:: 07/05/01 ::
The fence surrounding the compound was high, impossibly high, but from Maria's point of view, hunched over in the rocky dirt some hundred meters away, it was a thin screen, a delicate spider's web that she could reach out and sweep aside. Her conscious mind knew that it was a tensioned alloy, difficult to penetrate for the strongest bolt-cutters and charged with millions of volts of energy. Even so, the analogy stayed with the more imaginative part of her brain as she crept toward it. She stayed on her stomach, moving low and mostly silently despite the menagerie of equipment in her backpack.
More than once, she stopped at a particularly loud noise, afraid that the sound would trip the sonic detectors or, even worse, alert the guards to their presence. If that happened, all hell would break loose - if the alarm was tripped at least they might have precious time to escape while the guard contingent milled about in confusion.
However, Maria planned neither. Creeping into the facility was difficult and complicated, but it was a lot less dangerous than going in with all guns blazing. One thing that Maria did not want was casualties.
It took nearly half an hour to move up to the fence at a rate that was acceptable to Maria's sense of safety. It was tedious work, but she knew that the real action was about to begin. Carefully, she slipped the nylon straps of the backpack off of her shoulders, settling it to the ground with minimal effort and noise. She turned silently in the dust and waved two fingers, signaling her right-hand man to move forward.
Donny crept up in less than five seconds, a pair of steel cutting utensils held in one hand and a submachine gun in the other. She gestured, annoyed, for him to put the weapon away - rather, he simply set it in the dirt.
She motioned for him to come forward even more and whispered into his ear. "Time?", she muttered silently, inciting him to glance down at his watch.
He whispered back. "Outage-minus fifty."
She nodded in satisfaction. "Good. Remember, stick to the plan. It goes down, we go in."
He only nodded in silent reply, even though she could barely see him in the twilight.
The next fifty seconds dragged into eternity as Maria waited for the outage. In exactly - thirty seconds, the time ticked down in her head with the precision of a watch - the power to the fence would go down thanks to their inside agent and Maria's team would have ten minutes to get in. Ten minutes that would have to be spent feverishly cutting wires to make a hole big enough for an armed soldier.
She flashed three digits on her right hand behind her and made a circle with her left, indicating the thirty second mark to the team behind her. Their faces, lit only by the stark compound lights and the negligible twilight, were gray as ashes, dim even to her eyes that had long ago adjusted to the dark. She knew all eight of their names, just as well that she knew that at least half of them would die before the night was over. They were an odd mixture of friends and people she knew only by name and reputation; people whom she had fought with before and people whom she had never even seen before this night. Yet despite that, she knew them by name, just as she always knew her team members' names. That way grieving didn't seem so pointless. If she knew the person, then at least she knew what about them to grieve over.
She banished the thoughts. She could feel herself shifting into her killer mode, the part of her psyche that had been drilled into her during her Training. Emotion suddenly drifted away, replaced with a cold, hard reserve, a willingness to kill that felt so alien inside her own mind. She closed her eyes for a split second, letting what she knew as the Avenger take over her body and her will. Maria simply drifted into the background and watched herself, safe in the recesses of her mind, where whatever actions she took would not truly be her fault.
It felt as though she were looking down a long, dark tunnel at the fence. The barrier was everything, the focus of all her attention. The patient killer that Maria had become waited for the final seconds.
Ten.
Maria shifted in the dirt, her hand creeping toward the weapon slung over her shoulder. She gripped the handle of the gun, feeling the cold rubberized grip underneath her closed fingers. She finger caressed the trigger as she drew the machine gun forward and set it carefully to the side.
Five.
She showed five fingers to the men and women behind her and heard a short rustle of weapons and equipment being drawn.
Three.
She felt her heart pounding in her chest, anticipating the action, the excitement that was approaching.
Two.
Her muscles tensed, waiting to burst forward into that long ten-minute pause.
One.
She heard everything for an instant - her own heart, her short, deep breaths... the pounding blood of Donny, right beside her, and the excited clipped breaths and whispers and prayers of her troops. The universe slowed in its infinite cycle for a split second, and then erupted as the final count was reached.
Now.
She rushed forward, no longer heeding the sonic detectors, as the lights of the compound suddely dropped and blinked out. A dozen shouts of protest and surprise sounded from the surrounding guard towers, but she paid them no mind as she pounced upon the fence, cutting with all of her might at a single wire. The tensioned steel snapped with a metallic twang, an off-key note that stilled the night air even further. She heard another snap, but already the Avenger was deep into the blood rush and she could not bring herself to care. Another wire popped under her cutters, and another, sounding out into the desert.
It took a full five minutes, an eternity to Maria, wrapped in a comforting blanket of distance, to cut a rough square into the wires. She met Donny at the top apex of the square, both of them clipping the last of their wires simultaneously. At that moment of quiet victory, she shared a small, hard smile with him before gently removing the section of fence and signaling to the rest of her team. One by one, Maria first, they slipped through the gap in the wires, weapons held at the ready. Then it was a quick fifty-foot run to the shadow of the nearest concrete bunker, where the ten of them crouched in the shielding cloak of darkness. There, huddled together, Maria surfaced from the depths of her mind that shielded her and unveiled the rest of her plan.
"Right," she whispered, "from here, we head over fifty meters at about one o' clock and head into the bunker. We get past security - do not fire unless fired upon, remember - and plant the C4."
One of her team members grinned in the dark and tapped a roughly rectangular package that he carried underneath an arm. Maria only shook her head and smiled herself, and continued. "By the time we do that, they'll know we're here, so we haul ass and shoot anything that gets in the way. Got it?"
The other nine nodded and checked weapons one last time. A series of short snaps and clicks rang out into the night as weapons were cocked and readied for action, and for a moment Maria tensed, worrying about sonic detectors or guards on duty. When no shouts rang out and the alarms remained silent - still dead, she remembered - she took a quick look around the corner of the concrete storage bunker they crouched beside. There was a clear path to the target bunker that correlated to her mental map of the facility, a perfectly shielded corridor that was protected from sight by a series of disabled generators and water storage towers.
Gently, she raised an arm behind her and signaled for two of her men to leapfrog across the gap, stopping behind the covering blanket of shadow that the monumental generators provided. They crossed without incident and signaled all clear. Maria sent her next pair across, and another directly behind them. As soon as they reached the end of the line, she ordered the last set of commandoes across, and then turned to share a nod with Donny. They broke off at a run, charging forward into one set of shadows, pausing , and then resuming a mad dash to the next set of obstructions.
Suddenly a noise, a single metallic scratch in the dark night, sent Maria sprawling onto the ground, scrabbling for her weapon. But it was too late. The noise rose in intensity, just as she pivoted on the dust and aimed at...
Air. Nothing there.
Her heart pounding, she realized with a start: the generators. They were coming back online. Her heart was jumping like a frightened animal, her weapon still pointing ahead as if of its own accord, aiming for something unseen. Maria forced herself to get up, dust off, and resume her run to the shadows. Shocked, she slipped back into the Avenger, letting its ruthlessness comfort and shield her from the fear, the rabid panic that swept through her.
They slipped through the night again, Maria once again calm and serene in safety. A quiet shuffle of feet was all that they left behind them - the rocky dirt prohibited the birth of footprints - as they crept slowly to their target.
Then the door loomed ahead. A large concrete structure behind it - only the tip of a giant iceberg drilled into the ground. The bunker held the team's main objective - once in, half of their mission would be complete. Maria placed her hand on the cold handle to open the sliding door, weapon held forward in a one-handed grip. She leaned into the steel blast door, pushing it aside - removing one obstacle and trading it for another.
A guard. Maria - the Avenger - was too shocked for the second time in a minute to respond. Before she could move, even breathe, the shout was already escaping from his lips. She shot double volleys into him, the silenced rifle ringing out with faded tones, pumping a barrage of shells into the soft flesh. The man's face turned into pulp, his neck already covered with blood. And yet, in his death throes, he managed to fire the pistol which he held in his hand.
A sharp flaming spike, synchronized with the thunder of the shot, jabbed into the flesh just below Maria's collarbone, shattering a rib in its path of destruction through her own muscle and bone. She felt no pain, only the curious sensation of the tiny metal insect eating through her skin and flesh for a moment. But then it hit, leaving her suddenly gasping in shock, crumpling to the ground like a dropped doll. She felt only the dim sensations of feet pounding the ground next to her.
And then Donny's voice, ringing loud and clear above the sudden sharp crackles of gunfire raining down, bloodying her troops from above. Donny's voice: "Far enough, Max - cut it!"
And the world froze.
Maria's eyes were locked straight ahead. The shuddering that had plagued her only a moment before was gone, replaced with a feeling of absolute stillness. She did not breathe, did not feel a single motion or twitch. Absolute stillness. Her eyes had falled upon the grisly tableau of a man being cut in half by bullets raining down from a gun post. The red mist spraying from the frozen bullet wounds hung suspended in midair, like delicate ice crystals in the winter. It was almost.. beautiful.
And then Donny's voice came again, the only sound in a world where the earth had ceased to spin. "Where did that come from?"
In reply, Maria heard an unearthly, sourceless voice. She had never been a person of faith, but had the voice not had the exact timber of a college-student male, she would have become an instant convert. It was impossible, she thought… and yet, it was happening. "Where did what come from?"
"The guard, you scadding idiot."
"A surprise ending. You gotta be ready for anything, soldier-boy." Maria could hear the smirk in the impossible voice.
Donny's reply was muttered, but she heard it more than easily, with all sound gone. "You're an idiot."
And then he was close, too close, right up in her face, peering into both of her frozen eyes one by one. Instinct and reflexes told her to blink, but she could not. It surprised her just how much that fact irritated her. He spoke while examining her. "You did a great job on this Maria AI though."
AI?
"Thanks. It took a lot of work to get her right - she was kinda an experiment for my psychology class. See, I grew her up from childhood, through accelerated virtual time. In a lot of ways, she's still growing up, both one of the real interesting things is that she's even developed a sort of subconscious fighting personality, like a low-level schizophrenic would..."
"Right, right, kid. Save it for the teach. Now let's start it up again, hmm?"
The ethereal voice was suddenly gone, and Maria and Donny were alone on the flashfrozen base. He addressed her, smirking in front of her face. "Sorry, Maria-babe, but I'm afraid we have to wipe your memories of this little adventure. Can't have you knowing that you're really an AI, can we?"
She wanted, suddenly, to spit at him, but she was still locked in the invisible ice that held her fast. Donny stood and pushed aside the frozen body of the diving soldier being sawed in two, and made an odd gesture. Then, with a single finger, he punched an invisible button, and the world fell out. Reality shattered into a million tiny fragments, and Maria tumbled, through memories and futures unseen, through a gray mist, a white fog that carried her and suddenly dropped her into...
The fence surrounding the compound was high, impossibly high...
