Chapter Fourteen: Splinter Cell

Chapter Fourteen: Splinter Cell

            Pluto

            Crucible

            The men in the hangar never had a chance. Twenty used the rifle now, sniping them from on high. One after another they fell, and Ruby thought he had finished after he emptied his first clip. After all, the other sentries were out of their line of sight, and by the time they noticed anything suspicious, she and Twenty would have already been gone. But it looked as though he fully intended on killing the rest of the guards from his perch on the catwalk. She stopped him as he was about to load a second clip into his rifle. In all honesty, the fewer people he killed, the more comfortable she would have been. He seemed either oblivious to this complaint or completely nonchalant about the large numbers of men he was massacring.

            “Come on,” she said. “Let’s grab one of those ships and go.” Then, a thought struck her. “Never mind. Those are multipurpose. They’ll never get past the perimeter guns. Why didn’t you make the security chief neutralize them?” Twenty hesitated momentarily before responding.

            “He couldn’t,” the clone finally answered. “The guns are linked to the main computer system, and Grey doesn’t have the protocols down yet to shut the weapons off, or so he says.” He put his hand to his head and then shook it in disgust. “You know what, I liked it a lot better when there weren’t voices in my head.”

            “Then we need an interceptor-class,” she surmised. “Is there one here?”

            “One,” he answered. “There’s a problem, though.”

            “What?”

            “It’s Cipher One’s ship, and the members are still inside.” Ruby felt her stomach churn. Cipher One was well-known to the Ministry. Unlike Twenty, who worked without anyone’s consent except the Premier, Cipher One answered directly to the Circle, and their operations occurred publicly. Further, they were supers-soldiers, created by an initiative known only as ECLIPSE; their combat skills and sheer strength dwarfed that of normal humans, and their brains processed information and undertook reactions far faster as well. One of their members, a clone codenamed Striker, had died several years back, but the death had done little to reduce their effectiveness. The team now had only two members: a female clone named Hornet and a male, Striker’s older brother, named Ruin.

            “Can you fight your way through them?” She asked. “They’re superhuman, after all.” Twenty slid down the rail ladder beside the catwalk and picked up a small compact automatic from one of the dead bodies, along with a bandolier of ammunition. Then, he took a second heavy pistol, with more clips.

            “So am I,” he growled, placing a fresh clip in his own heavy weapon. “I’ll handle them.” Ruby shook her head.

            “I’m joining in,” she told him.

            “Please. You might have more guts than them, but that’s about all,” Twenty snorted. “You’ll get your throat cut in five seconds.”

            “At least ten,” she said, taking a knife from one of the bodies. “Let’s go.”

            Twenty shook his head. “There’s one other thing I need to get first.” He went over to a large rack of metal crates and picked a particularly heavy-looking crate and slung it over his shoulder. “Okay. Now we’re ready.”

            Ruin was busy welding the plates on the ship’s reactor back into place. His ship, the Swift Justice, had not been the same since the death of his younger brother. Whatever one had said of Striker, he always knew how to take care of things. Hornet was sitting at the makeshift workbench close by, modifying her suit. Unlike most standard-issue Ministry combat armor, her suit had two plasma-filed-sheathed blades protruding from remotely controlled arms on her back. This meant she constantly had to calibrate them in order for the neural interface to work properly, and that annoyed her to no end.

            “You know,” she remarked. “If you added a little bit of plutonium to it, the fuel would probably be a little more efficient.” Ruin nodded.

            “I’ll be sure to bear that in mind,” he drawled, one of his strange traits. Thanks to extensive time spent with the head of Division Five, Military Operations and Intervention, who possessed an Australian (or, more accurately, Saturanian) accent. Ruin had picked that up, along with a strange taste for explosives and anything fiery or dangerous. He turned to the entrance and barely saw the shadow before the shot rang out. The pistol round clipped his shoulder and spun him around, knocking him back five steps and into the ship’s hull. Hornet was on her feet, the robotic limbs on her battlesuit windmilling as she advanced. The dark figure raised his pistol and emptied the entire clip at her. Most of the shots bounced of her bladed arms, but a few made it inside. The armor absorbed most of the shock; that is not to say the bullets caused no pain. Each impact was like a punch to the area in question, and she felt at least one bone crack painfully. Still, she advanced, first one appendage and then the other lashing out at her opponent. Impossibly, he sidestepped the first, though the second clipped his left shoulder. He did not flinch or even turn; instead, he grabbed the offending limb and, yanking her toward him, delivered a jarring palm strike to her jaw. That punch hurt, and no mistake. It felt like a shotgun blast to the face, and Hornet was seeing stars. The next attack was a knee to the gut, which doubled her over. Then, a horizontal knee strike sent her against the hull, where she tried to get to her feet. Something wet and sticky was dribbling down her chin, and she knew it was blood. The realization came as a shock to her; as a superhuman, she made people bleed, not the other way around. Ruin was on his feet now, and he cocked his wrist cannons and popped his neck.

            “Big mistake, idiot,” he growled, slowly advancing toward the black-dressed figure. Then, he raised the arm cannons. “You’ve got no idea what you walked into.” The barrage of shots that he unleashed, put conservatively, was withering. The bullets pinged around the ship’s interior, and Hornet fully expected the hail of lead to leave a dead body in its wake. But somehow, the man survived. He cracked his knuckles and titled his head.

            “I think you can do better,” the man said simply.

            “You don’t want me to,” Ruin snapped. He sprang forward, both his gauntlet cannons blazing. The black-clad man knocked one to the side, although a bullet did penetrate his vest below his ribcage, and simply placed a gloved hand over the other. Even after it went off, the weapon did not blow off his fingers. Instead, all Ruin heard was a muffled crack, followed by a ping and then a pop. Without hesitation, the man drove a knee into Ruin’s stomach, followed by a phantom heel kick that knocked him backwards. By this point, Hornet was on him again, and she was attacking with everything she had. First came a horizontal slash, aimed at his neck, which he dodged with minimal difficulty. The next attack was a thrust, which he knocked down and away. Punches and kicks followed, and he either dodged or blocked them too. Then came the retaliatory blow; this one an elbow strike to the neck. Her head jerked to the side, and then he slammed it against the wall. Still, that was not enough. She was standing and conscious, without any sign of giving up whatsoever. Ruin was at his side again, and Twenty dodged a bullet punch that would have put a dent in his metal skull for certain. Then, he pulled his first trick; he grabbed Ruin by the throat and unceremoniously slammed his head against the hull. The blows came faster as his frustration mounted, and Ruin’s eyes crossed. After about a minute of beating, Twenty dropped his now-unconscious older brother onto the floor. Hornet had been attacking him for the entire time, but he had swatted the blows away like stinging insects. She was forced to watch as her friend was beaten to a bloody pulp by this new enemy. As he hit the floor, Hornet saw he was alive. Not in great shape, but it beat dead any day.

            “You…” she started, beginning a new fusillade of blows. The man knocked the slashes away and punched her in the jaw. A kick to the left knee followed, and she dropped to one knee. The man then swiveled, slamming an elbow into her face. She felt her jaw dislocate, and then an uppercut knocked her jaw back into place and her out of the fight.

            Twenty watched in mute satisfaction as Hornet’s body went limp. It seemed a shame that a decent fight could last only a few minutes, but he had no other option. Every second he spent fighting increased the chance that he was going to be caught, and he could not allow that. He dragged the bodies off of the ship while Ruby watched.

            “Nice work,” she remarked. “Six minutes for two superhumans. Not bad at all.”

            “Shut up,” he growled. Picking up the crate beside the ship, he nodded toward the boarding ramp. “Let’s go.”

            “Can you fly?” She asked.

            “Just about anything,” he responded. “Why?”

            “Past manually operated turrets?’ She pressed. He rolled his eyes.

            “If you can’t do anything under pressure, you can’t really do it,” he responded. He began tinkering with the ship’s computer. “Best disable the tracking beacon. Getting tracked would be bad.”

            “Getting blown up in the hangar would be worse,” she remarked. “You’re taking too long.” Twenty just rolled his eyes and kept typing.

            Saturn

            Ex-Patriot quarters

                        “I can’t believe this…” Dani whispered, her eyes scanning the documents. “There’s no doubt that they were directly involved in the assassination of the ICRF leaders, and they’ve made no effort to hide it.”

            “Why can’t you believe it?” Brooks asked. “Every hunter keeps a record of his most exciting kills.”

            “You think that’s how they’re treating them?” Kane queried, incredulous. “They’re people.”

            “Yes, and to kill people means you have to dehumanize them first,” Stefan countered. “It’s the way of the world. We’re not comfortable killing people, and so we have to make them not people first.” The others stared at him in shock.

            “How can you say something like that? Something so…cold?” Dani asked.

            “It’s a mere statement of fact, not a comment on the morality of the situation,” he said. “I don’t like it. It’s sick and cruel and twisted. But it’s the way of the world.”

            “Still…it’s…”

            “…Terrible,” Stefan finished. “I know. In case you all weren’t paying attention…”

            “You’re not terrible,” Dani pointed out. “Just not nice.”

            He rolled his eyes. “Enough. Now we know that the government is responsible for this mess. So what do we do now?”

            “Ask Anders for her input,” Dani said. “Which I did. But she didn’t answer. And then I found this.” She gestured to the holographic screens in the plush hotel room. The reporter’s voice continued an already begun thought.

            “…resistance leader Elizabeth Anders has been taken into custody after authorities found that she had ties to the Ultra-Humanists believed to be responsible. She will be taken to District 17’s incarceration outpost for further questioning, though more radical voices on both sides are calling for either release or execution.”

            Stefan’s eyes narrowed. He saw that Shepard was stroking her chin thoughtfully. Ministry? He mouthed.

            Probably, she responded. Let’s see if we can’t find out.

            “So she got arrested,” Kane said. “So what?”

            “So what?” Dani exploded. “You moron. If they took Anders, and she used to be Ultra-Humanist black ops, who will they come for next?”

            “Us,” Brooks said. “If you take down the mother, go after the cubs, too.”

            “Exactly.” Psyn looked at the screen. “How long do you think it’d take?”

            “I don’t know,” Dani answered. “My guess? Not very long at all.”

            “Then we need to move,” Shepard surmised. “Any ideas where to?”

            “I have one,” Stefan said. “Didn’t Crow mention that he has men in the District 17 outpost’s prison?”

            “Yeah,” Brooks said. “Why?”

            Dani smirked. “Let me guess. Prison break?”

            “Prison break,” he answered. “Anyone think we can get in?”

            “You might ask for those who think we can’t,” Brooks murmured. “It’ll be a shorter list.”

            Dani looked around the room. “Any objections to trying to break Anders out of prison?” Kane raised his hand.

            “Just one,” he responded. “We need bigger guns. Are we going to blast in? We are going to blast in, right?”

            “No,” Stefan answered. “We’re going to walk in. With me in cuffs.”

            “That’s insanity made to order,” Dani said. “We’d never make it through security.”

            “We won’t if we go in blind,” Shepard corrected, pulling a holographic computer unit onto the table. She accessed the official government pathway on the Linknet and began typing lines of code. “I might be able to make it through their firewall if they aren’t expecting to be hacked. Even if they are, I probably could.” She kept typing, her eyes narrowing at the screen. “OK,” Shepard said after a few minutes. “I’m in.” A holographic blueprint appeared on Dani’s screen. “Will that work?”

            “It’ll work,” Dani said. All right,” she added, cracking her knuckles. “Let’s go to prison.”

            Space outside The Crucible

            Twenty swore as an energy blast clipped the wing of the Justice.

            “What happened to turning off the turrets?” He snapped at Grey. “You said they were down.”
            “You’ll recall I didn’t say they’d stay that way,” the A.I. admonished.

            “I really hate you right now,” the clone muttered.

            Ruby held her chair’s armrests like they were her only anchor to reality. “You call this flying? My grandmother could do a better job.” She had added that last bit as an attempt at humor, but it seemed ineffective. Twenty did not answer, merely piloting the ship through a new barrage of energy bolts. “Not talkative right now?” His knuckles tightened on the navigation stick, but he said nothing again. Twenty’s brow was knotted in concentration, and she could see his eyes glowing more intensely than before. “Am I…”

            “…not helping?” He asked, his face tense. “Try dodging lasers with background noise from guns you can’t see, then tell me how beneficial it is for your concentration.” The ship went into a spin, and then he righted it. The reason for the rotation, two smart rockets, appeared off the starboard side. The clone clenched his teeth. “I’d tighten you belt,” he advised. “This one could be a little rocky.”

            “A little…” Whatever Ruby had been about to say was abruptly changed to a yelp of surprise as he gunned the throttle and went into a wild corkscrew. The missiles spun crazily, trying to compensate for this development. Twenty righted just as quickly and dipped the nose of the craft, slipping through a small space between two free-floating pieces of debris from around the station. Whenever the Ministry produced waste products, they usually did not care enough to bother with recycling. Instead, they simply ejected the garbage into space. Twenty had always found the practice abhorrent, but right now, he was very thankful for it. Both missiles exploded, sending shards of metal spiraling into the vacuum of space. Twenty gunned the engine and engaged the secondary thrusters, blasting the ship into space. Ruby sighed in relief and closed her eyes. She was exhausted, and despite her frayed nerves, soon fell asleep.

 

            How much later she woke up, she did not know. Twenty was still at the controls, his eyes focused on the vast reaches of space in front of him. The ship’s engines had begun an unhealthy-sounding rumbling noise. She rubbed her eyes and sat up in the chair.   “How long was i…” she began.

            “…out?” He finished. “That was two hours, seventeen minutes, and fifty-four seconds.” Twenty stopped talking, listening to whatever Grey was saying into his earpiece. “Never mind, I was off. Fifty-six seconds.” Ruby peered through the viewport, scanning the stars around them.

            “Where are we?” She asked. “I don’t recognize the star patterns.” A planet shot by portside. “Or that planet. Where’d you take us?”

            “The frontier,” Twenty answered. “The Ministry hasn’t put roots down here yet.”

            “Which frontier?” She asked.

            “District Twenty,” he replied. Ruby nodded. District Twenty was known in the galaxy as an adventurer’s paradise; worlds inhabited by scoundrels and scallywags. The last place the Ministry would go, under any circumstances. After all, they had yet to consolidate their control of any systems beyond the Solaris system and the Innermost Colonies. She and Twenty would be safe. For now, at least.

            “Well, at least the hard part’s over,” she said. Twenty took off the pilot’s headset and shook his head. He engaged the ship’s autopilot and stood, stretching his cramping legs.
            “Over? We’re just getting started.” He turned away from the console, stripping off the scorcher gauntlets. Ruby did her best to suppress a horrified gasp; underneath the metal exterior lay two strange-looking metal prosthetics, ending just below the wrist. Unlike most such artificial limbs, however, these lacked rotator cuffs, simply being painfully grafted into his existing bone structure. Tattered skin hung in strips from the point of entry. He followed her gaze and gave a sarcastic half-smile. “Nasty, aren’t they?” He asked, stripping off his outer jacket. “Turns out that the old ones were inefficient, so the Premier didn’t think I needed them.”

            “So what?” She asked. “He cut them off?” Twenty nodded.

            “No anesthetic, either,” he told her, flicking a switch on his goggles. She heard a whirr and a hum, and the lenses popped off his face. He took the glasses in his hands, examining them closely. She saw not that he wore magnetic strips across his eyes, to which the electromagnetic bolts’ opposite polarity adhered. Behind the goggles, his eyes were a strange grey-green. Like a stormy sea, she thought.

            “Sorry,” she managed, after a long and uncomfortable silence. “I shouldn’t have…”

            “It’s fine,” he said, cutting her off unceremoniously. “It’s shocking to you, which is good. It means you aren’t one of those beasts.” He stepped into the back of the ship. From there, he called to her. “There’s gear aplenty here. Suit up while you can. It’d probably be a good idea to find a decent disguise.”

            “Wouldn’t they know we took the gear?” She asked.

            “Ministry gear isn’t always unique,” he told her. “And an unusual combination might throw them off.”

            “All right,” she said, getting to her feet. “Let’s play dress-up.”

            Twenty grabbed a brown shirt off the rack and slipped it on over his tattered grey undershirt, followed by a dark blue, fur-lined coat and a long-range telescopic imaging device, or, more colloquially, a set of binoculars. He kept his dull grey pants, but strapped several bandoliers of ammunition and a holster to his legs. For her part, Ruby chose a dark brown jacket with camouflage printing and a set of dark brown pants, which she slipped on over her under armor. A set of combat boots followed, and then some ammo pouches and a holster.

            “Any specific planet in mind?” She asked.

            “Paleonix,” he replied. “It’s not easy to survive, but at least the Ministry won’t think to look there.”

            “Wouldn’t somewhere like Cygni Three be a better choice?” She queried. He shrugged.

            “If that’s where you’d rather go, we can,” he answered. He stripped off his combat fatigues, revealing a dark grey undershirt with two blood-ringed bullet holes in it. As Ruby watched, he jammed his fingers into the wounds with a sickly sucking sound and rummaged around for the offending projectile. He looked up at her. “What?”

            “Nothing,” she answered, selecting a tan set of combat fatigues and putting them on over her under-armor. Then, she strapped a shoulder holster on, too, followed by a set of dark grey pants. For his part, Twenty chose a jacket with camouflage patterns on the sleeves and its hood, while the exterior was tan and made of some bulletproof material. The pants he chose were dark brown, and he strapped a holster to his hip and an ammo belt across his waist. Another bandolier went across his chest, and he opened a weapon locker to the left, which he emptied onto his person. Four knives, two pistols, a sniper rifle, a compact carbine, and a newer model of sonic shotgun, along with several grenades.

            “Are you really going to carry all that?” She asked. He did not immediately answer. Finally, he did, in typically simplistic fashion.

            “Yes,” he responded. “I am.” She went to the locker and took out an assault rifle, which she sling across her back. Then, she tucked a heavy pistol into her belt.

            “So, what about a name?” She asked. “You’ll need one if you’re going to interact with actual people.” He nodded, sliding the scorcher gauntlets back on. “I’ve always liked Connor,” Ruby told him.

            “Connor,” he muttered. “It’s not bad.”

            “Last names are required, too,” she remarked. “What about Walters?”
            “Sounds like a fish,” he answered, walking back into the cockpit. He punched in some new coordinates into the navigational system. She followed him, leaning against the doorway.

            “Walleye,” she said.

            “What?” He asked.

            “It’s walleye you’re thinking of,” she told him. “but if you don’t like Walters, how about you come up with another name? What’s your favorite season?”

            “Season?” He asked. “What’s that?”

            Ruby shook her head. “You really missed out on a lot of life in that space station, didn’t you?” She asked.

            “That was an attempted at humor,” he muttered. “Yeah, I know what a season is. And the answer is winter. It’s cold, I know, and it’s destructive, but it also brings people together. The cold makes people gather around what they have in common. And what they have that’s warm.”

            “Winter…” she muttered. “What about Frost?”

            “Connor Frost,” he said. “I like it.” She went over to the pilot’s chair and sat down.

            “Well, what did we decide on?” She asked.

            “Cygni,” he answered. “Less flesh-eating monsters. Just really nasty people.”

            “All right,” she said. “Projected arrival time?”

            “Half a day, tops,” he answered. “Probably less.”

            Saturn

            Heaven’s Gate Hotel

            Alison sat back, her eyes hurting from staring at the holographic screens for four hours straight. “Ok,” she said. “Based on the blueprints and security programming I’m seeing, our course of action is clear. Stefan can go in, and we’ll put an EMP beacon inside his metal arm. The shockwave should knock out the systems in the cell block. Because Stefan’s criminal record would class him as high risk, he should theoretically be incarcerated in the same area as Anders. The fired security systems will stay down long enough for you to get her out of her cell,” she said, turning to Stefan.

            “With three dead limbs, not likely,” Kane said.

            “The limbs’ systems reset almost instantaneously,” Stefan told him. “I designed the technology myself. They’ll be online almost as soon as the pulse goes off.”

            “Timing?” Dani asked. “We need to make sure that it’s at a time when they’ll be understaffed. Otherwise, we’ll have guards swarming the cell block almost instantly.”

            "Ideas?” Stefan asked.

            “We might pull it out if we go in in three weeks,” Shepard said. “But it’s sudden. We haven’t observed movement patterns or any other source material. We’d basically be going in blind.”

            “Next time slot,” Dani queried.
            “Five months,” she answered, rubbing her eyes again.

            “Normal litigation time is two months,” Stefan said. “For an offense like this, usually less.”

            “An appeal wouldn’t be possible if the verdict is handed down guilty,” Dani murmured. “She’s being tried by humanity’s highest court. We can’t wait five; execution would follow, if that’s the verdict, in weeks, and we can’t take the chance of failure.”

            “Three weeks,” Stefan murmured. “We need some extra muscle. Did Anders mention any other ICRF cells we could use for…I don’t know…reinforcements? The Ravens won’t give us enough men, you know.”

            “Let me see,” Shepard muttered, accessing ICRF systems. “If I remember right…” She grinned. “Yep. There are four big ones. One on Mars, one on Ceresia, one on Kallex, and then one on the frontier.”

            “The frontier?” Stefan asked. “Which planet? There are a lot of them, you know.

            “Um…Cyg-Cygni Twelve,” she replied. "Is that too far out of reach?"

     Stefan shook his head. "It'll do fine," he answered. 

     "Hit them all up," Dani told her. "Tell them about Anders, and we'll go from there."

      Brooks grinned. "Prison break. This is so exciting."

     "It's either fear or indigestion you're feeling," Dani told him. "If you're feeling excited or confident about something like this, there's something you're missing."