by E. R. Torre
He was soon drawn to a small warehouse at the far end of the base. Within, he sensed the presence of nano-probes.
Vulcan approached the building carefully, listening for any sounds and looking for any movement coming from within.
When he reached its entrance, he stopped.
The nano-probes within the warehouse were dying. Quickly.
Wisps of smoke rose from the entry door’s cracks and Elias Vulcan ran. He jumped behind a stack of metal crates just as an explosive burst coming from within the warehouse violently knocked them, and Vulcan, back.
An alarm immediately blared.
Vulcan got to his feet and ran to the heavy metal door. He laid his hand flat against it and pressed. Had the flesh over his hand belonged to an ordinary human, he would have suffered severe burns.
The door collapsed and Vulcan stepped into the building.
Despite a relentless heat, Vulcan moved forward. The flesh covering his body quickly turned red and his new clothing let out wisps of smoke.
Vulcan ignored this and methodically examined the remains of workbenches, tables, lockers, and cabinets. A group of eight incendiary devices were set along the warehouse floor and detonated. Whoever ignited them hoped to wipe the warehouse clean of all evidence of the nano-probe infected soldiers.
They hadn’t quite completed the job.
Vulcan sensed nano-probes in the charred remains of beds along the warehouse’s north side. These beds were small and likely where the nano-probe enhanced child soldiers slept before being deployed.
Vulcan was drawn to one of the beds and found the dying nano-probes on it very familiar. They belonged to the female child soldier he spotted in the desert.
The child soldier ejected these nano-probes from her body and, despite being near terminal, the machines repeated their commands to torch Sada-bir over and over again.
Vulcan laid his hand on the charred bed. The few remaining nano-probes were absorbed into his hand.
Vulcan closed his eyes.
Through the nano-probes he learned the story of their creation.
9
Vulcan’s mind drifted inside the dying nano-probes’s memory banks.
He lived through their stored memories and found himself in a large basement in the Big City. He saw unfamiliar faces –scientists and nurses– working in dingy quarters while creating these micro-machines.
There was one face Vulcan saw over and over again, a woman in her late thirties or early forties who, unlike all the others, hid in the shadows and stayed away from everyone.
Vulcan felt intense memories coming from her, of pain and suffering and…
Curious, Vulcan approached her. He needed to learn more about her. He needed—
The basement was gone.
The same woman, a few years younger, was bought into a makeshift medical tent. She was covered in a bloody blanket, her body shaking from pain. It was ravaged by…
Explosives?
Vulcan looked closer. She was missing her right arm and legs. Her face was burned and her eyes gone. She was placed on the operating table while her blood stained everything around her. Doctors and nurses were quickly at her side and frantically worked to save her.
The equipment they used on her was old, dating from around the time Vulcan left Earth.
“She’s slipping away!” one of the Doctors said.
The injured woman spoke.
“Sam… Samantha…?”
“She’s fine,” another Doctor said. “She’ll see you very soon.”
It was a lie meant to calm her. It did not.
“No… she’s… she’s gone…” the woman said.
“She’s fine.”
“No,” the woman insisted. “Don’t lie to me. She’s… she’s dead.”
A Doctor eyed her staff and motioned to them. A nurse gripped the woman’s left arm and administered an injection. The injured woman relaxed.
With the patient sedated, the Doctors focused on saving her. As they did, seven more patients were brought into the tent. All had serious, though none as grisly, injuries.
“What do we have?” another Doctor asked.
“Roberts has a laceration on his lower left leg. Eleonore has multiple broken bones. Edwards—”
“Hang on,” the Doctor said. “Roberts is bleeding out. Get me a clamp and—”
“What about her?” a male voice asked.
A man stood in the shadows of the medi-bay. He was dressed in military fatigues and, like the others brought in, his clothing was a charred mess and his face covered in soot.
“We can’t save them all,” the Doctor said. “We have to choose—”
“I understand,” the man said. He peeled back what was left of his jacket sleeve. “Hook me up to her. I’ll give her blood.”
“Sir, with all due respect, she requires much more than just—”
“Do as I say. Quickly. So you can attend to the others.”
The Doctor nodded to the nurse.
The nurse had the man lie on a cot next to the severely injured woman and cleaned his arm before sticking a needle in a vein. His blood flowed through a clear plastic tube and was pumped into the severely injured woman.
“I admire what you’re doing, General,” the nurse told the man.
“Please take care of the others,” the General said.
He leaned back in the cot and closed his eyes.
The images before Vulcan froze as if he were inside a three dimensional photograph.
Vulcan approached the man giving blood. He recognized him instantly, of course, and knew the blood offered to the female soldier could indeed save her.
“What is she to you, David?” Vulcan asked.
This was where it began.
This was where David Spradlin first had the idea of giving of himself –of his nano-probes– to others. This would eventually lead to the soldier he saw in the Arabian Desert, the one who rejected the very similar nano-probes which were meant to control her.
10
“Hey!”
The voice came from the warehouse entrance and shattered Elias Vulcan’s nano-probe induced visions.
A pair of soldiers tried entering but the heat kept them at the warehouse door. They aimed their rifles at Vulcan.
“What in Hades did you do?” one of them demanded.
“Get your ass over here or we fire!” the other barked.
Elias Vulcan straightened up. He looked away from the soldiers and at the other end of the warehouse.
With an incredible burst of speed, he ran.
The soldiers fired. Their bullets landed dangerously close to Vulcan but none hit.
Vulcan burst through the charred remains of the door on the other side of the building and emerged into the desert night.
The alarms continued blaring while soldiers ran from all directions to the warehouse and higher ranking officers called out orders.
Elias Vulcan made his way to the base’s perimeter and stopped before its electrified fence. The last time he leaped over it, his actions were precise and carefully calculated. At this moment he didn’t have the luxury of time to make such calculations.
He took several steps back while vehicles converged near him.
Elias Vulcan moved forward, running faster and faster, until he took a small leap followed by a second. His foot slipped in the sand just before taking his final jump.
While in the air, he knew he wouldn’t clear the fence.
At the apex of his leap Vulcan was forced to skip off the top of the electric fence. The moment his boot touched the charged wire, an arc of electricity erupted throughout his body.
Elias Vulcan fell forward and landed hard just outside the base.
He took a moment to shake off the charge then looked down at his legs. The boot that touched the fence was rendered a smoky, molten mess.
Vulcan forced himself up.
He would recover, but only if he got away.
Military vehicles, each carrying
between four and six soldiers, exited the base and moved to where the intruder landed.
Their bright flashlights illuminated the sands and they soon found the spot where the intruder landed. They also saw the trail he left.
The vehicles’ engines revved. The soldiers drove after their prey.
Vulcan moved as quickly as he could.
He stopped near an outcrop of rocks. His limbs were stiff and the leg which took the brunt of the shock did not move as it should. Worse, the sounds of the approaching vehicles grew louder and louder.
Vulcan frowned.
Escape was no longer possible.
“Do you see him?” a soldier yelled.
“No!” another responded.
They reached the rocks and their vehicles slowed and stopped.
“Look!” a third said.
Lights caught the still form of Vulcan pressed against the rocks.
“There’s nowhere to go,” the commanding officer said. “Come out with your hands up.”
Vulcan was still for a moment before he moved.
“Easy,” the commanding officer said.
Vulcan offered the soldiers a smile.
“You’re much too polite,” he said. Abruptly, his hands reached for something at his side.
The soldiers, every single one of them, opened fire. Their bullets ripped through Elias Vulcan’s body and he fell to the ground.
“Stay where you are,” the commanding officer ordered.
He walked to Vulcan’s body while training his flashlight on it.
Very cautiously, he kicked the body and stepped back.
He then leaned in close and felt for a pulse. Satisfied the man was dead, the commanding officer straightened up and slid his weapon back into its holster.
“Wrap him up and take him back to the base,” he ordered.
11
They took the body to the medical bay and laid it on an autopsy table.
The coroner removed Vulcan’s charred clothing and examined his many wounds. His lower left leg was charred almost completely black and there were over a dozen bullet holes in his chest and back. The rest of his skin was very red.
“What a mess,” the coroner said.
The commanding officer motioned for the other soldiers to leave. When they were gone, the coroner said:
“What is it you want to know? Cause of death?”
The commanding officer was in no mood for jokes.
“Find out who he is and if he’s got anything on or in him,” the commanding officer said.
“You mean other than bullets?”
“Look for subdermal patches or biometric additions. If there are any, we need to trace them back to the Corporation or Corporations that sent him to spy on us.”
“He’s a spy?”
“We’re in the lungs of hell, Doctor. What else would he be doing here?”
“I don’t know,” the coroner admitted. “But the Corporations were the ones who sent us in the first place. You know, killing for fun and profit. Their profit. Why would they send someone to spy on us if we’ve already done what they asked?”
“You know how the suits are, especially when you’re dealing with a multi-corporate affair like this one,” the commanding officer said. “There’s always someone sniffing up his good buddy’s asshole. If this man is an Independent, I want to know who he was and who hired him. I want to know as soon as possible.”
“What if he’s an Independent sent by our own sponsors to make sure we weren’t fucking things up? You don’t think they might get a little angry that we killed him?”
The commanding officer didn’t respond and the coroner nodded.
“You already considered this,” he said.
“If he was brought in by them, fuck yeah they’ll be angry,” the commanding officer said. “Hopefully he was sent by one of the lesser Corporations looking to get a leg up on… who in Hades knows. If that’s the case, we don’t need to worry about any fallout. The big boys will take care of his disappearance for us.”
“And if one of the bigger sponsors sent him?”
“Then we consider other actions.”
“Such as?”
“Making him disappear. Luckily for us we happen to be in the middle of nowhere on the still-cool side of a radioactive shit storm. There are thousands of places to dump a body where it’ll never be found, provided you remove any chips he’s got inside him and provided they’re not top of the line recorders that have already sent his final minutes to his bosses.”
“Either way, you won’t be wanting a detailed official record.”
“Maybe we don’t need any record at all.”
“What about your soldiers? What if they talk?”
“I’ll brief them in a moment. I’ll say we stopped an Arabian fanatic from torching the base in a failed suicide bomb attempt. Given all the shit going down today, if there’s any official note at all, that’s it.”
“I never took you to be so mercenary.”
“Doctor, the war’s over and I’m not about to lose my pension because some Corporate backstabber decided to take a closer look at their goods. How about you?”
The coroner nodded.
“I’ll clean the body and make sure any markers he’s got are gone.”
“Good,” the commanding officer said. “Call me when you’re done.”
Once the commanding officer left, the coroner approached a metal locker.
He opened it and, from within, took out a box. He laid the box on a table and sorted through his tools. He grabbed a tray and set a bone saw, scalpels, scissors, rib cutters, forceps, and a skull chisel on it.
He then took the tray back to the table and set it on a stand. He reached for and put on his lab coat and gloves before putting on a pair of safety glasses. Finally, he grabbed one of the scalpels, faced the corpse…
…and nearly fainted when he found the deceased male sitting on the metal table.
The corpse’s brilliant blue eyes were upon the coroner and his smile revealed too-perfect teeth.
“Sorry to startle you,” the corpse said before jumping off the table.
He walked around the coroner.
“Have you any extra clothing?” he asked. “It just wouldn’t look right walking out of here nude.”
The coroner tried to talk but words would not leave his mouth. Elias Vulcan searched through cabinets until he found one filled with dark green scrubs.
“This should do it,” he said.
Elias Vulcan put on one of the scrubs and took a moment to look at his reflection on a metallic cabinet. The clothing was a little small but acceptable. Far worse was his burnt skin and charred hair.
He patted the coroner on his back and said “Take care, Doctor” before walking out of the medical bay.
Outside, Elias Vulcan surveyed the base and considered his next move.
His face was known to too many people.
“Time for a change,” he muttered.
As he walked in the shadows between buildings that change occurred. Elias Vulcan’s body shrunk down a few inches while his face morphed. Female breasts appeared and filled the scrubs. His face became softer, feminine. His charred hair grew until it was shoulder length. The burnt skin on his face, likewise, started healing.
In the time it took to walk between those buildings, the very male Elias Vulcan became a woman.
The Coroner ran out of his station screaming for security and yelling incoherently about a risen corpse. He ran past the now female Vulcan.
She ignored him, focusing instead on the warehouse he was discovered in. Soldiers surrounded the structure, no doubt attempting to figure out the how’s and why’s of its torching.
There were too many people around for him –her!– to get in and investigate so Vulcan decided it was time to leave the base. She made her way between tents and buildings while groups of well-armed security officers ran past her. Some stopped for a moment but, upon getting a good look at her, realized she wasn’t the
one they were after.
At a dark, quiet corner of the military facility and away from the groups of soldiers still hunting the male Vulcan, she summoned her spacecraft. She was in no mood to try the high jump over the electrified fence a third time.
The ship, in full camouflage mode and with her engine noise dampened, landed near her and she quickly entered it.
In seconds the ship was in the air and sailing beyond the speed of sound.
Moments later it was over the Earth’s oceans and on her way to the Big Cities that lay on the other continent.
12
Vulcan’s ship skimmed the rust colored waters while approaching the Big City.
Sophisticated security waves were detected coming from the many buildings ahead so she used an incoming thunder storm to further disguise her ship’s arrival. While rain pounded against the vessel’s body, she banked over and between a series of buildings while searching for one which met her needs.
It didn’t take long to find.
The Caligari Building was a fifty six story structure that once belonged to the Caligari Corporation. Caligari was bought out by Octi Corp and almost all its staff was immediately laid off. Since then, this large and modern building was sealed and abandoned while future use was determined.
That happened over two years ago.
Vulcan landed her ship on the building’s roof. It disappeared among the many condensers, water storage tanks, and general clutter filling that area.
She shut down all equipment wither her craft except for its safety features and exited.
Vulcan then walked to the building’s edge and gazed at the city.
Shining lights glittered through the thunderstorm. The sharp edges and metallic lines spoke of mankind’s progress, technology, failures, and successes.
Vulcan shook her head.
In a little more than twenty years and upon the arrival of her alien masters, it would all be gone.
Vulcan walked to a door leading to a stair well. It was locked and protected with a sophisticated security system.
