July 2076
Chicago, Central Territory
United States of America
Alex ‘Scope’ Samuelson peered through the smoke and dust. He scanned the cratered streets of Chicago, his opponent hidden out amongst the destruction. The predawn light of summer crept through the city, penetrating the wreckage of the battle just waged. Broken glass twinkled as stray rays of sunlight struck their jagged edges, setting off a kaleidoscope of colors upon the charred walls of ruined buildings that had once held schools and businesses. All that remained inside were broken furniture and shattered lives.
Alex let his vision drop from the scope of his rifle. He absorbed the sights of the destroyed downtown district, seeking any sign of movement in an otherwise empty city of twisted steel and smoking ruin. Nothing moved, save for a few plastic bags that tumbled through the deserted streets. Smoke coiled high into the sky from hundreds of fires that burned, unchecked, across the ruination that had been a thriving metropolis only hours before. An occasional burst of gunfire or the impact of a stray mortar had replaced the almost constant noise of the once bustling city.
A movement at the corner of his vision caused Alex to duck, flattening his body out along the concrete floor that made up his firing position. The round intended for his upper torso blasted a hunk of cement out of a support pillar behind him. A second round quickly followed the first, aimed lower in anticipation of his movement. Unfortunately for the other shooter, Alex had picked his spot for just that reason. The second round slammed into a section of bulletproof, plexiglass paneling that had been dislodged from a penthouse suite further up the building. Alex moved without thinking, sliding his entire body back into the recesses of the building. He pulled in his rifle and muttered a quick prayer to any deity in earshot.
“That was a good shot, Gemini, but you should always survey your surroundings before committing to the target,” he said to himself. “Now I know where you are.”
He was vaguely aware that both rounds had been non-lethal projectiles, designed to incapacitate him rather than kill him. Now he knew they wanted to capture him, not eliminate him.
Alex stood, shouldered his rifle, and carefully positioned his holographic image projector behind where he had been positioned at the edge of the building. He punched a command into the communications screen sewn into his combat jacket and set a one minute timer. Then he set off down the stairs, moving quickly and quietly to his secondary firing position. The building had been cleared out even before fighting broke out in the city, the firm in charge of construction having gone bankrupt months before. The top five floors had held the luxury apartments whose bullet proof glass he had to thank for being unscathed and not in enemy hands. The bottom twenty floors were just the skeleton of the building, unfinished when the war had arrived in the downtown district. Alex’s first firing position was on the nineteenth floor. He had to descend three floors in under a minute to make his plan work. He glanced at the timer on his wrist.
“Thirty five seconds, damn it, Alex, you better hurry,” he chided himself as his boots touched down on the sixteenth floor of the high rise. He dove into his next firing position as he heard the twenty second countdown begin in his earpiece.
“Nineteen, eighteen, seventeen.”
He slowed his breathing as he counted with the time. He folded the stock out and set the rifle down.
“Thirteen, twelve, eleven.”
He manually clicked over to his medium distance setting on his scope, adjusting the wind and range settings to where he thought the other shooter was hiding.
“Six, five, four.”
Alex almost whispered as he loaded in the special round designed to end this duel. He had saved it for her.
“Time for some show and tell,” he breathed.
As the timer hit one, the hologram activated up on the 19th floor, creating a hyper-reality image of Alex. To the sniper across the street, it appeared as if he was venturing back out for a second look. He scanned the area where he suspected she was hidden, waiting. The hit warning flared in his earpieces even as he saw the flash of the weapon’s muzzle discharge. His opponent had secreted herself underneath a dumpster on the fourth floor of a parking garage, not more than a hundred yards from his current position, incredibly close for a shooter of her skill.
“I didn’t want this, I hope you know that. I’m sorry,” he whispered to himself as he squeezed the trigger.
His vision sharpened as he was about to take the shot. The world grew silent around him, as if all creation awaited his pull of the trigger. The edges of his consciousness blocked out all thought other than the place where he aimed his weapon. The focus was absolute, a gift he had honed over the past several months, but one that seemed to have been innate his entire life and something of a mystery as well.
The semi-liquid shell blasted out of the chamber, traveling down the barrel of his rifle at nearly twice the speed of sound. It crossed the distance between them in an immeasurably small amount of time. The rifle jolted slightly in his hands, thanks in large part to the recoil compensation system. Alex realigned his line-of-sight to confirm the hit. As he studied the shot through the telescopic sight, his breath caught in his chest.
Then he heard the click of a pistol being cocked behind him.
“I didn’t want to have to do this either, Scope. I hope you know that,” Cassie ‘Gemini’ Hawthorne said quietly from where she stood a few feet behind him. He took one more glance at his shot. The liquid round had splattered harmlessly behind Cassie’s own projection. “I knew you wouldn’t peek back out for another shot and I knew where you were. Did you really think I would let you adjust for a second try?” Her tone was mocking, but there was something else behind it.
“Obviously I chose wrong,” Alex muttered, as embarrassed about being outsmarted as he was fearful for knowing he was now in enemy hands. “You always were more clever than I, Gemini.”
He used her operational code name and graced her with a sly smile. Even under strain and in life threatening situations, Alex made sure to keep a positive image and emotional state. Being negative made people give up and that got people killed in situations like this.
“I have to be more clever than you, Scope. You’ve always been the best shooter. A girl’s gotta make up ground where she can, know what I mean?” she quipped back. Her own self-confident smile made it obvious the statement was intended as a jab at Alex, not a compliment of his abilities.
He just smiled as he locked his gaze with Cassie’s. Her eyes were purple, ringed with blue, a genetic phenomena and one that had earned her more than a casual glance in her life. Those eyes, in combination with her raven black hair and pale complexion, had given her an edge over her male counterparts.
It’s always the ones with the pretty faces that you have to be most careful of Alex, he remembered his father telling him. Everyone assumes beautiful people have a squeamish disposition to violence. They’re usually wrong.
Alex always knew Cassie was dangerous, even when they had been kids growing up. She always stood up to a challenge, that was one of the things he liked about her. But fighting against her, losing to her in a duel like this, was not something he would relish in the days to come. He snapped his gaze away from her eyes, focusing instead on the men coming through the door to the stairwell behind her.
They were big and there were four of them. Those were the first two things Alex noticed. They were dressed in old, turn of the century era United States military-style uniforms. Desert green and tan camouflage shirts and pants were covered by more modern looking black body armor. Black special forces helmets cradled their heads. Muted, unreflective dark goggles covered eyes that no doubt looked upon the captured form of Alex with anything ranging from smug confidence to outright hostility. The only ornamental item the men sported was a red armband wrapped around their right biceps. On the outside facing side of the armband was a circle of white with a black lion’s head crest. The first time Alex had seen their coat-of-arms, he had thought it looked startlingly similar to the old Nazi stylizations of the Second World War that he had read in history class back in school.
The four moved into the room with a steady confidence common in men who fought wars for a living. These men were veterans and war was their business. They approached Alex with limbs extended out, ready for any sudden move he might make to escape. He knew he wasn’t in much of a position to escape. Five well armed, trained mercenaries blocked the one escape route out of the building, short of jumping off the sixteenth floor to the cratered streets below.
No, he thought bitterly, this is the end of the line.
Alex turned his attention back to Cassie.
“Goliath and Dash have already been brought in, Scope. They’re still mopping up the rest of the company, but you were the last of the prime targets,” Cassie said.
“Only my team calls me Scope, Cassie. But it’s good to know the whole team will be in this together, thanks to you,” he hissed back as he momentarily let his emotional barrier drop. Cassie’s eyes widened, almost imperceptibly so. Alex knew her well enough to know his words had struck deep. “I just want to know why Cassie. Why all the lying, why all the deception? I’ve known you my whole life and you’ve never kept anything like this from me, so why now? You had your opportunity a hundred times during the mission. So why?”
“I’m just doing what I was taught in Basic, Alex. Loyalty to the contract and the client,” she shot back, her emotional walls were back up, the cold soldier back in place of his onetime best friend and teammate.
“You can cut the crap with me, Cassie. Were you a plant the whole time, or did they get to you when we got here? And what happened to sticking with your team?” Alex grunted as the four men now interrupted their conversation. Each grabbed one of Alex’s limbs and hoisted him up. He knew there was no chance of escape now. These men were strong, their vice-like grips a knowing sign that they could snap his neck as easily as kindling.
“You have to trust me on this one, Alex. I’m doing this to protect you guys,” Cassie responded directly into Alex’s ear in a low enough voice that the guards couldn’t hear as she walked behind them. Alex was looking directly at her now as his captors walked him down the 16 flights of stairs to the ground floor. Something in her words made Scope reconsider his hostility toward her. “Besides,” she whispered, “you still owe me that date.” She reached up and kissed his cheek softly.
Alex smiled and blushed. It was kind of an awkward situation for a kiss, but he couldn’t keep the smile off his face. He looked into Cassie’s eyes and saw the same girl he had known for years. Then his vision began to cloud and he realized what she had done. As Alex’s eyes fluttered shut, Cassie carefully peeled the neurotoxin-laced film from her lips. She applied some solvent to dissolve any remnants that might inadvertently incapacitate her.
“Let’s go, gentlemen. The Council awaits.”
* * *
Alex awoke sometime later. He opened his eyes and instantly wished he had kept them shut. Bright light flooded his vision as a sharp pain spiked through his forehead. He wiggled his fingers and toes, making sure nothing was broken or paralyzed. Everything responded well, thought stiffly.
I’ve been out for a while, he thought.
He also realized that his hands were bound in front of him, held together by tightly bound, triple-ply zip cords. That was disconcerting. The last thing he remembered was the kiss from Cassie, how wonderful it had felt.
“So wonderful I passed out,” he said aloud. His voice sounded cracked and he felt the dryness in his throat for the first time. “Damn you, Cassie. You played me, again.”
He cracked his eyes open, barely enough to let him adjust to the brightness. The searing pain that had first accompanied the light now dropped to a dull ache behind his eyebrows. After what seemed like hours, but was likely only a few minutes, Alex gently eased his eyes open further. Light poured onto his retinas and for the first time he got a good look at the room.
Cell is more like it, he thought as he quickly absorbed all the pertinent information about the room.
Solid cement walls towered up to a ceiling that must have been at least ten meters high. Two small windows, no more than the size of Alex’s open palm, allowed in minimal light. About seven meters up the wall, there was a slit of some sort of glass, likely bulletproof, that seemed to give onto an attached room. He guessed it was where anyone observing his incarceration would be stationed. The cell was roughly six meters from corner to corner. The only indication of a way in or out was the faint trace of seams in the floor, indicating an elevator shaft of some sort to allow food or, more likely, interrogators to enter without fear of Alex springing a trap or overpowering the guards.
Hard to escape a subterranean building when the only way out is down, he observed with grim approval.
Whoever had placed him here was covering all their bases.
Knowing there was nothing to do but wait, Alex settled back into as comfortable a situation as he could manage. The concrete floor and cement walls offered scant comfort. The cold, dry surfaces seemed to sap the heat from his body, but he knew that was just another part of the psychological warfare perpetrated on the incarcerated. After a time, the sunlight that filtered down from the tiny windows far above waned. As the last rays of natural light disappeared from the glass portals, the glaring light in his cell blinked out. No moonlight came through the windows and there was no obvious source of light up above. Sleep came slowly as Alex started at images and thoughts in the bleak darkness of the cell. When it finally did, he slipped fitfully away and dreamed of a quieter time before, back when everything had started.
“Sweet dreams, Scope,” Cassie said from behind the glass, though the sleeping form on the cold ground was not aware of her presence in the adjoining room. “See you soon.”