"Would you look at that…" A sultry voice crooned, barely audible above the noxious ringing raging about inside his skull. "Hello, my beautiful Conclave man." The voice was far too sultry, lilting even, to fit the person who spoke. Not her appearance, mind you. She was stunning. Hers was a curvaceous body, wrapped in a gorgeous deep red- almost-black dress. It hugged her in all the right places. The slits to either side showed off her toned legs from delicate toes to sky-high thighs. Her hair was a deep black and twisted about her head, with ribbons and gems woven through and studded throughout her locks in a complicated manner. The hair style emphasized her high cheekbones and graceful neckline. Her eyes, though, were a cold, calculating dark brown framed by a harsh scowl. The look in her eyes was a shame. He liked brown eyes. He particularly favored the hue of warm, molten chocolate. Her cold, dark brown eyes were of frozen mud, not molten chocolate.
He wondered briefly at the state of his mind for focusing on those details in such a situation. He was sure he should be in pain. He should, right?
"I should tell you; I really do appreciate the entertainment," she stepped forward, purring the words almost breathlessly, her excitement broke through the hateful facade, twitching the corners of her mouth. Not breaking stride or allowing that exhilaration to fall from her face, she stomped hard on Saedah's right arm. Distantly, the cracking noise registered, but the pain was slow to emerge. "I was almost convinced your mob of merry miscreants were smarter. I'd expected more from the Conclave. They didn't even send a Ghost." She sounded almost disappointed.
He had definitely underestimated this devilish little flower. Actually, that was an understatement. He had ignored the bitch, and as a result? He was bleeding out under her heel.
His brain operated at a sluggish, detached speed; focusing on odd details, like the nick in her left ear and the large fleck of blue in her left eye.
His hand-eye coordination was non-existent. Hell, he couldn't even feel his hands. Or his eyes.
Was he supposed to feel his eyes?
His vision was double. There was an alarm going off in the room, or were his ears ringing? As it turns out, consciousness truly was a relative term. He was awake, but about as useful as cyanide for toothpaste.
Looking around, he tried to fix his eyes on a single copy of the objects whirling about in the room. The double images mixed and swirled with the smoke and still-fluttering papers. The crazy woman didn't seem to be bothered by the alarm, so it had to be his ears. Either that, or his BIO alarms had taken on an odd pitch. The obnoxiously high-pitched ringing only served to disorient him further.
Her voice, the pain of his body, the burning of his lungs, and the taste of blood seemed more a memory than current events. They were distant, like watching a movie with a full-body haptic suit on to stimulate sensations. Only the suit was turned down so low that he could hardly feel it.
Slowly, but all too quickly, his brain stopped reeling and got to work pulling him from the comforting semi-consciousness into full-blown, painful and crisp awareness. He really preferred having his body on mute. A lower volume, at least, would have been preferable.
She waved a small crystalline slide before his face. He stared at it dumbly, like a mindless goldfish following a finger. It took him far too long to truly comprehend what that little device meant.
An advertisement jingle played in his head to: "It's the newest standard in crystalline storage, at the compact size of a thumbnail!"
With a sinking heart, Saedah knew that device had everything on it. That had been the target of the raid. That single, little data storage drive.
The dagger-like heels of the "lady" above him shifted from his arm to dig into his jugular and squeeze his windpipe. His left arm lay in shatters under the wreckage of what had once been the desk. What he could see of the appendage was in shreds, with a splinter of bone to complete the nauseating image. His right arm? The woman had indeed broken it.
'Dammit….' He was screwed.
He had been infiltrating the office belonging to the CIO of DuraCore Enterprises when the room had exploded around him.
The pretty little flower down the hall had, indeed, noticed him as he slipped into the office. How was a damned good question. Saedah prided himself on stealth. Even so, just as he made his way around the desk, he heard the whispered snick as the door closed, for a second time. Then a grey, metallic ball rolled between his feet.
In true Saedah fashion, he was dumbfounded by the object.
What the--
"Uh!!" He grunted, kicking the grenade - as he would in the field - as was ingrained within every fiber of his being and self-preservation instincts. Unfortunately, Saedah wasn't in the field.
Saedah was in an office. A rather small, enclosed office. As a result, the grenade hurtled across the room, cracked the drywall as it rebounded, then rolled to a stop to explode under the desk- just as Saedah happened to be jumping it on his way to the door.
His left arm now lay uselessly crushed beneath the thick marble desktop. That should hurt, shouldn't it? His right arm, undeniably broken thanks to her, hung limply and useless, bent at an odd angle. So, while he kicked and writhed in the slippery pool of his own blood, he wasn't able to dislodge the unbelievably heavy weight of the crazy bitch's foot from his throat, but he did manage to slap her a few times with the limp and flopping broken arm.
The part of his brain not screaming at the loss of oxygen and excessive pain found a sense of accomplishment at her squeak of disgust. Her face twisted into the very image of revulsion as the broken and bloody appendage hit her leg repeatedly.
His earpiece continued to issue nothing but static and BIO alarms.
'Come on, Tramp… Please.' He prayed to hear her voice, any Conclave voice, through his HUD. It had miraculously remained attached to the spot behind his ear, sending signals to his brain that tricked it into interpreting images as being in front of him. It did much the same for sound, like an old-style headset with screens. The HUD displayed nothing but scrolling warnings to the left in his peripheral field of vision.
You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.
Yes, he was damaged. He didn't need a line of text to tell him that. Of course, he couldn't have possibly managed to make use of the device, even if his friend had been on the line. He couldn't focus well enough for that. What the hells happened?!
His vision began to dim.
"Now, now, we can't be having that. You won't get to die so easily." The weight lifted from his throat and Saedah drew in a heaving, burning breath. As the air rushed into his deprived lungs, his traitorous body rejected the intake of smoke and oxygen. He coughed and gagged, rolling painfully onto his pinned arm to spit more blood onto the floor. The thought flashed in his mind that he could still suffocate. His lungs heaved painfully to expel each small gasp of smokey air he managed to drag in, just as his bruised throat screamed at the further abuse. The darkness around his vision exploded into hundreds of little starbursts. He was horrified to realize that he was still choking on his own blood. Somewhere in the tumult he had bitten his tongue, badly, if the amount of blood flowing into his mouth was any indication. There was also the pain that seemed to throb directly against his spinal cord.
Vaguely his brain wondered just how much blood he had lost. The thought alone was enough to concern him. As a wave of dizziness beat against his consciousness, he knew too much blood had been lost already. His body was trying desperately to shut down. His heart-rate was erratic. He could hear that alarm clearly in his earpiece. The scary part was that he wanted to succumb. He wanted to retreat into nothingness.
He needed an escape.
His brain reluctantly tried to work out a solution. His training attempted to settle over him, calling the Calm. The Calm was a trance-like state a small fraction of his people could enter. It allowed them almost superhuman abilities, boosting and exceeding the latent strengths and limitations of their natural state.
The calm simply flickered, barely registering.
If he could make the window or the door, he had a chance. Unfortunately, he inevitably came back to his two broken arms, pinned, and likely surrounded on the 51st floor. He couldn't fight his way out of this one. He would also, probably, succumb to blood loss soon. The near strangling hadn't helped, either.
With no link to allies for backup, he was on his own. With said link down, he knew the others had to be in similar, if not worse, positions. Field Ops were likely compromised, or on EVAC. The field soldiers were blind and deaf, nothing better than mice walking right up to the cat.
It was an effective trap, even if he could not appreciate the beauty of it.
"Called it." He gurgled around blood and heaving lungs before he began coughing again. More starbursts exploded behind his eyes, quickly calling the darkness to close in.
"What was that?" the witch leaned in, smiling.
"I said -" he growled around another mouthful of blood, "That I could smell your dead fish from here." He spat in her face, relishing her renewed revulsion as she wiped at the splattered blood. The quick jab that connected with the bridge of his nose sent his brain back into a spiral.
Subconsciously, he heard the woman talking, but paid her no mind as he welcomed the numbing, all-consuming darkness. He couldn't fight it anymore.
At least in the darkness, it did not matter that his body felt pain. In the darkness, he had no body, no mind, no need to feel. In the darkness, it would not matter that everything had gone to hell in a handbasket.
The static in his ear broke, but he was too far gone to notice.
***
2 days earlier
Saedah sat in a room with four other people, watching the DebCon projection. The DebCon was a console used for briefing, linked into all Conclave systems. The display was revolving, focused on a skyscraper and surrounding buildings. He scowled and leaned his head back against the headrest of his chair.
"We're all set," A tall figure spoke, resting his gloved palms on the surface of the DebCon. The black and gold helmet obscuring his face reflected his vantage-point of the display. "The First launch is in four hours. Alpha, you leave then. Beta, you leave in six. Delta, eight, and Charlie will meet you at the drop. Gather your teams, and brief en route." The figure was fully encased in a suit coined as one of the 'Apollo Skins'. It was one of six suits exclusively used by the Conclave Ghosts. This suit was a matte black so dark it reflected no light. There were molten-lava-gold accents, including the closed visor, all inspired by the samurai from the old fables. On both shoulders and helm, a Celtic circle encasing a phoenix in flight branded the suit, also in that lava-gold.
It was disconcerting to look at, to say the least.
The damned things were, of course, tight as all hells; hence the name of 'skins'. Each suit was a work of art, specially designed for the wearer. They were intricately interlinked with woven scales, plates, circuits, joints, and nodes, all made of the strongest metal, ballistics gel, padding, Kevlar and studs found in the galaxy. The metal also happened to be found only in the depths of Oon'Aryx, a planet in the RREC systems. The accents were non-reflective, but would glow when the need for intimidation arose.
That suit, as was common knowledge by that point, belonged to the royal bad-ass by the call-sign 'Requiem'.
What no one in the room but Saedah knew, was that Requiem's gold colored accents came from the unique color of his eyes, an unnatural genetic mutation. The history of the gene could be traced back to the beginning of Gaea's ancient, pre-expansion genetic modification trials on humans.
The ancestor, a woman, had been exposed to the contaminated solution of a biological experiment. Though she never showed any signs of mutation, she had been expelled from the facility for negligence. The mutations did not appear until a few generations after the incident. The mutation manifested in highly heightened eyesight and a golden reflectivity in the iris. The descendants actually grew a tapetum lucidum, a film behind the retina that reflects light, like those found in cats or dogs. However, even over the many generations following the initial mutations, the subjects would eventually experience ocular nerve degradation. Over time the condition would worsen from simple blurry vision to total blindness in later years of life.
"Yes, sir!" Came the voices of 3 veterans of war, startling Saedah from his reverie. Their uniforms were dark gray armored protective suits. No weapons graced the holsters or pockets yet, but come time for launch, each person could be considered a walking, talking bomb with teeth and blades. Each team had four fresh field soldiers to gather, recent graduates from the academy. There were also four operatives assigned to work from tactical locations near the targeted building. They were likely going through a similar briefing in a neighboring pod. These fomenters, as Conclave fighters were called, would not know their ops, nor the location of their ops, but each team had an operative agent.
In case all hell broke loose and shit went sideways, there were procedures and protocols, fail-safes and safety nets. But as Conclave grew and started to appear on radars, those procedures and protocols were deemed insufficient nearly as quickly as they were implemented. Their enemy was powerful, after all, and apparently did not appreciate guerilla activity in the slightest. The conclave was a tiny infant in the face of the massive, established, and tried armies with soldiers numbering in the tens- to hundreds of thousands.
And although the name of Conclave was beginning to spread, it wasn't necessarily due to victories or prowess. The enemy might think so, but many missions slid home based on luck alone. The past year had seen more FUBAR missions than truly successful. When Conclave struck, it was akin to a landslide through a munitions plant; lots of collateral damage and explosions.
And by some miracle – a lower allied body count than the disasters warranted.
Surprisingly, however, they could often - technically - still be called successes. After all, infiltrate and eliminate could be translated as 'trip every alarm, get shot twice, and blow it all off the map by 2 miles in any direction', right?