Something Dangerous

  “TacCom, you read?” asked Ian.

  “Loud and clear,” came Melisa’s voice through his headset.

  “I have eyes on Caboose, copy?”

  “Full copy,”

            Ian was standing on yet another partially built skyscraper in the City Atop the City. He was looking down at a small airfield with a few hangers and a large administrative building. Devon was down below, sneaking towards said building.

            Ian was providing cover, picking off targets with a .50 calibre sniper rifle as his friend continued from the gate to the building. They had learnt much during the day but had waited until now to strike as the night provided better cover. The rain and thunder helped.

            It took a good thirty minutes for Devon to reach the building undetected, but he did not do it without a few close calls. Luckily Ian was able to silence all of the guards that had sighted Devon before they could so much as lift a finger.

            They had no real idea who they were dealing with, as these were not Others agents. They were all clad in black and armed with rifles. None of them carried swords, axes or bows, and a lot of their tech was much further advanced than anything the Agency or the Others had.

            Devon was silently talking the halls. He could hear patrol moving around the building as well as people working in their offices. The whole sneaking thing always annoyed him, but he was good at it as he had proven on a few occasions.

            The building was littered with cameras, but luckily Devon’s suit had built in video scramblers. He would not appear on any of the footage. For minutes he moved around the building until he found an empty office. He sat down in front of the computer and started to hack into it. Within seconds he had access to the network and started scanning through files.

            He found a long list of shipments that were en route or already in the city. A few mentioned crystals like the one they had seized, others mention supplies like ammo, food, clothing and some more intimate objects. Finally Devon found what he was looking for. It was the manifest of a cargo plane that would arrive the next morning carrying two ‘subjects’ as they were listed on the manifest.

  “Found it,” said Devon, “uploading now,”

  “Dev,” said Ian, “can you get hold of some schematics for the facility where they will be taking Ed?”

  “Let me check,” he said and started sifting through files again while the manifest uploaded. “Yes, sending now,”

  “Good, once the upload is done get out of there,”

  “You don’t have to tell me twice,”

            It took a good minute, though Devon could have sworn it was longer, before the file was uploaded. Devon logged out of the system and made his way back to the entrance. When he was half way, moving past a window, a bullet zipped past his head and embedded itself in the wall next to him. Instinctively he fell to the floor, rolled to the wall below the window and drew a silenced pistol.

  “That wasn’t funny, Ian,” Dev said furiously.

  “What wasn’t funny?”

  “You, shooting at me,”

  “That wasn’t me. Fuck, Others,”

            Ian scanned the rooftops nearby and noticed a sniper in the building across from him. He took aim and killed the Others sniper before he could fire on Devon again. That’s when all hell broke loose.

  “Go loud, go loud!” shouted Devon as he holstered his pistol and took the UMP45 from his back.

            He started running through the halls as agents peered out their offices to see what was going on. A few of them tried to pull a gun on Devon, but he shot them. Most of those he shot, he killed, but some were only wounded. He could hear the booming of the 50 calibre rifle that was no longer silenced.

            Ian saw Devon run out of the building followed by a single agent. Devon was oblivious to the man who was about to shoot him in the back, but Ian shot first.

            As with the operation the night before, everyone was firing on everyone. There seemed to be no alliance between the Others and these unknown agents, which proved useful to them as Devon was able to get out of the complex without being followed.

  “So?” asked Ian when they were back at the safe house and clad in casual ware.

  “It’s definitely going to be them,” said Melisa as she finished inspecting the manifest.

  “We won’t be able to take them in broad daylight,” said Devon.

  “No,” agreed Ian, “we’d have to wait until tomorrow night before we mount an assault,”

  “An assault?” asked Melisa, “the three of us against an entire base of who knows what?”

  “They’re just people,” said Ian, “they bleed when you cut them,”

  “And die when you shoot them,” added Devon.

  “This is a bad idea,”

  “Stick around,” said Ian, “we’re full of bad ideas,”

  “So how do you expect the three of us to assault a militarised facility?”

  “With care, but we can worry about that tomorrow, I’m going to make like any good Microsoft product and crash,” Ian said and headed to his room.

            He got into the bed and for an instant wanted to turn over and look upon Danny’s face as she lay smiling in her sleep. But she was thousands of kilometres away, and Ed was not yet rescued.

            Melisa couldn’t sleep. Every time she managed to doze off she would find herself in a terrible dream. She dreamt time and time again of Donovan, of him coming back to her, holding her, then turning to ashes and being blown away by a sudden gust of wind.

            She got out of bed, left her room and headed to the kitchen. To her surprise Ian was busy with something at the kitchen table. He had a number of flasks on the table, some filled with coloured liquids, others empty and scattered amongst the flasks were a number of glass capsules no larger than a golf ball.

  “What are you up to?” she asked as she opened the fridge looking for something to eat.

  “Making Dragon’s Fire,” he said without looking at her. It seemed that he was concentrating very hard on filling one of the capsules with a mixture of some of the coloured liquids.

  “Don’t you mean Dragon’s Breath, and don’t you need shotgun rounds for that?”

  “No, this is a grenade not a cartridge,” he said.

  “So what’s it do?”

            Ian finished filling the capsule he was busy with, carefully placed it on the table and took a small vial from the table. The liquid inside was black with a swirl of green. He shook it once and threw it at a rat in the corner of the living room.

            The vial hit the ground and a ball of fire a good half meter in diameter erupted from it. The heat was intense, Melisa could feel it even where she stood, and when the fireball dissipated less than a second after the vial shattered, only a blacked path remained.

  “Where’s the rat?”

  “Vaporised, just like the vial and anything else that might get in the way,”

  “This stuff’s worse than thermite,” she noted disapprovingly.

  “Yeah, and about as volatile as nitro-glycerine,”

  “So why make it?”

  “It’ll even the odds a little,”

  “It’s a bad idea,”

  “I told you we’re full of them,” said Ian with a smile.

            Melisa shook her head and walked back to her room, intent on trying to sleep. But sleep did not come.