Go To Part 3 “Lack of Intelligence”
After the raid on the laboratory both Haqqislam and Druze forces are congregating on the final target: Ruby Monday’s treasure cache.
Kleio ignored the curious looks of the one the mercenaries called “Fiddler”, but it worried her that the inquisitive and hyperactive engineer had taken a special interest in her persona. Due to their ever-changing rosters, infiltrating a transient “Brawler” mercenary company was notoriously easy, but that didn’t mean it was without risk. This was the third time now she was trying to mess with this crew’s operation, and something was bound to go wrong sooner or later.
Kleio had already taken more time than she wanted to get into position again. She knew Saladin had faced the Druze at Bureau Lakshmi’s secret research facility without her help, but time had simply been to short. She spared a moment’s thought for Ilya, and felt surprisingly relieved that he hadn’t been hurt in that engagement.
As they approached the coordinates where Ruby Monday had supposedly hidden her cache of xenotech artifacts, the lieutenant gave orders to spread out and cover the site. To Kleio’s eyes, it looked like the remains of a huge dome that had collapsed and blanketed the area in debris. She moved away from the group and slipped behind an old piece of wall that still protruded from the ground. Out of sight, out of mind — perhaps the engineer would stop worrying about her.
A whirring sound proved that hope wrong as two of Fiddler’s strange “jackbot” remotes came rolling around the corner, their visual sensors—and their shotguns—focusing on Kleio in her Brawler disguise.
“Hey, you!” The voice came from a jackbot’s speaker, but was clearly Fiddler’s. “What you doing out here?” The tone was carefree and jovial, but it didn’t fool Kleio for a second.
“I’m just checking the approaches, as ordered,” she replied.
“Hm. Awfully close to the supply cache there, eh? Would you mind taking off your helmet for a sec? Your face looked a little familiar earlier, but I didn’t get a good look.”
Kleio cursed inwardly. There was no way to save her disguise past this point. And the two bots were a problem, putting their controller out of her reach. Could she get them both and survive? Their vulkan shotguns were deadly.
With a smooth and rapid motion, Kleio unslung her own shotgun, brought it up, and blasted the first jackbot to smithereens. She tried to both dodge and swing around to the second, but realized she wasn’t fast enough. The muzzle flashed and she felt the impact of the shot on her upper body, knocking the wind out of her. Then the vulkan pellets exploded in a chain reaction, driving themselves deep inside her. She tried to bring up the shotgun again to destroy the second bot, but her fingers went numb and the gun slid out of her grasp. She slumped to the ground, and as her vision faded, she heard Fiddler’s not unsympathetic voice: “That was a dumb move.”
Ilya tried to make out the Hunzakut scouts slightly ahead of him. He knew there were two and he didn’t think they used any quantronic camouflage technology, but he still couldn’t see either of them. He felt inadequate. This was his home turf. He had been rummaging through this kind of xeno ruin since he was a kid. Still, the Hunzakut moved through the broken dome like silent shadows, making him look like a bumbling idiot in comparison. They were hunters and they were on the prowl, sneaking up on that megabeast that must be hiding somewhere ahead in the center of the ruin.
He heard something. Was that breathing? Heavy, slow, regular. Very heavy. A Hunzakut appeared where there had been none before and silently flitted towards a huge pile of rubble. The hunter squeezed into the rubble only to reemerge a few seconds later. He held something, a container of some kind, and turned to move back towards Ilya. Then a growl erupted from the rubble, rocks shifted, stones tumbled, and something huge rose up behind the Hunzakut.
Ilya saw huge fangs and claws, two pairs of tiny, glinting eyes, and a huge muscular body akin to a hunting cat of old Earth—but many, many times larger. As it moved, gaps between its muscles opened and closed, revealing an eerie bio-luminescence below that spoke of alien origin and perhaps modification. “Bubbles!” flashed through Ilya’s head, the ludicrous name Ruby Monday had given the creature guarding her cache.
The Hunzakut froze as he realized he had stirred Bubbles from its slumber. The beast sniffed the air and focused its beady eyes on the human who stole from it. It tensed its body, ready to spring.
Ilya saw the second Hunzakut appear from the shadows, just to the left of the beast. It was a woman, and she fearlessly crept up right behind the beast and extracted another artifact from the rubble. She was so smooth and silent, Bubbles didn’t even notice her presence and kept its attention on the first thief. She slowly backed away, trying to get out of reach of the beast.
Ilya held his breath, expecting Bubbles to jump any heartbeat, but then he saw a movement out of the corner of his eye. A man in heavy, bulky armor came crashing around a large piece of ruin. One of the Diggers that had hired themselves out to the Druze. He held a chain rifle in his hands, and Ilya knew that brutal weapon would fill the area in front of it with shards of molten metal when fired. Both Hunzakut dove away to get out of its line of fire, but Ilya stumbled, fell, and hit his head on a piece of rock. Above him, the air exploded into heat, fire, and metal.
The last thing Ilya saw was the huge shape of Bubbles springing through the air and its jaws closing around the body of the Digger, biting him clean in half. Then he lost consciousness.
