#technically on time

[tesla-tday]

[nny11writes]

Fictober 28- Death

Ahsoka is dodging blaster fire and is overwhelmed. No one survives that many hits and she dies gasping for air before she can hit the ground. Ahsoka is back in herself and jumps, neatly avoiding the absolute hail of blaster fire that opens on the spot she’s just left. She back flips and lands three point outside of the circle. A magna guard is there, Ahsoka is barely able to keep up when a second one joins the first. Distracted by the two droids she doesn’t have time to redirect the B2’s rocket. It ends in burning fire and Ahsoka is disoriented. She’s choking on blood and can’t breath, she can vaguely see Rex’s boots as he makes for her body before fading out. She returns to herself. Ahsoka twists landing two quick blows to the first magna guard, and then shoves her main blade through the second’s chest. She flicks it off, clipping it to her belt, and uses every ounce of power she has to push the rocket upwards to explode mostly harmlessly in the sky. The B1’s shoot her unprotected back and Ahsoka jerks with each hit, her knees ache as she collapses. She returns to herself. Ahsoka throws herself sideways behind a rock, rolling into Rex’s side.

“Good show Commander.” He grunts twisting to fire his decees into the crowd of droids. “Don’t suppose you have a way to get us out of here alive?”

They die on the retreat, a tank a few klicks away fired a heavy mortar. This time it doesn’t burn, she’s simply there one moment and gone the next.

They die fighting back along their original route, there’s too many droids and they are boxed in. Rex falls first, his body trampled underfoot and Ahsoka falls next.

The magna guards force her defenses to open and she takes two electro staves directly to her chest. It hurts worse than almost anything as her body literally starts cooking from the inside out. Her heart stops a few moments later. Ahsoka can only hope Rex will survive.

They stay put and grenades kill them.

They dodge the grenades only to be taken out by superior fire power.

Ahsoka pushes the grenades back into the ranks of battle droids. Scrapping several lines and buying them time. She kind of wishes she’d remembered the super battle droid before she’d done it though.

The next time she redirects its next missile into a group of droidekas. (They rolled around the corner killing them both. They rolled around the corner and killed Ahsoka first. They rolled around the corner and she pushed them with the force, a sniper commando droid makes use of her distraction.)

“I’m working on it Rex!”

After all, when death keeps trying to drag you back and the spirit of some bizarre force demi-god has decided you are their favorite toy; Ahsoka doesn’t have much choice but to work on it.

[jcollinsfiction]

Untitled, Because I am Still Not Sleeping

Spring is almost here! I have proof, and I’m very excited about this. I do not have any focus, though. My ADHD meds started making me feel even more ill, so I’m gonna figure that out. My editor was very understanding, and I’m taking a break while I sort out my apparent lack of ability to find some sort of homeostasis. Here are some more pretty pictures of flowers as compensation for a complete…

View On WordPress

[rigil-kentauris]

ap:tor 23

Finished this one like one minute ago (busy day!) so I have literally bisected the conversation this is about in two. Meaning this is def going to get edited when it goes up on Ao3. Plus, my keyboard keeps switching between my english keyboard and my conlang keyboard, and it’s messing up my spell check, so it probably need even more editing.

Still sick. Also, going out of town this weekend. Hopefully, I can get a few days stockpiled up tomorrow morning.

Ha ha. Doing things ahead of time. How quaint.

Bye!

Day 5

“Mike – congratulations on bringing in Nasri. They’re interrogating him now.”

Every part of me hurt, so I was taking the day off. Plus, it wasn’t like I could shoot anything, even if I’d wanted to. Shoulder wasn’t having it. Mina was nice enough to call me, and update me on the results my mission. Note: you might think Westridge would have done that, but you would be wrong.

Sorry. Grumpy today.

“Anything on Shaheed?”

“No.” Shit. “We’ve got a lot of information on arms trafficking in the region – we should be able to shut down a lot of pipelines before people get hurt. But nothing on Shaheed.”

“Dammit, I thought for sure…” If I’d been there sooner…if I let him go instead… I sighed. “Maybe bringing him in was a waste of time.”

“I don’t think so, Mike.” Mina said, shaking her head and smiling reassuringly. “You made the right call.”

I didn’t want to look at her, to see if her expression matched her tone.The light switch on the wall was much more interesting, curiously burnished, not in a nice way, or a way that screamed ‘antique’, but in a messy, unpleasant way. A way that suggested no one had put any love into maintaining this place. I’d have to do something about that before I left, polish it, maybe. After a brief silence, Mina’s voice echoed from the TV.

“Anything come up you need my help with?”

I pulled my gaze from the light switch very to her questioning gaze. I was fine. I was used to these stakes. I did make the right call.

But that didn’t mean I wanted to talk about it.

“You been with Alpha Protocol a while?”

She smiled and straightened up.

“Not as long as Westridge – and not nearly as long as Parker. This assignment with Shaheed is probably the biggest one I’ve been involved with.”

Hm. She was new, too?

“What other assignments have you been on?”

“I went undercover with Parker in Milan as a contractor for Halbech. It’s how we found out the missiles were gone in the first place – although it was too late to stop Shaheed. The incident with the airliner…”

Now it was Mina’s turn to look away, voice trailing off. The news reports, on the scene images of ambulances flashing, reporters targeting family member like birds of prey, dropping from the sky to interrogate shaking mothers with red puffy eyes. One guy didn’t know his daughter was dead. He found out on live television, in front of the world.  Mina shouldn’t put that on herself, but it was so easy, that little voice saying, if you’d been better, faster, if you hadn’t spent that extra hour sleeping or joking or laughing…

The plane might have landed safely. The missiles might have still been at the palace.

“We’ll catch him this time,” I promised. “He won’t get another chance.”

Chance of success in the 20th percentile. I pushed the thought away. Pressure is one thing. Undue pessimism is another.

“I hope so,” Mina looked at me, and tried to refocus her smile. Tried, and didn’t manage it. “I feel like if we’d been a little quicker with analyzing the data-”

There it was. If only we’d been faster…I cut her off. “Don’t beat yourself up over it. What’s done is done, let’s focus on the next step.”

“You’re right,” she said, and finally got her smile back. “We’re closing in on him and it shouldn’t be much longer.”

“Still, with Alpha Protocol – what I don’t understand is why the United States would want to keep this operation secret,” I thought out loud. Shaheed’s capture – a perfect follow-up story to Flight 6133. The media would love it. “Don’t they want Shaheed captured?”

“I think it’s the missiles that are the problem. Halbech’s a substantial government contractor. The fact that the missiles were involved…complicates things.”

“‘Complicates’ things? As in…they’re a potential embarrassment to Halbech?” As in, how did Halbech lose those missiles?

“I think that’s a big part of it. US weapons used to kill US citizens? Wouldn’t look good on a front page, even if the missiles were stolen.”

Then again, Shaheed’s capture was big news on its own. The missiles didn’t need to be mentioned. In fact, Shaheed was probably a bigger media risk free than he would be in the hands of the US government. Something didn’t add up.

“Alpha Protocol does a lot of operations like this,” Mina continued. “I don’t know all of them…or all the names this program has had…it carries out missions without the knowledge of other U.S. agencies.”

Well, someone had to know about it. “Like what? The CIA?”

“The CIA, the NSA…congressmen don’t even have a clue this program exists.” No shocker there. What most congresspeople knew could fit in my hat. The NSA, though… “It’s designed to prevent red tape. And if it’s found out, it just gets buried and renamed.”

“Renamed? To Beta or Gamma Protocol?”

“No clue,” she said seriously. “Parker probably does, he’s been here the longest. Whenever it’s in danger of being exposed, it closes shop – and a new one opens up.”

Evidence of the program must be deleted.

“Interesting. I guess that’s good to know.” Mina hadn’t been here too long, by her own admission. Had Parker told her? Had she even asked? “Wonder if I’d get a new name if Alpha Protocol shut down.” I loved my name, but a new ID was preferable to a bullet in the back of the skull.

“I don’t know,” she said reflectively. “We might get new names, new identities…or fired.”

Evidence of the program must be deleted. I could have said something, figured out if she was being metaphorical when she suggested we’d get fired. I didn’t. If she wasn’t why bring it up. If she was, again, why mention it. We were alive today, and we had a job to do. A damn important one, at that.

“Can you tell me anything about Shaheed?”

She shook her head, ponytail flipping side to side. “Not much more than you’d find in his dossier. His personal fortune doubled in one year when gas was $4.00 a gallon. And he likes feeling…safe, when he travels.”

When gas was ha-ha-I-ride-a-bike dollars a gallon, you mean? Never mind, not important.

“What do you mean, ‘safe?’”

“While Al-Samad is mostly untrained civilians using cold war guns, his personal bodyguards are well-trained. And judging from the missiles used on the airliner…let’s just say he makes sure they have cutting edge tech.”

Again, you might think this is the kind of information you might want to give an agent before they head off on an op with a chance of success in the 20th percentile, but you would be mistaken. Fortunately, I’m a good agent, and I have a knack for getting intel. Then again, could I really take credit for Mina calling me and volunteering that info?

Yes. Yes, I could.