Semper Fi

by Evan Currie

“Tess,” He said softly. “playing with the Marine when he was alone, that’s fine, but if they’ve moved whoever this is in, then there are likely more coming.”

  She snapped her head around to glare at him, “then I’ll kill them too. My city. MINE.”

  “Oh boy,” Malcolm winced.

  Pitr couldn’t help but agree. Tessa had always been single minded, it was one of her defining traits, but this was bordering on… no, he would be honest with himself at least, this was a true psychosis.

  He just had no idea how to get her to back down, even if only for a little while.

  “Malcolm, find me more… volunteers,” Tessa ordered coldly.

  Hopefully I figure it out before she gets us killed.

  *****

  Hale was on his feet, getting his wind back to the point he could talk. He then tapped his earpiece, “Pierson.”

  “Hale,” The familiar voice returned.

  “thanks for the backup,” He said.

  “My pleasure… actually, hers from what I can see. Is she always that knife happy?” pierson asked, audibly wincing at something she saw on screen.

  Hale was carefully not paying too much attention to Lana’s actions. He knew what she was like when you pushed her far enough to resort to violence.

  “Yeah, probably why she became a corpsmen,” He said honestly. “Lana always… inspired us not to get shot, cause if we did we knew she’d be coming to, ahem, see to the injury.”

  “Yeah, I’d learn to dodge bullets,” Pierson confirmed with feeling.

  Hale snorted, barely keeping from laughing outright as the tension of the confrontation began to flood out of him. He could feel his hand starting to shake, but clamped down on the nerves with a vicious will.

  “We have information,” Pierson said, “Something happened during the fight, you remember the flashbang?”

  Hale gritted his teeth.

  A cop had died because of that damned thing.

  “I remember. Did you see who threw it?”

  “No,” Pierson said, “but we saw what it came through.”

  A chill went down his spine, and Hale straightened up to the surprise of those around him. “What do you mean, what it came through?”

  “I wouldn’t believe it if we didn’t have it on live video,” She said, “but it looks like some sort of portal opened up right behind your head in the middle of the fight and someone tossed the grenade through it.”

  Hale frowned, eyes sweeping the area, “Someone would have to have been able to see me to do that.”

  “Probably, though I’m starting to think there are a lot more to these abilities we’re seeing than we’ve documented so far,” Pierson sighed.

  Hale nodded absently, noting in his peripheral vision that Lana was almost through with the now completely disorganized mob. Then that thought brought him up short.

  “They’re not working together anymore,” He said out of the blue.

  “What?”

  “The mob, they’re acting like… a mob.” He said, “They didn’t do that with me. They moved like one person, like someone with a plan.”

  Like someone was… Hale paused, eyes drawn upwards.

  “Rooftops.”

  Pierson was confused, “What? I don’t understand.”

  “Scan the rooftops,” Hale said, “Find me observers on overwatch.”

  “On it.”

  *****

  USSOCOM Bunker, Virginia

  Pierson leaned over the CIA desk, where the direct feed from the Predator was running through. “Do we have anyone on the rooftops around the scene.”

  “A few, yeah,” The Langley man confirmed. “Several buildings with line of sight to the fight had people gathered, probably both for safety and to spectate. We even have video feeds from some of them, mostly bad cellphone clips thought.”

  “Eliminate those rooftops for now,” Pierson said, “Show me the ones we don’t have feeds from.”

  “Yes Ma’am. That’s leaves three.” He said, pointing to the highlighted buildings on the screen.

  “Too many on that one,” Pierson said, pointing to the one in question.

  “Two then.”

  “Get me the addresses,” Pierson said, bringing her phone up to her head again. “Hale, we have two likely possibilities for you to check. Addresses to follow.”

  *****

  Berlin

  Lana felt the group move up behind her more than anything else, and was preparing to turn around and explain in very clear terms how she felt about being snuck up on when a crack of a sonic boom shook her and three bodies hit the ground.

  “I didn’t need the help,” She said wryly, turning around.

  “I noticed,” Alex grinned at her. “Thanks for that, by the way.”

  She dropped to one knee, using the pant legs of one of the mob to clean off her knife, then rose back to her feet as she slid it back into the sheathe. “Always have your back, Cap. Even when you’re being an idiot about things. I swear, why’d you treat these assholes with kid gloves like that?”

  “In my defense, they weren’t attacking kids at the time,” He said lightly.

  “No, they were just trying to blast you.” She retorted sarcastically.

  “I can take it.”

  “Whether you can or not isn’t the point. That was evidence of intent, you dumb bastard,” Lana reached out to poke him in the chest. “You’re still playing games. This isn’t a damn game.”

  “No, it’s a mission. Keep that,” He jerked a thump upward, “focused on me as long as I can. These idiots weren’t a threat to me, but they put on a nice show.”

  Lana gritted her teeth, “those kids might not agree.”

  Hale nodded, “Yeah. They might not.”

  “Where the hell did a bunch of kids come from, this late in the evening, in the middle of a city wide riot anyway?” Lana asked unhappily.

  “Cops are still working on that, I asked. All the busses were locked down hours ago, though, so that one was stolen. No one knows where the kids themselves came from yet, but they’re looking into it,” Hale said, “in the meantime, we have an oddity.”

  Lana snorted, stepping over a painfully writhing body as she made her way to his side.

  “What about this shit isn’t an oddity?” She asked.

  “I suppose you have me there,” Hale told her with a quirk of his lips, “but a new… power, I suppose, was recorded during the fight. Someone beaned me in the back of the head with a flashbang, by throwing it through a portal.”

  Lana raised her eyebrow, “that’s new.”

  “Yeah.” Hale glanced up, but quickly and then back down again. “Predator on overwatch found two possible buildings with small groups observing the fighting. I’m thinking maybe the grenade chucker and this mob here are linked.”

  “Oh yeah?” Lana showed teeth, “How do you figure?”

  “They were behaving strangely before you showed up, moving as one, like they had a plan, or someone directing them.”

  Lana paused, looking down, scanning the bodies around her. “Not seeing any comm gear, boss.”

  “I’m thinking a different sort of direction.”

  It didn’t take long for Lana to click to what he was implying, but she was still surprised when she worked it out.

  “Some kind of… what? Mind control?” Lana asked skeptically, “We’ve not seen anything like that so far.”

  “Would we have?” Hale asked her, almost making idle conversation. “Think about it, the first things we’ve seen were all the physically spectacular stuff, but we know that isn’t all the changes did, right?”

  Lana felt herself flush slightly as he pointedly made that comment in her direction.

  While she’d been physically boosted by the changes, her real shift in abilities had nothing to do with strength or speed.

  “Alright, you have a point,” She admitted after a moment. “You think there’s mind controllers out there?”

  “Maybe, maybe something els
e. What I think is that the changes are more far reaching than we thought. No one had any idea that anything like that portal was possible, until it was caught on video just a few minutes ago,” Hale said. “Now, I’m going to pop up and scan those two buildings from above. Make sure none of these idiots die, just in case they weren’t acting on their own alright?”

  Lana nodded, then grimaced as she looked around at the mess she’d made.

  “Oh. Oops?” She said.

  Hale snorted, “They were still trying to off a bunch of kids, I don’t care if they were controlled. It’s sad, if they were innocent, but battlefield rules.”

  She sighed and nodded, “None of them are in danger of dying. I wasn’t interested in making it that easy on them, but I suppose I can heal them up a bit, just in case.”

  “You do that, I’ll check in shortly,” Hale told her before he lifted off into the air.

  Damn.

  Lana really hoped she hadn’t just sliced up a bunch of innocent bystanders, but like the boss said… battlefield rules. First deal with the threat, then worry about the details.

  Still…

  Damn.

  ******

  Chapter 9

  Berlin

  Hale continued up a couple hundred feet over the rooftops, keeping himself from being silhouetted by the moon, and scanned the two target buildings quickly.

  People were milling about on one, not paying much attention below now that the fighting was over. The other, however…

  He tapped his earpiece.

  “Pierson here, what is it?”

  “There’s no one on one of the target buildings,” He said, “Can you check when they left.”

  “Roger, hold on and we’ll run the footage back.”

  Hale nodded, though he knew she couldn’t see him, and slowly turned around to scan the city while he waited. There were still fires burning in multiple points, and sirens could be heard from all directions. Fighting, the occasional sounds of gunfire…

  All in all, it was a bad night to be in Berlin, he supposed.

  “Hale. We’ve got them leaving the rooftop, shortly after we talked.”

  Something in the way she said that told him that they had their targets.

  “I’m assuming they didn’t take the stairs?”

  “Negative. Opened up a larger version of that portal and walked right through.”

  Hale blew out an annoyed breath.

  “Well, shit.” He didn’t really know what else to say. He thought about it, wondering if he were right. Then realized something, “Start observing the riots. Look for abnormal behavior.”

  “Other than, you know, rioting you mean?”

  “I mean look for any signs of the rioters suddenly being puppeted. Like someone is directing them, giving them orders,” He said, “They moved way too fluidly, and too much in sync for rioters. Get people to analyze the actions of the other rioters, then tell me which ones aren’t acting like rioters.”

  There was a silence.

  “Fuck.” Pierson said, “You’re serious?”

  “Deadly.”

  “Alright, I need to make calls. If you’re right, this changes everything.”

  “No, this changes nothing,” Hale corrected. “It just means we need to be more careful than we thought. We should have been doing that anyway.”

  *****

  Tessa stepped out of the tear onto the rooftop, rolling her head slightly to stretch out the muscles of her neck.

  “It’s been a fascinating night,” She crooned, pleased with herself despite everything.

  Oh, it would have been nicer to eliminate the Marine, that was true, but she’d humbled him quite nicely if she did say so herself. On his knees while the bus load of kids were blown up because he failed to protect them, that was utterly delicious.

  She pulled out her phone, smiling as she thumbed into the browser and found the news stream.

  “Breaking news, in Berlin an attempt to slaughter schoolchildren was foiled by the determined actions of German police and the super human known publicly as the Marine. Incredible video shows men and women of the German police throwing themselves into deadly fire while the Marine blocks as much as he can. Meanwhile, other officers cut into the bus from the back side in order to free the children who had been…”

  Tessa’s smiled became a clenched jaw snarl as her fist tightened around the phone until the device cracked audibly in protest.

  “Jesus, Tessa,” Pitr said, noticing her sudden shift in tension. “What the hell is wrong with you.”

  “He was supposed to fail.”

  “What?”

  “He was SUPPOSED to FAIL,” She repeated herself, seething visibly.

  “Tessa, what the hell are you talking about!?”

  “They got the damn kids out of the bus!” She snapped, throwing her phone at him, striking Pitr in the chest.

  He fumbled, barely catching the device, and flipped it over to see the video.

  “Huh. Ok. So?”

  “So? Are you naturally this stupid, or do you practice,” Tessa asked savagely. “He was supposed to be humbled. Beaten. PUNISHED for coming into my CITY!”

  She snarled, spinning around and throwing her arms out, “He’s not supposed to be more popular than every because he saved a bunch of sniveling little brats!”

  Pitr sighed, knowing there was nothing he could do to break Tessa out of her anger at this point. She’d always been a little off, he knew that, but since that night, well she’d become… more.

  More everything, the things he loved about her and the things he detested.

  Pitr supposed all of them had become more.

  He grimaced, he didn’t want to think about that night. The nightmares still chased him night after night, and he knew they did the same to Tessa. None of them could remember more than flashes of that night, being held helplessly amongst dozens of others, just floating there with people and… parts of people bumping into each other.

  He shuddered, forcing his thoughts away from that train. It went to places he didn’t want to follow just then.

  “We fought him and he doesn’t even know we were there,” He said instead. “Tessa, we did humble him. The world just isn’t aware of it, which is a pity, but it doesn’t take from the fact that the ‘famous’ Marine came off second best to us when we weren’t even trying particularly hard.”

  Tessa calmed at that, nodding, “I suppose you’re right.”

  She pouted cutely, “but I wanted to see him fall!”

  And hello wild emotional shifts, Pitr thought with a roll of his eyes as he looped an around around Tessa’s lower back and pulled her in close, tilting her head up with a finger under the jaw.

  “Call it a prelude to a fall,” He told her with a smile before leaning down and catching her lips with his. “The city is ours for the taking, fraulein. Then the country, Europe, and the world. On our schedule, and we just proved that the flashy, showy, abilities are not the most powerful.”

  She pouted some more, before her lips twisted into a smirk and she kissed him back.

  “You always know just what to say.”

  *****

  Hale checked his watch as he landed beside Lana, surprised but not shocked at how little time had passed since the events in Berlin kicked off. He was intimately familiar with how stress could compress one’s perception of time, had in fact even contributed to a few studies on the subject in the past and written one of his own that had a small but positive reception through the peer reviewed periodical he sent it to.

  Apparently that was something that only got more exaggerated when you could literally alter your perception of time.

  “Nothing?” Lana asked him as she checked out one of the men she’d laid out.

  “Gone,” He said, “Predator caught them leaving by portal a few minutes ago.”

  “You think they were actually controlling people?” She asked, pensively.

  “Yeah,” He nodded, “don’t have evidence to prove i
t, but it makes sense to me.”

  “Damn.”

  Hale snorted, “Hey. You took them down, hard, exactly like you should have. Like I would have if I’d been able to once they escalated the fight to including civilians. Like I should have when they were willing to open fire on cops and me. You did what had to be done, I fucked up.”

  “Did you?” She asked, grimacing. “If they were being controlled…”

  “Makes no difference. Sure, if I’d known they were being controlled, then maybe I could be excused for going light on them while looking for the puppeteer. But I didn’t. And neither did you. You acted in the right, Lana.” Hale sighed. “I’m beginning to suspect that the change messed with my head more than I thought. It’s like I can’t even think straight anymore, sometimes I wonder if I’m still… me.”

  Lana smiled, “Captain, I think the problem is that you’re more you, and you’ve not yet figured out how to deal with that.”

  He shot her a quizzical glance, but said nothing as she continued.

  “You’re a talker, Cap, like we always said. It’s who you are, at your core. But you’re aggressive too, otherwise you wouldn’t have been a good Marine. Now you’re more aggressive, and more of a talker, and you’re aware of both… and you keep trying to compensate for one or the other, and it’s making you a little crazy, Cap.”

  “Gee thanks,” He said dryly.

  Lana shrugged, smiling impishly, “Don’t blame me if you can’t take the truth. Just be yourself, Cap, keep using your best judgement. That’s all any of us can do.”

  Hale rolled his eyes, “That sounds familiar.”

  “A big dumb Jarhead once told me that after a particularly tough patrol.”

  “Doesn’t sound so dumb to me,” Hale chuckled.

  “He has his moments.”

  Hale nodded, “Well let’s see if we can make one of those moments for ourself tonight. You briefed?”

  “On the big boy upstairs,” Lana asked rhetorically, “that’s an affirmative, Cap. I’ve got these idiots stable. They’ll heal, with some nasty scars to tell the story of tonight, but I kept from doing anything that would affect them long term.”

  “Generous, considering.”

  “Not really,” Lana said simply and clearly, “I wasn’t planning on healing them up quite as well as I did. The original plan would have left them all with… let’s say selective nerve damage.”