[Giftsnap] Sixty Minutes to Hanukah

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Mobius 1
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[Giftsnap] Sixty Minutes to Hanukah

Post by Mobius 1 »

This'd be from Siege. As of this posting, and as with the Justice fic, it's still ongoing- yeah for subtle hints. Anyway, snap to.

***

Alright, I don't know how canon this is going to be, but I really wanted to write this story, so I was damn well going to :-). Also, it's in parts, because I haven't finished yet, and I don't want this to inadvertedly become a "secret summer" type of thing.

Having said that, I give you the first snippet:


Sixty Minutes to Hanukah

xx years after the war

Outside the forcewall-protected windows an uncounted number of stars twinkled in the cool lunar night, and were rivaled in their brightness by the luminescence of New Adelaide’s hundred million lights. A riot of wanton high-rise, the thousand kilometer-high spires of the solar system’s third-largest city pulsed with multi-colored lasers, the thrusters of descending cruisers, pale floodlights and strobing advertisements in infinitely-recurring neon movements. Certainly there was no such thing as a dark side of the moon, not any longer. Luna never slept, and even at night New Adelaide’s streets and skies were a warren of people, vehicles, starships and robots all clamoring for attention in a billion different voices.

But on the 132nd floor of the orbit-piercing Hyde & Croft apartment spire at the edge of Independence Boulevard and 3rd Street, serenity reigned supreme. The bedroom of the luxury penthouse was only halfway through its simulated night-cycle, perfectly dark and isolated from all the noises generated by a metropolis with a ten-digit populace. Nothing could pierce the peace and quiet of the tastefully decorated apartment- nothing - except the sort of high-technology intrusion for which people so gladly pay good money.

The vidphone chimed noisily, a glaring machinal racket with preciously little regard for the sanctity of human sleep. Under the black satin sheets, a solitary figure whimpered, curled up, and drew a pillow over her head. Then when the noise would not abate even after half a minute, the woman –thirty-something and dressed in nothing but a set of boxers- drew herself upright with a softly moaned complaint, and finally scrambled for the hammered copper voice-only button on the expensive comms-set set atop the table next to the bed.

‘Yeah?’ she groaned.

‘Colonel Grissom-McDonnell, Marine Corps?’ an unfamiliar voice questioned from the other side of the line.

‘Retired,’ stressed Sarah Grissom warily. ‘Who is this? How did you get this number?’

‘Colonel, this is the Cadre for Tactical Intelligence speaking. Check the ident-key we’re pinging to your VP in case you don’t believe us--we’re reactivating your commission and transferring you back to active duty, effectively immediately,’ the voice on the other side replied completely deadpan. ‘Oh, and you’re going to need guns.’

‘Wait, hold it right there,’ replied Grissom, more awake with each passing second. ‘You could be multisexual space gods from beyond the pillars of creation for all I care. I’m retired. I like being retired. I want to stay retired.’

‘Colonel, we have a situation in your immediate vicinity. We require your help in the next sixty minutes or lots of people are going to die. You’re the galaxy’s best sniper. We need you on-site.’

‘Bugger,’ sighed Sarah, staring at the rotating CTI eagle of glowing gold the ID-ping had produced on her vidphone’s liquid crystal display. ‘Fine, if you want to put it like that, I’ll get the rifle out.’

The voice on the other side of the line sounded relieved. ‘Fantastic colonel. You have to get going right away - we’ll brief you en route.

***

The black luxury sedan drove itself, which was all too good because its single occupant was far too busy making final checks on the collection of military-grade fire-arms displayed on the back seat to keep an eye on the road. Its engine humming gently, the car zoomed across the high-priority VIP strips of the autoroad at speeds in excess of three hundred miles per hour. A single green blip blinked on its navigational display as the target location.

‘The indicated point is a medical facility no fifty miles from your current position,’ echoed the voice of the CTI operator across the comms. ‘As far as we can tell it has been taken over by a group of ONI agents-’

‘Say what?’ said Sarah incredulously, diverting her attention from the guns for a moment. ‘You’ve got to be kidding me. Everybody knows ONI was disbanded years ago, after the war, after everyone got wind of all the bullfuckery they pulled. Don’t tell me you guys didn’t get the memo.’

'Colonel, let me ask you something...’ the remote voice crackled with static as the black sedan slid into a high-speed mag-tunnel. ‘Did ONI ever strike you as a group of people that'd let themselves be disbanded?'

Sarah frowned, then shrugged and rammed the firing pin back into an impressive-looking SMG. 'Good point.'

‘The facility itself is not very noteworthy, except for the fact that it is directly underneath a high-level government relay backbone. The agents have taken the staff and patients hostage and are using a quantum virus to hack their way into the ISAF restricted network. They’ve wired the building with explosives and are threatening to blow everything to kingdom come should we intervene. Our best estimates predict it will take them another fifty minutes to penetrate the mainframe. After which they’ll make their getaway and, knowing ONI, detonate the charges anyway, to cover their retreat.’

‘Fucked if you do, fucked if you don’t, eh?’ said Sarah, not taking her eyes off the scope she was calibrating.

‘Something like that. Just to add, we’re not sure what they’re after exactly—this is ONI after all—but we know it can’t be good.’

‘So where do I come in?’

‘These people are well-prepared, and probably monitoring our communications, but they are not all-knowing. As long as we stay outside the regular channels, we think we should be able to slip in a small team unnoticed to take them out. You were one of the only two assets in the area with a low enough response time.’

‘Who’s the other one?’

'He’s already on-site. His name is Maciej,’ said the operator, pronouncing the name as 'magic'. ‘He’s going to be your wingman on this one. And colonel, I think you'll like him.'
SHADOW TEMPEST BLACK || STB2: MIDNIGHT PARADOX
The day our skys fe||, the heavens split to create new skies.
Mobius 1
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Re: [Giftsnap] Sixty Minutes to Hanukah

Post by Mobius 1 »

***

With a hiss of hydraulics the sleek black sedan came to a full stop at the corner of Independence Blvd. This district of New Adelaide was strictly business, covered with slick glass-and-steel post-modern architecture, the sidewalks occupied by hundreds of formally-clad businessmen and –women, and even some aliens, many sporting earplugs or cybernetics that connected them wirelessly to their offices, allowing them to work even during their commute. Sarah was hard-pressed to think of a more dreadful existence—but then again, most of these people probably would be horrified by the prospect of going into battle with the Ark. To each his own, she shrugged.

Palmerton Medical Consulting turned out to be located in a bland six hundred-story building on the edge of an equally bland square the gray pavement of which was interspersed at regular intervals by fashionable potted neon-trees. A handful of people hastily crossed the square, none of them electing to pay the woman with the suspiciously bulky duffle-bag any mind. Nothing about the place betrayed an imminent crisis.

‘We haven’t alerted the local precinct yet,’ the CTI operator’s voice explained in her earpiece as if he’d read her thoughts. ‘Thermal cross-imaging shows all targets are holed up in PMC’s offices on the 250th and 251st floors. You shouldn’t encounter any resistance until you get there, so you can just walk in the front doors. Your partner is waiting there.’

‘Righty-o,’ muttered Sarah, wrenching herself and her bag into the revolving doors. On the other side, the atrium of the towering office building was a grandiose fourteen-story construction of marble floors, a vaulted steel and glass roof, and gengineered extra-tall conifer trees for decoration. Hovering glowlight signs suspended on AG fields in mid-air pointed to the elevators and explained which firm could be found on which floor. More businessmen hurried by. Janitors were mopping the floors, auspiciously giving wide berth to a single colossal figure standing stone-still in the middle of the atrium.

Sarah raised an eyebrow and approached the figure, a giant of a man dressed in a perfectly fitting tieless Zaatxchi-Armani that very nearly managed to hide the full extent of his cybernetic enhancement. But even underneath the exquisite fabric the expert eye of Sarah Grissom managed to distinguish artificial muscles unnaturally bulging over what had to be a kind of rigid subdermal armor. And that was just the surface. The janitors might not be able to tell exactly what was wrong with the man they were tacitly avoiding, but the way he stood and the manner in which he remained completely motionless to Sarah indicated that his was more than just a skin-deep hackjob. This fellow was chock-full of military cyberware, maybe even a full-body mod.

‘You must be here for the party as well,’ Sarah said to him upon approaching.

The man’s head swiveled on his neck. Sarah could just imagine hearing the whir of microgyros. 'Colonel Grissom? Gunnery Sergeant Maciej Wilder, formerly of the 607th SOS,' the man-machine nodded and made a lazy salute. 'Pleased to make your acquaintance.'

Sarah whistled between her teeth. 'SOS, huh? Wow. I thought all you guys were supposed to be dead.'

'The keyword's “supposed”,’ Wilder grinned, the movement of his jaws oddly mechanical. 'I find that's actually the case with a lot of legends and legendary outfits. The reports of their demise have often been... premature, not to mention greatly exaggerated. You yourself are testament to this, as I understand it.'

‘Just so,’ she nodded. But the 607th was something else. They weren't just ordinary soldiers, and their designation certainly wasn't a distress call--or maybe it was, maybe it was a distress call for their enemies. The 607th Space Ordinance Section was an elite unit, originally founded by the Valhalla colony on the Saturn moons, and composed of guys and gals who took spaceborne assault and cybernetics to the next level. Modified until they were something the Valhallans called humachines, they were then shot like cannonballs from orbital spaceraft. No chutes, rocketpacks or g-wings, just pure kinetic impact at terminal velocity right on top of the enemy, to emerge from the rubble with guns blazing. They were all-volunteer and, if the war stories were to be believed, all-nuts. Balls to the walls nuts - until they supposedly got themselves wiped out at Sigrun halfway through the war. A Valhallan colony overrun by the Ark, the 607th had made their last stand at the capital spaceport, first to allow the civilian population to evacuate, then to allow the regular army and marine corps to flee, and then, when there were no more ships left to extract them, just for the hell of it. Word was their resistance was so fierce that rather than to fight on the Ark had finally elected to annihilate Sigrun City from orbit, such were the horrid casualties the SOS had inflicted upon the attackers.

Apparently not even that had been sufficient to kill them all of. This assignment just got a lot more interesting. ‘You’ve brought guns?’ asked Sarah.

‘In my briefcase,’ nodded Maciej. He smiled wickedly. ‘And in my arms.’

Sarah grinned back. ‘Let’s do this thing.’

Express elevators were housed in shafts running all the way to the top of the building from the side of the lobby. From behind a desk, a hired security guard threw the two of them a wary look, before letting them enter the nearest elevator unopposed. The doors closed swiftly, the metal cage of the elevator cutting the comms temporarily.

‘Security here is crap,’ grunted Maciej.

‘That’s the way we want to keep it,’ shrugged Grissom. ‘If everything goes to plan there’s going to be one hell of a gunfight, and we’ll get arrested, and then a few phone calls will be made. And suddenly there’ll be no record of us ever being here, and no-one will know how close they got to a bomb massacre here in uptown Pleasantville.’

‘Just like that huh?’ remarked Maciej, pulling two impressive-looking subcoilguns from his briefcase. ‘I read that interview you did for the Pan-Solar Times. After what intelligence put you through during the war, I’m surprised you’ve got enough faith left to expect ‘em to bail you out after this.’

‘I didn’t say the calls would be to CTI,’ replied Sarah dryly.

‘Ah,’ smiled Maciej. ‘So tell me. What do you think of this job, then?’

Sarah adjusted her commlink and turned to the tall cyborg. ‘I think there’s lots of civilians holed up on those floors above us that need our help.’ She furrowed her brow. ‘But this is an intel-job. Fast-loop, sketchy details, off-the-record, irregular… Phone calls in the dark. I get the feeling I’m being used as an expendable asset.’

‘Never much liked being expendable myself, colonel,’ hummed Maciej.

Sarah nodded as she unzipped her dufflebag. ‘The feeling’s mutual. ONI or no ONI, let’s keep our wits about us, just in case.’

‘Right,’ Maciej agreed, and then looked at the rapidly climbing red numbers on the elevator door panel. ‘Almost there. Time to synch Double Sights?’

Pulling down a visor in front of her left eye, Sarah fidgeted with the digital controls until Maciej’s optical feed was overlaid across her own and vice versa, creating what was known as Double Sight. A late-war invention, the Double Sight was an optical effect wherein a team of soldiers could effectively ‘share’ their visual feedback. It was particularly useful in close quarters, where an extra pair of eyes could mean the difference between coming out on top and coming out feet first.

Sarah then pulled out her personal XB-20 lasergun with a custom-made short barrel, slung it over her shoulder, and jammed a magazine in the ZZ0 Combination Weapon System just as the elevator doors began to open.

‘Something something bubblegum,’ murmured Sarah. ‘Let’s rock ‘n’ roll.’
SHADOW TEMPEST BLACK || STB2: MIDNIGHT PARADOX
The day our skys fe||, the heavens split to create new skies.
Mobius 1
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Re: [Giftsnap] Sixty Minutes to Hanukah

Post by Mobius 1 »

AK-SHUN

***

Whatever CTI’s game was, there certainly were ONI agents holed up in Palmerton Medical Consulting. Three of them, dressed in dark-blue suits and sporting insectoid ocular implants and submachineguns, patrolled the soft-carpeted lobby. They were obviously surprised by the sudden appearance of two heavily armed individuals strolling onto the lobby floor, momentarily even forgetting to raise their weapons.

‘We’re licensed CTI agents,’ said Sarah, pointing the CSW at the nearest agent’s chest. ‘You are under arrest. Please drop your weapon and surrender.’

As one, the agents raised their weapons. Maciej did not hesitate for a moment. Diving left and away from the elevator, his subcoilguns came up so fast his hands barely seemed to move. A terrifying roar split the lobby and blue electric flame spat from both barrels. The hypersonic projectiles tore through wickedly into the first agent, reducing his chest to a superheated boiling mist only to then plow into the wall behind him, punching disc-sized holes through a moderately expensive neomodernist painting.

At exactly that moment the remaining agents opened fire, their guns throwing a hail of micro-grenades through the lobby. Wood tore, steel splintered and preciously furnished mosaics on the wall simply exploded into a myriad irreparable shards. Sarah moved right, through the waft of fire and smoke and debris even as magnetically accelerated explosive rounds from her CSW exploded the head of the agent closest to the elevator. As his dying form crashed backward through a pane of decorative glass, the agent’s finger spasmed on the trigger of his machine pistol, sending an erratic line of fire into the air. Bullets passed narrowly over Sarah even as she moved into cover behind a velvet-wrapped pillar, hammering a hanging chandelier with a burst of exploding shells.

Crystal shards rained down on the lobby floor. Scooping and rolling to avoid the worst of the shattering chandelier, Sarah barely had time to see Maciej shred the last agent into two distinct pieces with automatic crossfire from his fearsome subguns. Briefly, silence settled over the blood-stained lobby floor. The gunfight had barely lasted ten seconds, and yet already the place was a horrid mess of blood and gore, stone riddled with gaping bullet holes, shattered glass and fire licking across splintered wood.

‘“Please surrender”?’ snorted Maciej, casually turning around.

‘I had to try,’ shrugged Sarah, swiftly picking herself up from the floor.

‘Looks like you’re in,’ echoed the remote CTI operator, his connection finally re-establishing itself. ‘The elevator put you in the west corner. You want to be in the east corner, so you’ll have to traverse the whole floor. I suggest you be quick - it will be a matter of seconds before they react to your presence.’

As if on cue, six more agents burst into the lobby from the far side doors, wasting no time before opening fire and raking the lobby with fire. Sarah ducked behind her pillar, but Maciej simply stood like a massive stone giant in the midst of the lobby. Bullets tore into his imposing bulk, shredding his suit to reveal synth-skin and, as the bullets tore even that into pieces, cold blue armor below.

‘Do you punks know how difficult it is to get this complexion right?’ growled Maciej, whirling around with a frightening speed and agility that seemed impossible for something as large as him. His two guns came up and flared blue fire, the whine of hypersonic death once more searing through the lobby, instantly vaporizing the first three agents. Another lost an arm to a projectile that merely passed by at a meter’s distance. The man collapsed onto the floor screaming –the last two agents were fortunate enough to stumble into the lobby the precise moment Maciej’s guns ran dry.

Grinning, the second agent plucked a hi-ex grenade from his belt, drew the pin out, and tossed it.

‘Arsebiscuits!’ cursed the Valhallan man-machine, and begun to dive for cover, knowing he’d be too late.

Using the Double Sight, Sarah popped off a single expertly aimed round from the CSW. It flashed past Maciej and connected with the grenade in mid-air, punching it backwards and sailing down the hallway toward the agents. The grenade’s semi-smart fuse recognized two presences nearby and detonated at the optimum distance between the two. For a brief instant, a cloud of fire and ten thousand sharp micro-fragments perforated everything within ten feet, the overpressure blowing out the armaglas window at the far end of the hall, razor-edged fragments tearing the nearest two wooden walls to pulp in less than a second and instantly reducing the two agents into roasted bloody smears on a granite floor now punctured by hundreds of super-sharp needles drive into the dense stone.

Suddenly, silence.

‘Sweet potatoes, I think I forgot how damn good I was,’ huffed Sarah. She blew the smoke off the barrel of her smoldering CSW. ‘Hey spaceman, go find some bullets.’

‘Shut up,’ growled Maciej.

The swing doors through which the agents had sortied only to be swiftly annihilated had closed again. Maciej took up position to one side, Sarah at the other.

‘The other side is a hundred square meters of open office floor,’ echoed the voice of the CTI operator. ‘No cover to speak of. You’ll have to be quick across. Expect some opposition- we’re relaying thermal signatures to your eyepieces.’

Sarah’s vision swiftly overlaid with the retransmitted imagery from a thermal camera, highlighting the room in ahead with illuminated red grids and white flecks that were the heat signatures of several agents on the other side of the wall.

‘Time to improvise,’ Sarah shouldered her CSW and grabbed the heavy laser rifle.

‘We haven’t been improvising yet?’ grinned Maciej. ‘Walk in and shoot everyone is a plan?’

‘Shut up,’ muttered Sarah, shouldering the weapon and pressing her eye to the sight. ‘I prefer solid-slug rifles, but for the moment this will do just nicely.’

She fired. And retired or not, Sarah Grissom-McDonnell was far from rusty. The cover provided by desks, computers and cubicles in proved of no use to the agents in the office: the thick red sustained beam of the infrared laser sliced effortlessly through door, wall and other obstacles, cutting the nearest two agents on the other side neatly in two before dicing through the rest of the room and setting it on fire almost instantly.

But these agents were better prepared, dug in as good as they, using the cubicles as improvised flak-board and keeping their heads down whilst pouring fire back onto the doorway. Torrents of bullets shattered the door, tracers burning searing after-images onto Sarah’s retina as she quickly moved to reposition herself.

With a thunderous roar, part of the office wall abruptly came crashing down, showering the fortified agents with calcite dust and debris. For a moment the firing faltered. Then the hulking form of Maciej Wilder became visible through the smog. The Valhallan commando had smashed straight through a concrete wall that might as well have been rice paper under his immense strength, and was wielding his enormous autopistols like children’s toys. Crackling blue fire hammered the lobby; agents were torn to pieces everywhere. Sarah seized the diversion and rounded the corner, lasering the office cubicles to tattered shreds with a slicing rapid-fire spray. For brief seconds a brutal firefight raged, then all the agents were dead. With the thermal imaging and the agents cornered it wasn’t so much a fight- it was a slaughter, and it was over only a minute after it began.

‘Nice going,’ commented Maciej dryly, careful not to step in any of the pulped bodies or the pools of blood that ran freely across the marble floor. ‘Watch out - this stuff is murder to get out of your clothes.’

‘Like I don’t know it. Ruined my best uniform back on the Brute-’ she fell suddenly silent, but Maciej had heard enough.

‘-Hope?’ he finished. ‘You were a part of that boarding party?’

Sarah hesitated. ‘After a fashion. That blood? It wasn’t the enemies.’

‘What happened?’

‘I died,’ her voice briefly caught a pain-stricken edge. ‘Sorry. It’s not exactly an experience I like to talk about.’

‘I bet,’ murmured Maciej, his face oddly expressive for a cyborg. ‘So, what’s next?’

‘In the back of the office floor there’s a door,’ echoed the CTI operator’s voice. ‘Go through it and you’ll be in the medical area. There should be stairs to the next floor about three hundred meters from your current position, but our floor plan is pretty old. Better watch out for any surprises.

‘Surprise and me are going to play a fun game,’ rumbled Maciej, hefting his enormous subguns. ‘It's called, "who is your daddy, and what does he do?"’

‘Wait- what?’ asked Sarah incredulously.

‘Never mind. Let's go kill some more bad guys.’
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The day our skys fe||, the heavens split to create new skies.
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Re: [Giftsnap] Sixty Minutes to Hanukah

Post by Booted Vulture »

I like this fic. I like this fic, a lot. Not only has it has a decent approximation of Mobius brand action, it does it with a little more tongue-in-cheek flair and on top of that, there's decent hooks to make you want to read more, vis-a-vis, Sarah's 'death' and subsequent resurrection.
Ah Brother! It's been too long!
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