Tanya Frost/9-13-2002 - 2030 hours
From Unofficial Handbook of the Virtue Universe
This story is a DRAFT, is completed start-to-finish, but is continuing to be refined. Check back for changes!
"Those two years before the raid were the best two years of my life. They were the years I learned what it meant to be free."
-- Tanya Frost
9/13/2002 - 2030 hours
The doors of the elevators slid open, the damp air and the smell of the decaying ruins rushed in. Not that the rest of the city was glamorous, but Darwin's Landing had that special touch to it, just enough to make you think someone could live there, but not enough for anyone to understand why they ever would. The four stepping out looked the part though, save the girl's blue hair and that confident swagger in their walk. The tall one stepped forward. "Like paradise, eh?"
They weren't packing much heat, hell, most of the punks were packing more. A .22 and a knife wouldn't last 5 minutes out there in the hands of a real rookie, but that didn't matter. The girl brushed her hair out of her face, trying to ignore the filthy water dripping on her from the rooftops, the last remnants of the passing storm. She looked up to the tall one. "Takin' point, Brown?" The tall one smiled. "Always, lass. Bout two blocks south o' here." None of them liked the codenames, but they were easy to remember.
The tall one was "Brown," the pointman with the macho attitude and a mean left hook. The girl was "Blue," she wasn't too subtle, but she had talent, and wasn't as obvious as a Widow. The third one, "Red," packed some more muscle and picked up the rear. Not his favorite job, but every op needed some weight to throw into a door if someone thought the deadbolt would keep 'em safe. The fourth one, "White," was a scrawny guy, but he wasn't there for the fighting. He'd hit the deck if a baby threw a bottle at him, but they needed a talker. Someone who knew how to negotiate, especially at the other end of a pair of plyers, some elastic band, and a little butane torch he knew how to use for a little more than keeping up his bad chain-smoking habit.
Brown looked across his squad, presenting a brief in his typical confident tone. "20-30 you guys. We got fifteen minutes and only one lead, let's keep movin'." The whole thing stunk. Mercy had enough spider newbies to pull one punk in and torture the information out of him later, only so much heat you could pack in the dregs of town and not get noticed, no way someone could stay low and still take on one real spider troop. Yet here they were, sending four seasoned ops in to catch a drug deal with pop-guns and knives. Maybe it was something new? No, they could still just storm 'em and squeeze 'em for info in lockup. Why send covert?
Blue glanced over to White as she hopped over the rubble trailing Brown's footsteps. "Say White, why ya think they sent us out here? Rack some drug runner? They know he's here, got the heliport just north, why not just lock down and sweep the whole place?" White pulled some smoke in from the cheap cigarette, looking up at the overcast sky trying to think of an answer. "Ya know Blue... Sure they got somethin'. Ops says it's big, so jus' hope. Get 'nuf out of 'em and next run might be a lil' more fun."
Brown pointed to an abandoned three-story, freshly trashed from Hellion punks. "Listen up! Intel says the target's here. Got one punk, two bodyguards, and a case with some dyne and somethin' else. Bet Red could take him alone, but we gotta string the dealer name out of 'im too. Ops wants this kept quiet." The building didn't look like much, aside from some fresh graffiti. Lights weren't even on, but enough light poured through the broken windows to make out the hallways. Red clicked the safety off of his .22 and screwed on a silencer. Blue grinned, amused that the muscle was reaching for his toys so soon. The place was dead, maybe too dead. The footsteps were dusted over, the usual sign that everyone's already packed up and left.
The hallway swung around to the left up ahead. The other three were checking out the rooms, but Blue stepped up to the corner, staring down the hall at the empty cafeteria. "Guys... This doesn't..." A gust of wind through the broken windows dropped an empty beer can to the floor down the hall, which caught her attention, but just as she jerked her head to the side to investigate it, she heard two more familiar sounds: The quiet pop of a silenced pistol behind her, and the dull thud of the bullet hitting the drywall where her head was a split second ago. Someone had jumped them. She didn't have to think about what to do, the whole thing was reflex now. You'd hardly see it if you weren't looking for it, but it was one swift, beautiful motion, grabbing the .22 in her holster and firing one shot over her hip back at the source.
She spun around, her eyes wide at what she saw. There was Red, with his silenced .22, stunned from the hollowpoint that was buried in his chest, not a hostile in sight. There had to have been a mistake, a pretty damn bad one at that. The cold reality hit her when the other two reached for their sidearms. They'd turned on her, and this wasn't a good place to be ambushed and outnumbered, especially without body armor. Raising her hand towards the two, a strong blast of wind and bitter chill swept over both of them, knocking them back into the doorway. Blue was full of tricks, but her best trick this time would be retreat, ducking into a room in the hall.
There wasn't enough time for anything spectacular, so the pistol would have to do. Brown was clumsy, moving too fast and forgetting to hide his footsteps. Only took three shots through the rotted drywall before one found their mark right below his ribcage. Blue stepped out into the hall to grab his gun, and make sure he was at least dead enough to stop standing up. White wasn't anywhere, but he wasn't good enough to sneak by, so all it took was a glance down the hall to watch for his little hands pointing out, assuming he hadn't bailed already. Brown could barely move, and definitely couldn't talk. Probably lost a lung, so he'd be gone soon enough. Blue wasn't quite sure why their best point man gave his position away so easily, but it dawned on her that it may not have been his footsteps she heard, a thought she barely had time to entertain before she felt the agonizing pain of the knife slipping into her back right behind her shoulderblade.
Maybe White was more clever than she thought, but he wasn't any better in hand-to-hand, and wasn't good at picking a good spot for a knife. Most things take effort with a knife in your back, but kicking White's legs out from under him wasn't one of them. White kept his grip at first, sending Blue reeling from the pain from the knife carving a path across her back, and he didn't let go until he'd just about hit the floor.
Blue braced herself against the broken tile and fired one last blind shot at White. The echoing report of the .22 and the sound of White's screams as the round tore into his leg were the sweet sound of victory, but that wasn't really going to be found until he started talking. A sharp kick to the side put him on his back, and he certainly wasn't the kind of person to stand up with a bullet in his leg. She set her gaze on White, who was still writhing in pain. Blue couldn't think about much more than the pain herself, but she had to hold it back for now. She needed answers before he did something stupid.
"Hell has a special place for traitors, White. Hear Arachnos has an even better one. Tell me who paid you off, and you just might walk away." White laughed at the very thought. "Need to work on makin' lies I can believe, Blue. There's no way I'm leavin' this place alive, you know that." Blue grabbed the bloody knife from the floor, running it along the side of White's head. "You're probably right, White. But if I'm not hearing names, then the sound of you begging for death might have to do instead." White grinned at Blue, dazed from the adrenaline and blood loss. His delirious laughter echoed through the abandoned halls. "Ha hah.....!! You don't get it, do you!? There is no pay-off! This whole thing's just a joke! Just this big, stupid joke! M1's over, Blue. It didn't work. Koenig thinks you're a blemish on his perfect little project!"
Blue tried to hide her shock. "M1...? What did they...? Who told you about that? Tell me!!" White sighed, barely reacting to Blue shaking him around. "Look around, Blue. They dun care 'bout you. Nobody does. They're jus' usin' you to stay on the top, they'll watch your back long as you got somethin' for 'em. When the project went down, you lost that somethin'. They buried you months ago, they just forgot to kill you until today." Blue couldn't believe what she was hearing, but it was starting to make sense. "... This whole thing was a set-up?" White nodded, trying to keep his head up to look Blue in the eyes. "Blue... Spiders got no room for failure. M1 was a failure, so they got no room for you. It's over. Go find a new life."
She was looking at White, but she wasn't paying attention. All she could do was skim through her life and try to make sense of it all now. What White was saying made sense, K.I.A. on some secret mission in the middle of nowhere probably looked better on the internals than "killed by your own squad." But it meant her loyalty, her slavish devotion for her entire life, meant absolutely nothing. Nothing to the project. Nothing to Koenig. Nothing to Arachnos. Nothing to anyone. They were sweeping her under the rug, taking everything she'd given them and throwing the rest away.
Blue let out a long sigh. She never shed a tear before in her life, maybe never even shed one after. But she shed one then. Just one. "No, White... It's not over..." She raised her pistol, shakily aiming it towards White's head, wiping the tear from her face. "It's just starting." They say you should never look a man in the eyes when you kill them, because those eyes will just stare back at you for the rest of your life. Maybe it's true. White was as good as dead anyway, so maybe she wanted to see those eyes, the cold fear of a spider about to get cut loose from the world. Maybe the rage was blinding her, and she didn't see anything. You could hear that shot halfway across Darwin's, but no one paid attention. It was just another noise lost in the chaos of the Isles.
Blue picked up the knife, wiping as much of her own blood off of it as she could, slipping it into the sheath. She couldn't help but be impressed by it, it was a nice, light blade with a serrated back edge, much better than the short double-edge that ops packed her with. The suture kit in Red's pack would keep the blood loss down, but the spiders would find what happened by daybreak. Tomorrow, her new life began, a life hunted from both sides. She'd have to lie low, maybe even get out of the Isles if she could hope to get strong enough to hit back at the spiders. She looked over to the nearby helipad one last time, stepping back to the elevator going back down to Mercy. It was the last time she could ever afford to be seen by Arachnos, may as well make it past the security checkpoint and find a better place to bide her time.
