by Tyler Hanson
Stacey felt like he might vomit. He wasn’t sure how much nausea stemmed from the confusing, messy situation rather than his headache. He honestly felt like it was one hundred percent for each of those reasons, which must be why he felt two hundred percent nauseous. Something filled his nostrils; after a moment, he realized it was the smell of burning ozone.
Something’s wrong.
The device Daanis planted was unknown to Stacey’s personal knowledge of conventional weaponry. It looked and felt almost alien, and as he watched, it behaved as such, too. It offered a low hum that grew louder and increased in pitch with every passing second, like the charging noise of a Polaroid camera. The recipient reached his thick, glassy arms behind his back, scrambling to remove the device.
Daanis stepped closer. “You can’t fight forever,” Daanis hummed in a low voice, her tone disturbingly gleeful.
“You can’t fight forever,” Ben growled, shoving his knife into the neck of the combatant in a brown hoodie.
“You can’t fight forever,” Lincoln murmured, pulling himself to his feet.
“You can’t fight forever.” Adam laughed as he threw the fighter in a green hoodie to their knees, shooting them in the back of the head with his sidearm, execution-style.
“You can’t fight forever,” Xander huffed, removing the weapons from the two unconscious DEVGRU operatives for no clear reason.
“Okay, what the fuck?” The same Johnson responded.
The device reached a peak, and it offered a slight, organic shudder, like an insect burying itself into the dirt. When it did, the mosaic man screamed in pain as he shattered into thousands of crystalline pieces. Both teams ducked to avoid the shower of sharp points and edges.
The Johnsons convened in the middle of the room, their armored attacker apparently incapacitated.
“Where’s our target?” one said. “Where’s Bin Laden?”
The pain in Stacey’s head reached critical mass. He clutched the side of his face, digging his fingernails into his skin, begging for it to stop. Involuntary tears flowed from the corners of his eyes, dripping onto the floor.
“Over here,” one of the other Johnsons called out.
In the far corner of the room, near where Stacey had first seen the occupants in the dark, was a man who looked very similar to the photographs of Osama Bin Laden. He wore off-white pajamas, stained red from a cluster of bullet holes. His open eyes stared back at the operatives, sightless and empty.
“My God,” Captain Johnson said. “We finally got him.”
He turned to address the rest of the room. “Now can anyone tell me what in the hell we just saw?” His query yielded no response. “Have any of you, during any ops, come across . . . body modifications . . . like this?” More silence. “How would Al-Qaeda, or ISIL, or any related groups even afford this kind of technology?”
The other DEVGRU members looked uncomfortable. The CANSOFCOM team, on the other hand, stared at him, all five faces unblinking.
“Also, these aren’t Pakistanis,” continued the captain. “Hell, most of them aren’t even from this continent! Who on earth did we just have a firefight with?”
The five Canadians smiled together, not one of them out of synch. Adam, Ben, Xander, Daanis and Lincoln spoke as one, harmonizing in the same playful, sing-song voice. “They’re just insects, Captain. Insects trying to topple mountains.”
With that, the CANSOFCOM team produced long, black sticks resembling cattle prods and jabbed them into the four standing DEVGRU operatives. The men seized up as electricity forced its way into their bodies. The Canadian team withdrew their prods, and the American team collapsed to the floor in spasms.
Stacey put a hand to his mouth, holding his breath; the adrenaline produced by his fear was almost as intense as the burning behind his eyes. Slowly, as quietly as he could, he crawled backward, away from the CANSOFCOM team.
What happened to the people I knew? Where was Xander’s focus; his intensity? Why would Daanis sacrifice her drive for success by compromising a mission like this?
Ben had a wife and two children. Surely, he wouldn’t risk losing them. Adam, though playful, had never demonstrated such irresponsibility. Lincoln? Okay, Stacey could believe Lincoln was a secret traitor or psychopath. Nonetheless, their synergy disturbed him. The dialogue and body language seemed fake, as if five mannequins had come to life and tried to emulate human behavior.
“Ah, yes,” they turned in Stacey’s direction, their words in synch. “The replacement.”
Stacey used one shaking hand to unclasp the sidearm on his hip. His thumb chattered against the side of the weapon as he removed the safety. He curled up, knees to his chest; with both arms outstretched, the black pistol pointed forward.
“Hello, replacement. Mother is hungry.”
Footsteps drew closer, and Stacey’s finger rested on the trigger of his gun. Fear and pain caused such a quiver he couldn’t get a clear shot on any approaching target. He held his breath, pointed the jittery pistol at the incomer’s center mass, and pulled the trigger. The gun cracked and the muzzle flashed, revealing Lincoln standing there, an insane smile plastered on his face. Lincoln stumbled back, clutching his chest.
The flash from the muzzle sent Stacey’s headache spiraling out of control. He dropped his gun and collapsed to the floor, shuddering as if feverish. Lincoln, who seemed far too composed after being shot, leaned over and picked Stacey up, throwing him over his shoulder. Stacey’s head and arms drooped down Lincoln’s back, sweat forming on his skin and evaporating into steam before it dripped to the floor.
Adam, Ben, Daanis, and Xander stood in a parabola. Through the tears and orange light, Stacey could see the six DEVGRU operatives lined up. They were only unconscious, as far as he could tell, though stripped of all weapons. When Ben saw Stacey on Lincoln’s shoulder, he retrieved the cattle prod and held it out.
“The replacement makes seven for Mother,” he said.
His cheeks stretched into an insidious smile that went well beyond a normal grin. It was as if he was waiting for someone to take their picture, but he didn’t know when, so he was holding his happy face, just in case. The others shared the look, their eyes glimmering, glassy as doll’s eyes. Stacey almost detected a deranged glee glinting behind their pupils.
“Time to go to sleep, replacement,” they intonated at the same time, their different pitches and dialects merging into one amused, sinister voice.
Lincoln dropped Stacey to the floor. When he landed, a sharp pain went through his back, though it was nothing compared to the orange light stabbing his eyes. Stacey pressed his eyelids closed with all the force he could muster, willing the fire and the light and the agony to disappear.
Much to his amazement, it did.
Bomber’s Report
01.11: “Rescue”
Abbottabad, Pakistan
May 2, 2011-B
The orange light faded.
The force in his head receded.
The tremors throughout his body stilled.
An itching sensation replaced the pain in each of his eyes, focused into a small spot right in the front. The feeling made him uneasy, as if ants crawled across his pupils. Ben’s cattle prod crackled close to Stacey’s face, and he opened his eyes.
Everything was gone.
Instead of sand, walls, people, ceiling, and cattle prod, he saw stars. Billions and billions of orange stars. Though he found it hard-pressed to point out a difference between each orange speck of light, he could feel the difference.
A thick cloud of orange lights hovered in front of him, surrounding him. He saw the clouds everywhere, in any space described as empty. The lights constantly moved and expanded away, and he felt the motion. Tiny lights of carbon left his mouth as his exhaled; tiny lights of oxygen flowed into his body, entering his bloodstream.
An orange column of aluminum lights coalesced in front of him, working together with copper, carbon and hydrogen to produce
small, excited specks of electrons. Thin, orange strands connected the molecules like threads in a spider’s web. Surrounding the other end of the column was a mass of orange dots composed of hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, carbon, calcium, and phosphorus particles.
He squeezed and reopened his eyes. The orange starfield vanished, replaced with the scenery he already knew. The clouds of lights dispersed, and he returned to breathing invisible air. The column of orange dots and strands dissolved into the cattle prod; the mass around was Ben’s hand. The device stopped crackling, and the electricity at the end vanished. Ben looked curious and amused. The rest of the team mirrored his look.
Stacey rose to his feet in the middle of the silent room, uneasy and hesitant. Daanis stepped forward, though when she opened her mouth, all five of them said, in unison, “One of the Refined. Mother will be so proud.”
Ben reactivated his cattle prod and continued his advance.
Stacey pressed his eyelids together, willing the itchy, burning light to return. When he opened his eyes, the room once more became a mass of glowing orange particles. The four standing galaxies behind what he recognized as Ben reacted to him, as if they knew what he was seeing. Though his eyes moved to Ben’s cattle prod, he could feel them as they drew their knives and guns. The simple wavelengths of visible light no longer limited his vision. He knew everything around him simultaneously, and by identifying the nature of the orange particles in their pockets and behind their barriers, he knew what they would do before they even acted.
Ben struck out with the weapon, but Stacey sidestepped him, stumbling. He held out an arm to steady himself, but his hand didn’t connect with the wall or floor. Instead, his fingers clutched at millions of those tiny, orange strands holding together the gaseous particles in the air. To his amazement, they supported his weight, despite creating a pressure no more noticeable than a falling cobweb. Stacey pushed against the threads, and as they rebounded, he felt some of their warmth pass into the palm of his hand.
Instead of springing him back to his feet, the threads of the particles pushed that warmth through his body, like a shiver. As he left contact with them, his stomach dropped from the sensation of sudden g-force, as if he was dropping from an airplane. Stacey propelled across the room, knocking Ben and Daanis to the ground in the process. He reached out with both hands to call upon the orange threads all around him, clutching at individual ones with enough finesse to slow his propulsion without sending him flying back in the other direction. Still, he reached the far wall in less than a second, and his right shoulder stung as it struck the surface with a low thunk.
Stacey blinked to change his vision, surveying the three CANOFSCOM operatives still standing. As he did, he noticed that both of his hands were hot; of more concern to him, though, was the smoke rising from his fingertips.
He had apparently moved across the room at a speed they couldn’t track, because those still on their feet were looking in the direction he had come from, rather than at him. Stacey decided to take advantage of the situation, placing his hand in the center of Lincoln’s back.
I may not see them, but I know they’re there. What happens when they break?
Stacey closed his eyes and willed his hands to touch the orange strands connecting the dots of carbon in the skin of Lincoln’s back. He pressed forward, hard, both with his arm and with his mind, breaking apart the strands linking his starfield together and releasing the energy held there. The space in Lincoln’s back under Stacey’s hand glowed bright orange for a fraction of a second.
Then, it exploded.
A rapid-fire series of popping noises released so close to each other they couldn’t be distinguished as a singular sound, like a sheet of bubble-wrap bursting all at once. Heat and smoke ejected from the middle of Lincoln’s back, and the large man was hurled across the room like a ten-ton marionette. He slammed face-first into the wall where Stacey had just stood and collapsed to the floor, revealing a smoking crater in his back, as large and as deep as if he had been struck by a cannonball.
Ben and Daanis were already crawling to their feet to rejoin Adam and Xander, even as Lincoln flew over their heads. The four remaining CANSOFCOM operatives jerked to look at Stacey.
“Oh, this one will make Mother very happy,” they said with glee.
Stacey’s heart pounded in his chest. “Stay back!” He yelled, holding a hand up in an attempt to bluff them.
Adam and Xander raised their rifles, training the weapons on Stacey’s chest. “No, we don’t think so.”
Ben and Daanis retrieved their machine guns as well, and all four took a menacing step in Stacey’s direction.
Creaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaak . . .
Everyone froze.
Stacey’s arm tremored with fright. The four cocked their heads in a gesture of curiosity, all still in sync. Xander broke away from the other three toward an adjoining hallway from where the noise originated. The others remained very still. Waiting.
Silence.
“Wha—“
Xander flew, airborne, past the entrance of the hallway and out of sight. There was a spectacular crashing sound as he presumably struck another wall. Ben and Adam turned to aim their rifles at the hallway.
Silence again. “Oh my.”
Adam was looking at Ben, suddenly suspended in an egg-shaped field of clear liquid. Ben scrambled in the fluid, trying to swim to the edge, but some force kept pulling him back to the center.
A high-pitched whining sound echoed down the dark hallway, its mechanical noise hypnotic in its unwavering consistency. A silhouette filled the doorway, outlined by arcs of crackling blue energy. It stepped forward, into the light.
A brown-skinned woman, with broad shoulders and a curvy, muscular build, wore some kind of padded, navy-blue armor along her body. A thick belt made of some kind of silver metal accented the suit, but it sported a disc where the buckle would be, encircled by a notched dial. The disc’s diameter was similar to that of a baseball, and something resembling fan blades spun in the center at a speed too high to see with clarity.
Reaching above and below the belt, embedded in the body armor, was a series of metallic, copper lines. They spread out from the woman’s waist to create a sharp design all across her body, the pattern similar to the lines on a microchip. Some of those lines reached down the woman’s arms and stopped at the copper-studded knuckles of her fingerless gloves. As Stacey watched, the fan on her belt produced arcs of electricity that raced along those copper circuits up to her arms, causing the knuckles to glow a bright blue.
The woman surveyed the scene, her expression daring them to make a move against her. She had a button nose and dark, frizzy hair. If it were lying flat, it would have been neck-length, but for her, it splayed up and out in every direction, creating a curly mess. Her eyes were hidden behind thick, circular goggles with mirrored lenses, reminiscent of those used for welding.
As Ben continued to struggle for air, Daanis and Adam opened fire on the woman. The bullets bounced away from her body, each one causing blue electrical sparks to shed away from her in the places they struck.
The woman seemed unfazed, even a little bored, and they redirected their gunfire toward her face. She simply raised a hand, as if shielding herself from the sun, placing her forearm between her eyes and their bullets.
The gunfire ceased, the two having emptied their weapons. They ejected their magazines, hurrying to retrieve new ones.
The woman, no worse for wear, said, “It was a nice try.” Her voice was harsh and inhuman, as if she were speaking through some kind of voice-changing device. The tone, though, was distinctly American.
She dropped to one knee and lowered her head, planting both palms flat on the floor. Behind her, two people stood side-by-side: A tall figure in white and an amorphous phantom in black.
The figure in white already had its left arm raised in the direction of Ben’s water-egg prison, as if to hold it in place. Daanis pulled her sidearm, and th
e figure gestured toward her with its free hand. A perfect sphere of clear liquid, the rough size of a bowling ball, shimmered into existence and wisped toward Daanis. It connected with her chest and splattered into droplets, though the force of the liquid projectile launched her through the open door of the house and back into the compound’s courtyard.
Stacey backed against the nearest wall, trying to stay out of the way of this unconventional firefight.
The phantom in black raised its arms to produce something dark and glittering. Before Stacey fully registered the scene, machine-gun fire spat from the phantom’s weapons toward Adam. The bullets pattered across Adam’s torso, mostly absorbed by his body armor, before penetrating his neck and face in multiple areas. Blood burst from the back of his head, and he fell to the floor.
Stacey tried to run, to hide, but he couldn’t make his legs move. The spectacles that had appeared before him held him captive.
Hot lead lit the hallway, coming from the direction where Xander had been catapulted. The phantom lifted its cape—or wing—or whatever it was that it wore. In any case, the bullets lost their momentum as they struck the makeshift shield. The figure in white held up its right arm, creating a flat, shimmering disc of water that spanned the hallway. Xander’s gunfire couldn’t penetrate it, either.
The woman in blue strode forward into the room, toward Ben, ignoring the new assault. She looked back at the other two newcomers. “Drop it,” she said, her voice warbling electronically.
The egg of water holding Ben collapsed into a puddle, splashing across the floor. Ben fell with the water, but the woman caught him by the neck with one hand.
“Two things, and I’ll be brief,” she said, raising her voice above the gunfire in the background. “One, what exactly is the hotel?” Ben smiled, water leaking from his mouth. “Two, where is the center hub for the targeting facilities?”
