@agentannakelso (This was to fulfill the long overdue "Offer of Mercy" prompt, but halfway through it I realized that I was about to commit a sin I loathe in media, so I had to change it a bit. I have another idea for a ceasefire drabble however. We'll see.)
Cement debris showers from the tunnel's fissures, and dust her jacket, hair, and eyes with grey. It leaves her skin itchy and her throat hoarse, but not as much as the knowledge that They would soon break through the base's eastern doors.
Anna knew it was bound to happen. She could still taste the words of protest upon her tongue when they left the Director alive in his holding cell that first night. He was too calm, and his eyes were too bright. The NSF should have known his allies would come - they should have known their ceasefire plot was insane.
"How's it looking, Carlson? What armor are they bringing," she grunts over her infolink, while dashing past two frightened youths running the opposite way. Upon her visage their bewildered faces brighten with hope, but she waves them on towards the southern exits and continues down the corridor maze. "Carlson," she snaps, brows furrowing, "I need an answer. Mechs. Are there any?"
"Roger. It's not good. They're packing at least two Boxes a- "
She curses and hails again, but recieves no intelligable word from the unit conmander. The crackling voice lessens until it is little more than a white sea within her inner ear, so she turns the volume down, allowing the clap of her steps and the haunting blare of distant klaxons to take lead.
She hated mechs with their armored guns and heavy treads, yet she preferred them over the Adept - that other breed of cold, killing machine. Their luminescent eyes, toneless voices, and self terminating brains curdled her nerves, especially once she accepted the fact that they were once eager agents like her.
Automatically, her fingers brush her holster and unfasten its lock. Like the neuropozyne she once abused, the touch of her gun immediately lessens her building inner tension. She wonders if she would ever break free of its comforting pull - if there was a light at the end of her suffering that did not call for violence. She could only vaguely remember how peace felt: how she spent days in the sun without worrying about rain, where a smile was just a smile, and the worst she could imagine was a broken bone gained by falling out of someplace tall...like a tree. Quietly, her mind relents to fragmented memories of swaying hammocks, pill-bugs hiding under wet juniper leaves, and a father lifting her upon his shoulders just as both augmented legs sweep out from underneath her.
Shoulders, hips and wrists crash against the ground. Gravel stains her tongue, but a surge of copper quickly overpowers the bursting earthy flavor. She had bitten her tongue during her violent fall.
But Anna Kelso, the augmented NSF agent, did not fall. Not on accident. Not anymore.
Sputtering, she flips herself upright, and thrusts her battered hands towards the sidearm fastened at her hip. Dust swirls around her as she draws. A sudden pressure upon her head forces her systems into protest. Like a vice the air squeezes and pulls, grinding her jaw to the point of cracking and her neck to the point of dangerous strain. Panicked, Anna fires twice into the dim, and spins to one side. Immediately the pain diminishes, but with adrenaline and gunfire still ringing her battered ears, Anna's eyes flash around herself, seeking for the sudden foe.
Nothing. Save dozens of tiny winged bugs swarming the orange emergency lights lining the ceiling, Anna Kelso crouches against the tunnel walls alone. A small ping opens in her inner retina view. Momentary gyroscopic malfunction. Minimal collision damage. Minimal lung filtration. Systems clean. Power levels green. No EMP damages. The window closes.
A deep boom sounds down the path, rocking the structure's integrity and sending clouds of dust adrift. For one flustered moment her own self confidence shakes in fear. Doubts surface, and she wonders if years of panic and peril had finally corrupted her peace starved existence. All the books said it would happen sooner or later. Everyone said a madness would come.
Slowly, the agent makes to rise, padding her lip with the back of her hand. Thoughts, like the bugs above, swarm around her current predicament, but she pushes most aside. Another boom and distant gunfire reminds her she had someplace to be.
She renews her gait cautiously, gun outdrawn. Her senses track for any odd shadow or sound beyond the certain chaos she ran toward. Running paranoid, she checks her diagnostics at such a frequency that she inevitably leaves the private window running in dark corner of her eye. It picks up nothing, but her skin crawls and her guts knot as her most primitive human instincts warn her of something wrong.
She begins to hear things. Tremors, Footsteps. Whispers. She imagines a set of breaths upon her back: a steady and deliberate exhale-inhale very unlike her jagged heaves. The sounds came from the right, or maybe the left - somewhere behind her. She could not tell how close, but she had the very distinct feeling it was drawing nearer.
She stops abruptly and wheels around - barrel level to her eyes and index finger poised to pull. Like an extension of her own augmentations, the pistol's contours gleam an oily gold beneath her stretching shadow. Ready to fire. Ready to kill.
Except her shadow, she realizes, casts on the wall to her right and did not come from the man approaching her left.
Always hard to look at. Always too close. Walton Simons's face holds little emotion, yet those luminescent nano rings within his dark eyes betray the loathing violence polluting his stone heart. They burn as he peels forth from his stealth cloaking in silver waves.
Two bloody bullets fall from an already healed hand.
Anna's HUD radar finally screams red.
Immediately, she twists and kicks the Director in his shins as calloused fingers rip at her jacket. Thrust backwards, he misses, but catches her gun, and though she fires squarely into his chest, the Director wrenches it out of her hands with a jolt she feared would rip out her arm. Unabashed, she darts for it, but a swipe of silver-blue - a sword - convinces her otherwise.
Lights flicker in time with bomb echoes. Dust columns rain. Woman and man dart through them, dodging stones, blows, and blade. With agility on her side, Anna scrapes ahead, gaining precious seconds between herself and the force of death following her. She could see the lights of a gate drawing near, and hear the sounds of violence further beyond. A hundred strides more, and Anna could regroup, rearm, and fight again.
But she remembers the gravity behind his presence and the song of his sword as it barely grazes her back. She would be leading the monster - a wasp to her hive of bees.
How had they captured him in the first place?
Anna closes her eyes, takes a deep breath and falls. This time, however, she turns to land upon her hands and feet. Simons skids to a stop a second past her.
"Too slow," she tuts, taking some pleasure in the way he stumbles. And she's off - rushing back down the way she came. Her plan works. He follows.
Now Anna truly runs for her life.
She knows bullets would not stop him. Anything smaller than military grade armories would only slow him down. Nonetheless, her heart swells upon seeing her firearm, her crutch, upon the floor. In a feat of practiced acrobatics she dives, scoops it up, and unloads it in his direction, hoping one would hit a special nerve or make him doubt his persistent advance. If not that - she shudders, ejecting and slamming another clip into the handgun’s chambers - she hopes to keep him interested long enough for the others to either regain control or flee.
Simons does not smile, it was not in his nature to do so, but she imagines a grin upon his lips as he slows to a stroll. His body jolts and bloody mists pop here and there, but for every wound there were a million nanos to heal. He comes ever-closer; his skin and haunting eyes glow with patterned lines of white.
Her breaths turn faint, drawn taut by fear and frustration as the blade he weilds slides closer towards her. She could hear the quiet snapping of a million nanos that made up his tinted blade - their reaching energy warming the air beyond her lungs. They smelled like ionized metal. Like blood. And they mezmorized just as much as they hungered.
Cursing she spins away again - staying him by another several yards. "I should have killed you the moment they took you in,” she bellows, hurdling a misplaced brick towards his face. "How did you escape?"
The man clicks his tongue and flinches out of the way, letting the brick crack into pieces behind him. The debris, Anna realizes with horror, stops at the feet of the same two frightened children she had encountered before. They had pressed themselves amongst the shadows of shipping boxes, and clung desperately to each other as the two adults stormed by. Eyes wide and full of tears, they appeared close to screaming at the violence playing out before them.
Anna makes to scream herself - an order to squirrel themselves away or at least stay away from the man, whom, before she knows it, stands too close for her to run away.
Eyes wild she unleashes a flurry of strikes upon his jaw and sternum. Her precise attacks send him coughing, but they do not stop him from slamming a closed fist upon her shoulder. The blow crumples her to the ground.
Stunned, she barely makes out his movements, but she feels the edge his sword lowering down upon her. It rips through her jacket as if passing through water, drawing a line into her flesh just before she discharges one more bullet into his gut. Snarling, he kicks her numbed wrist, and, again, her gun spins away. "Enough," he chids and forces her against a wall.
With a furrowed brow Anna growls and scuttles halfway to her feet, clawing and pummeling at any scrap of flesh she could lay her hands on. "Dammit Walton! Who was it?! Who let you out?!"
He kicks her again - this time across her cheek - his words, however, are soft amid the crumbling tunnels. "It's no longer relevant. I am here now, Miss Kelso, and you shall cease to be." The sword named Dragon Tooth flashes forward and, without decorum, cleaves downwards, parallel to her spine.
Gunfire. A shot in the dark. And the side of Walton Simons' face shreds apart.
Heaving, Anna watches his sword arm relax, and lower gently to her side. Quickly she pulls herself away from the hyper steel, and turns her sights back up to the Director's face. Unwavering, ringed irises burn starlight white behind his dark lashes and fresh cakings of blood. They stare into her own until the figure of a boy with a loaded gun darts between them.
She doubts Simons hears the boy's trembling, guilt-ridden pleads, or sees how he cries and quakes like a leaf. She doubts the man actually sees the boy at all, but a specter of some shred of humanity instead. It was the only reason she could come with for being able to rise and collect the two children. His wound had healed.
The ground shakes and the two boys clutch onto her sides. The lights above them shutter off, leaving the sword and Walton's patterns to haunt the dark. Far behind them the doors fly open to the knock of a heavy mech - the sort Anna had feared before. Mislodged stones snapped into dust under its slowly advancing treads. It could not see them yet, but its weapons whirled on and off with that shrill purr of preparation.
"Take your kittens." Walton's voice called before her, arresting her and the childrens' hearts in apprehension. "Take them and go."
They did not need to be told twice, but as they passed, Anna took one last puzzled look at the Director and mouthed a promise she would one day fulfill.
