

“Jaik, are you ready for this mission? We’ll be landing any minute now.” Ursun asked with the tone of a caring but concerned father.

Jaik, the youngest of the mercenaries, was a handsome man with curly black hair and green eyes. He was also a licensed medical doctor, though he’d made it clear that he didn’t want his teammates using that title. He’d been staring out the window at the seemingly endless waves that the Titian flew over at high speed. The sight put him in a light trance, causing his thoughts to wander just as endlessly as the waves beneath him. Hearing Ursun’s voice brought Jaik back to reality.

“I’m ready, boss.” was all that Jaik replied with his smooth, low voice. He had a determined smirk on his lips, which reassured Ursun that his junior merc was alright.

“You boneheads done reading yet?” Ursun then asked Lorias and Srell.

“Yes, sir!” The two men yelled before bunching up the papers between them and handing them back to Leanna. She simply rolled her eyes and placed the papers on a planning table nearby.

“Final approach. ETA is in five minutes.” A slightly distorted voice came over the ship’s intercom after a moment of loud feedback, followed by an abrupt click.

“Okay kids, get your stuff!” Ursun ordered.

The mercs retrieved their weapons from lockers that lined the bay’s walls in quick succession. They all wore dark red, lightweight combat armor and dark red ear cuffs that worked as radios. The insignia of their company was featured on their armor’s chestplate; a golden medallion engraved with the head of a red wolf howling at Æba’s two moons.

They were known as The Red Wolves; the most effective mercenary company on the planet of Æba.

Within the lockers, each of them possessed a sidearm pistol with specialized rounds, as well as automatic carbine-like firearms called PAWs, Personal Automatic Weapons, which acted as their primary weapons. Each of them also had a unique third weapon that ordinarily could fit on their extensive gear belt, a testament to how different they were from each other. Their gear belts had several compartments that carried all manner of practical tools that were both modal and miniaturized as much as possible without reducing the tools' practicality.

In addition to his pistol and rifle, Ursun grabbed a glossy, black-colored heavy weapon from his locker. It was easily half his body length, and looked more like a computer than a firearm, with its wiring and display screen. It had a trigger at least.

“Is that thing really necessary?” Leanna asked Ursun with a shake of her head while pointing at the heavy weapon. “It looks like traditional tech…”

She put on a sleek backpack that was made of the same material as their armor. It made a strange, short hissing sound once she connected it to a port on her back.

“Gnapp wants me to try it out, so I’m humoring him.” Ursun replied with a smile. “He assured me that there’s nothing to hack on it. The trad-tech on it is very minimal.”

“Gah, it’s not fair! I want a portable coilgun too!” Srell yelled as he pulled a small shotgun out of his locker and placed it on his belt.

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“You’d have to gain at least thirty pounds of muscle before you could even pick that thing up, Toothpick.” Lorias joked while he fastened a sword scabbard onto his belt, eliciting an angry snarl from Srell.

They all felt the ship slow down and begin its vertical descent only moments after they’d finished arming themselves. The hum of the ship’s fusion pulse engine began to intensify as its two jet engines rotated to face the ground.

They all braced themselves for the unknown; none of them had been to the mission’s location before. It was a remote island in the middle of the Eizic Ocean, Æba’s eastern ocean.

When their aircraft descended far enough, the rear wall of the tiltjet’s bay began to open up, becoming a ramp. The ramp opened onto a pristine sandy beach as the ship came to rest on its retracted landing gear.

“Let’s go, RED-1! In and out!” Ursun yelled to his team. Together, they were the Red Wolves’ best mercenaries.

The five members of RED-1 ran down the ramp with their PAWs readied. Ursun had his bulky coilgun swung around his back, with its strap across his chest. After a quick visual scan of the area around the Titian, the group paused while Leanna touched the rim of her wrap-around glasses.

The once-clear glasses had transitioned to a black tint since they were out in the bright, hot sun. Colorful pixels danced across their black surface while various bits of information were shown to Leanna. After slowly turning completely around, Leanna touched her glasses again and gave a thumbs-up to the other mercs.

“Nothing unusual in any of the non-visible spectra. We’re good,” she told the group around her.

“Then we proceed. Stay close, and keep radios silent. We don’t want to wake up any sleeping constructs.” Ursun said before signaling towards the tree line.

They all proceeded to the research facility several kilometers inland. Its location was simply a dot on a map that had been uploaded to their OLED displays, which were on the right forearm section of their armor. Once they made it to the trees, it didn’t take long for the sparse forest to become a dense jungle. They could make out the sounds of various animals and insects, but the animal wildlife kept out of their sight.

“Hard to believe that the Queen’s forces were ever here.” Jaik said after they’d all been walking for a while through the jungle.

“She’s over a thousand years old. This place could’ve been left abandoned for centuries.” Leanna said while Lorias cut through an especially large bundle of vines that barred their path with his sword. Any trace of a road or footpath to the facility had been completely concealed with overgrowth.

The sword had no trouble slicing through the thick vegetation, leaving charred remnants behind with each fiery slash. Its edge glowed red, though the heat’s area of effect was precise enough to avoid setting the surroundings ablaze.

“Here’s hoping whatever we find here will finally be enough to kill the wench.” Srell said with a sinister snicker.

Jaik looked up at the fragmented sky while they walked through the jungle, examining the various openings to the blue and white above the treetops. He stepped over the wet and uneven ground beneath his boots as though he were on auto-pilot. The words he’d been told just a day prior kept echoing in his head;

“Protect whatever or whoever is in that rejuv-pod. Keep it sedated, and keep it alive,” his former superior from the Science Division had said to him.

Jaik put his right hand into a medical pouch on his belt, and felt vials containing various sedatives clink around his fingers. He’d helped design some of those sedatives, and knew how deadly they could be if used by the wrong person. He was the team’s medic, and yet his patient was potentially the enemy.

“Keep up, kid.” Ursun turned around to tell Jaik, who was several feet behind the others. Jaik nodded guiltily, and put his focus back on the present.

It took the mercenaries an hour to make it to their first objective, which was the entrance to the Queen’s facility. It was a small domed stone structure that was nearly completely overgrown by flowering vines. A ray of sunshine cut through the canopy above, dramatically illuminating the mossy building.

“Not much to look at.” Lorias said with his variable sword at the ready, once again set to cauterize mode. He approached the structure, eager to clear the vines obscuring rusty metal entryway doors.

“Wait.” Ursun said to Lorias. “Screens off, everyone,” ordered Ursun.

Each of the mercenaries tapped their OLED armguard screens that showed a map of the island. The screens went black and inactive. Before Ursun even needed to tell her, Leanna began scanning the area with her data-gathering glasses. It didn’t take her long to discover a faint web of electromagnetic activity scattered around the entrance.

“The security system is still functioning.” She stated plainly. Srell and Lorias groaned.

“Recommendations?” Ursun asked, knowing the danger of triggering such a system recklessly.

“The system is old. I’ll run a hack, but I’ll need to be hardwired. Port’s on the door, though…” Leanna explained. Her glasses were glowing as she analyzed the data from her earlier scans.

“So the surrounding area…” Lorias began to say.

“Is riddled with traps, yeah. Weight sensors on the ground. Laser optics on that ring around the domed roof. Scans anything within a hundred feet of the entrance. If it isn’t an animal or an authorized person, it arms the entire facility’s security.” Leanna said right before she began to tap on a virtual keyboard that only she could see via her glasses.

“Seems like overkill…” Jaik said softly.

“Yeah, looks like…yup, looks like the place was put in “Extended Away” mode about a century ago. They must have abandoned this place with the intention of locking down whatever’s here until…whenever.” Leanna further explained while still engrossed in her work.

“Are you sure you can’t hack it from here? You’re obviously able to access its datastores remotely.” Ursun asked with a hint of annoyance.

“Door security is a separate, non-networked system. The datastores are connected to an inactive wireless communication system…” Leanna said before pointing to an overgrown speaker mounted high up on a nearby tree.

“Could we trick the lasers by crawling like animals?” Jaik also asked.

Leanna glanced back at him and smiled.

“You guys couldn’t, but I’m probably light enough to trick the weight sensors, even with my dronepack.” Leanna said with a determined glint in her eye.

“Proceed, and be careful.” Ursun ordered.

With a nod and a smirk, Leanna got down on all fours and crawled through the jungle underbrush with cat-like grace. Her teammates knew she was agile, but each of them marveled at how naturally her body moved in such an animalistic fashion. It took her mere minutes to reach the door, completely tricking the security system in the process.

Leanna plugged into the door’s computing port using a wire she pulled from her backpack computer after affixing a small adapter to her wire’s connector. She was surprised by the complexity of the century-old door’s cybersecurity. Her dronepack’s organic computer acted like a second brain for her, giving her the extra edge she needed.

After a few minutes of rigorous code-cracking, she managed to gain full-access to the small, domed, entrance building. The first thing that she did was to completely disable the external security system so that her teammates could approach the door.

Leanna gave a thumbs-up to her teammates a few meters away just when she triggered the heavy metal doors in front of her to open. A few of the vines were torn away by the opening doors, but the entryway was still largely covered by thicker, hardier vegetation. It didn’t take long for Lorias to slice away at the remaining plants to completely clear their path into the facility.

“Well done.” Ursun said proudly to Leanna. Leanna nodded quietly and stayed where she was, crouched by the door’s computing port. Her glasses flashed various shades of green and blue, signifying to the others that she was still accessing the facility’s systems.

“What’s wrong, Data Girl?” Srell asked impatiently while the team stood around her.

“I’m locked out of the internal security systems. There is no way for me to access them from here. I was able to get a map of the upper levels, but that’s it.” Leanna replied with irritation in her voice.

“Disengage and share the map data with us.” Ursun ordered.

“Got it.” Leanna said before standing up and unplugging her backpack’s wire from the door’s control panel in one fluid motion.

She tapped the side of her glasses a few times, which caused them to glow and project a three-dimensional layout above the ground between her teammates.

“Looks like the Queen’s typical underground base layout, even though it’s so old.” Lorias noted.

“Must have been one of the first of its kind. I don’t remember the older bases being this sophisticated.” Jaik said, having studied such things not that long ago during his expert-level mercenary training.

“We’ll find our target in the lower levels, which aren’t on this map. Fortunately for us, it looks like we’ll have a clear path down to it.” Ursun said while he traced the fastest path through the tunnels with his finger.

A blue line appeared where his finger moved, recording his movements.

“I wasn’t able to find any sentry constructs in the data I accessed, but that is probably a part of the two-tiered security system. We should expect to run into them once we enter the facility, since I’m not able to deactivate the internal systems.” Leanna explained.

“As expected. I’m authorizing radios for everyone. Screens back on, too. Share the map data and directions with the rest of us, Leanna. We proceed once all of us have it.” Ursun ordered.

Leanna nodded silently before tapping her glasses again. The inactive black OLED screens on their armguards lit up and revealed comprehensive displays showing the map of the underground facility and their locations above it. Ursun was then the first to tap his ear cuff, turning on his communication radio. His teammates quickly did the same.

“Let’s go. And as always, be careful.” Ursun ordered. The team readied their PAWs as they entered the darkened opening to the research facility. Each of them was ready for combat.