In Service of Empire: Angel of Death
Posted: 2004-04-07 04:28am
In Service of Empire: The Angel of Death
By Jeremy ‘HappyTarget’ S.
- - -
7And when He had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, "Come and see." 8And I looked, and behold, a pale horse, and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.
Revelation 6:7-8
- - -
In the classical antiquities of Earth, the myth of the Furies, the Erinnyes, three sister goddesses of punishment arose. It was said that they made their home in Erebus, the darkest pit in the Underworld. There, they tortured those who had yet to atone for their sins relentlessly and without mercy. No prayer, no sacrifice, no tears could move them nor protect the hapless object of their persecution.
It was only natural then that the Terran Empire would willingly embrace and expand upon that myth for its own designs over 25 centuries later. The Empire created its own Furies, and it didn’t limit them to only three beings (Tisiphone, Alecto and Megarea) like the Ancient Greeks had either. Imperial Scientists made as many as were required to keep the many enemies of the Empire in check, both within and without.
Immensely powerful, their loyalty to the Empire unquestioning, anyone marked for elimination would find not a hint of hesitation when the inevitable finally arrived. Just enough of their existence was leaked by select sources in within the Empire to foster a healthy fear that soon became sufficient to keep the less desperate or greedy among the Empire’s ranks in line all on its own. Some might have said that with their purpose fulfilled, they should have been disposed of and forgotten, for their powers could pose a deadly threat should the Furies become corrupted. But the Empire wasn’t one to cast off useful tools, and the Furies had proven most capable and loyal assets.
So they remain, the unwavering guardians of the Empire, ceaseless stalking death for those who are deemed its enemies. If you believe in a higher being and an afterlife, pray to whatever deity you worship for forgiveness and a chance at continued existence. Should you cross paths with a Fury, you will find none of either.
But what happens when you take the next step beyond what a Fury is?
That is where the Shades reside, creatures virtually unaffected by time or death, like shadows of shadows, these tireless predators have only one purpose: to kill…
- - -
Stardate: 01092387
Location: Darwin Research Station, Terran Empire Space
“I still say that this is a mistake!” The elderly woman wearing a white lab coat argued with her protégé turned superior, shaking her head and causing her gray hair to dance. “You’re pushing things to far, to fast! If something goes wrong we’ll have no way of controlling her! She could kill us all with a mere thought!” Her blue eyes were fearful and she wrung her wrinkled, age spotted hands together in consternation. The almost dazzlingly lit room caused the polished silver and obsidian Sword and Earth emblem of the Terran Empire to gleam brightly on her coat’s right breast. But the emblem wasn’t normal, diverging from the customary forms in a singular and significant way. The distinctive double helix of DNA entwined the sword, denoting the elderly woman as part of the Empire’s eugenics program.
Her fearful eyes, still bright with a keen intellect despite her advanced age, kept darting back to the artificial womb that dominated the center of the sterile white and stainless steel laboratory. It was a vertical transparent cylinder with white caps on either end connected to the floor and ceiling with a veritable maze of pipes and cables. Monitors and control consoles ringed the circular room, all designed to provide extensive data and direction for what was going on inside the pinkish fluid filled tank.
Within the womb resided a lump of differentiated cells still no bigger than her clenched fist, but already distinguishable as humanoid. Human it most certainly was not. Not anymore at least. Oh sure it had a lot of the basics in common, but the scientists working at this top secret laboratory complex had pushed humanity far beyond anything God or Darwin likely intended. Mutation of innate human abilities as well as cautious but liberal splicing of useful alien DNA had allowed for the re-emergence of Homo Sapiens Supernus following their demise at the end of Earth’s final world war over 330 years ago. However, by her line of thinking, that cluster of cells growing in the artificial womb could well end up becoming Homo Sapiens Invictus and prove the undoing of man. Minor modifications were one thing. Adding a resistance here, an enhanced ability there, all strictly controlled and monitored for all to real security concerns, was a minor thing given the tools now available to mankind. Activating the largely dormant and drastically underdeveloped but none the less innate ESP abilities humanity possessed had started the Fury program. They were even more tightly controlled and supervised, for their powers were of the like that Khan Noonien Singh and his ilk could only dream about.
“Come now Dr. Kingsley, you worry too much.” The room’s sole other occupant replied with an almost serene calmness that she had possessed since she and Sara had first met. “Sure she will be the most powerful one yet. But that is why she will also have the most aggressive routines of loyalty and obedience yet devised implanted within her to ensure she remains controlled. And she should pair up rather nicely with Subject X 3139 when the time comes for the bonding.”
Subject X 3139. An anomaly that should have been terminated as soon as they unforeseen and uncontrolled mutation occurred, Sara Kingsley thought. Yet then, as now, she was overruled by her superior. It hadn’t always been like this. In the beginning, many years ago now, Sara had been the chief scientist of this laboratory, with Dr. Toby Russell a young lab assistant fresh out of Starfleet Medical. But now, thanks to a remarkable string of successes that Dr. Russell achieved on her own after absorbing Sara’s experience, the apprentice had become the master and had been elevated to the highest position inside the lab. A sudden thought struck Sara, and she cursed herself for not seeing it before. Subject X 3139 was no anomaly at all. She has orcastrated this entire thing from the beginning just so she could push the envelope. I always knew she was reckless, not caring how results were obtained, merely that they WERE obtained in the most timely fashion possible.. But this was beyond reckless. A Fury, even unpaired, was too powerful an entity to cavalierly increase its abilities. Baby steps were required to ensure that control was guaranteed to keep abreast of the increases in their capabilities. Subject X 3139 and Subject X 4028 were both showing signs of being considerably more than a baby step over their fellows, even at this early stage in their development.
“And regardless, the go-ahead has already been given from the Terran Council and Section 31 Chief Directorate as per my recommendation.” Toby continued, cutting off Sara’s thoughts. “As such, we go ahead weather it offends your delicate sensibilities or not. For progress, one sometimes has to take risks. If Robert Oppenheimer hadn’t taken any risks, we might never have unlocked nuclear power.”
And we all know how well those same risks turned out during the limited nuclear strikes of WWIII don’t we. But she kept her thoughts her own and instead said, “I would still like to lodge a formal complaint that I think that this research is to dangerous to pursue at this time.”
“Fine, lodge it. You’ll see how wrong you are when X 3139 and X 4028 become operational.”
- - -
Stardate: 02232387
Location: Darwin Research Station, Terran Empire Space
“Again Adriel, this time no showing off. Just complete the objectives as outlined.” A voice said in her head. It sounded vaguely exasperated, like a parent with long experience trying to control an unruly and willful child.
Her enhanced senses told her that her previous objectives had already been beamed away. Glowing blue eyes danced with mirth, but otherwise her features remained unchanged. Although she was actually only a few weeks old, implanted memories similar to those used in Imperial Starfleet Clones allowed her to at least understand the concepts of a joke even if they didn’t allow for her to fully implement the associated emotions. Being a telepath helped in this respect somewhat, for she had a wealth of data sources on emotional responses she could analyze and absorb that no Imp Drone ever could. But even so, she was a definite novice when it came to expressing emotions. Commanding people to shut down their voluntary muscle functions had most emphatically NOT been part of her assigned objectives. She had done that extra bit all her own because a stray thought from one of the techs supervising the tests indicated he would find it funny. New people were beamed into the mock up street. She could sense their nervousness. They well knew that they were to be used as training aids for Furies, and that scared them.
Rightly so, she thought. If I felt like it, everyone of them would die in heartbeat. The power that was at her beck and call was chilling, even to her sometimes. She could kill without remorse or regret true, but during her down time she often was scared of what she could do with the most casual of thoughts. That was likely part of the programming Mother had given her to keep her in line. But knowledge of that didn’t make it any less forbidding to her. Fear was one of the few emotions she had completely mastery over, which she thoroughly regretted. Especially when others thoughts said that the rest of the spectrum of emotions were infinitely preferable. The emotion love stood out most clearly, by most accounts it was very conductive to pleasure.
“Go.” Mother’s voice said inside her head, and Adriel continued to study her stunted emotions as she proceeded with her assigned task. She reached out with her mind and began to walk down the simulated street. Furies sometimes had to be covert, and this was a test of her ability to be just that. Which was why when she made every person on the street loose control of their voluntary muscles, it sort of ruined the exercise.
Subtle proddings threaded their way through chinks in mental defenses most telepaths would never have even found. Once inside their minds, she set about actively deleting any notice of her presence. The crowd subtly parted to make way for her on an unconscious level. Even as her mind reached out and worked its magic over the biological systems in her path, her nanites swarmed out and set up remote linkups with the technological systems. Most security systems were closed loops to prevent just what she was doing. If one could hack into a security net, one could actively delete oneself from the scanner reports and could fully control any automated systems tied into the net. Furies got around this by using their nanites to make a remote connection to a closed system. With the recent introduction of Borg based technology and the bounty of information store-housed in the captured Borg databases, they made dominating the past generation of computer software available to the general public almost child’s play. Non-Terran systems were much harder to predict, for they were very likely all to alien in nature to allow for easy compatibility. But the nanites were clever little beasties, and they executed their primary function very well.
She passed down the street without a single person nor a single sensor taking note of the girl that appeared seven or eight years old passing like a specter through their midst. After slipping through them, she turned and stared directly at the lone camera she hadn’t dominated.
- - -
In the distant control room, a message appeared on the monitors. Dr. Toby Russell blinked as her progeny casually overrode the screen’s assigned function. Her powers were advancing every bit as fast as she had hoped, and Section High command and the Terran Council Special Projects Oversight Committee had taken a keen interest in her as well. “Yes Adriel, I am satisfied. All right, let’s proceed to the next set of objectives…”
Stardate: 03052387
Location: Darwin Research Station, Terran Empire Space
Today’s testing would revolve around her upgraded combat speed systems and her melee efficiency. She was given the next generation of what is colloquially known as ‘bullet time’ when she was made, and now she is finally going to be able to test it in simulated combat. Whereas previous versions of bullet time revolved around speeding up a body’s response time to allow for vastly increased movement speeds and reaction times, there was an upper limit to just how far the physical body could be pushed with such systems. Adriel’s systems don’t have this problem, as they involve speeding up a small pocket of space time around herself, allowing her to operate at very fast speeds while the world seemingly slows around her. Of course this brought about an entirely new set of problems in that she aged seemingly much faster to the rest of the universe whenever she enters that state. While this can be controlled somewhat with standard regenerative therapies, she was fortunate that Section was also working on the long-gev treatments and chose to make them available to their new and promising project. They allowed Adriel to remain very close to her apparent physical age even after extended periods of using what she had ‘heard’ the techs call ‘blink time’.
Adriel took up position inside the mock up building, her extensive stealth systems operating at peak efficiency. The opposing force’s power armor sensor suites shouldn’t detect her presence until they are right on top of her position. She waited silently as a grave. Patience is one of her strong suits, and she could make a rather believing impression of a shadow without much difficulty. Her enhanced hearing picked up the whisper quiet approach of an op-for scout drone’s AG drive field interacting with the air. The fly sized forward recon element was a vital component of any capable infantry force’s battle plan. The op-for is playing things cautiously, sending in their mechanical spies to try and flush out my location. she thought to herself. Although the drone’s sensors are much more limited than a suit’s, they were being used in sufficient numbers to augment this deficiency. It was evident that one would eventually nail down her position, so she brought some of her previously dormant EW sub-systems online. They already know I’m in the building, so complete stealth no longer serves me, time to give them some targets of my choosing. Three false signatures of varying strengths, but all greater than her actual stealthed one, appear inside the building as her own drones come online.
They are carefully placed so that the enemy will have to pass through terrain of her choosing to get to them. She let the enemy’s robotic spies get close enough to get a sniff of her false signatures, then her other set of drones activated. These are not EW decoys like her first set. These are hunter/killers, and their light weaponry reaches out and smashes the defenseless scouts with ease. Little more than a needle sized grav-gun with sensors, datalink and AG drives, the hunter/killer drones are designed specifically to eliminate enemy drones, and they are decidedly efficient in that task.
Adriel’s passive sensors detect the near immediate flare of activity outside as the op-for’s suit sensors come online and bathe the building in EM and subspace searchlights. She largely ignored them, for she was secure in her stealthing’s ability to hide her at this range. She found a crack in one of the op-for trooper’s mental defenses and slithered through it to read his thoughts. They had only been told that they were to execute a simple breach and clear of the building against a lone opponent who was armed with melee weaponry only. That explained why they dropped a power armored infantry man’s usual phobia against continuous use of their suits active sensors in exchange for the raw power active sensor sweeps provided. In the grand scheme of things, she was considered an easy target.
- - -
Her Mother knew enough about standard infantry tactics to understand that the op-for team were drastically underestimating Adriel. But then they weren’t in possession of adequate intelligence as to her true capabilities. When it came to an actual op situation, only a handful of Section 31 personnel would have access to such intelligence, and so the troopers stumbled about in ignorance of the death that was stalking them even now.
- - -
At least they’re showing some level of sense Adriel thought, for only six of the op-for platoon were running on active sensors. The others were likely using tight beam burst coms to limit her ability to listen in. If they remained within LOS of each other, they could even use old fashioned laser coms to virtually eliminate her ability to tap into their com net. They entered the building and began to spread out and split off into groups. Their own hunter killer drones picked off her remote sensor drones steadily, but she was still able to track their movements thanks to what leaked past their mental barriers. True telepaths she had to work to read, but no non-telepath could possess sufficient wards to block out her abilities.
The first group approached her room, and the trooper in the lead was one of those whose sensors were active. Adriel activated her second tier of EW, casting a more inviting target on the other side of the room while maximizing the degradation factor of her jammers. Totally motionless, she was ready to strike at her targets even as the first flash bang arced through the door. The ball sized grenade was designed to both blind, deafen and shut down voluntary muscle impulses within a fairly large volume. It also carried a concentrated EMP like effect that while having only minimal effects on biological tissues was thoroughly capable of at least temporarily shutting down modern high-tech devices. Adriel’s systems were immune and hardened enough that the grenade did virtually nothing other than cause a slight hazing of her visual quality as her augmented vision shifted to other levels unaffected by the primarily EW spectrum flash of the grenade. Auditory augments blocked out the raucous acoustic assault even as it began, the noise dying half formed inside her ears.
The combat grid fell over her vision, telling her distances and threat values of her unwitting prey as they closed on the heels of the flash bang’s explosion. They did so with the rapidity of well trained troops, but they were still limited to the maximum response time and slightly enhanced speed their human bodies and power armor provided them respectively. The trooper wore the armored carapace of current TE frontline power armor, the arms slightly longer than looked normal because it was easier to fully armor gimbal gauntlets than individual fingers. The ‘head’ of the power armor was actually above the wearer’s head, included mainly to provide a more human looking figure than anything else. The wearer’s head was actually safely enclosed in the armor’s ‘cockpit’ about a half a foot down from the ablative armored shoulder blades of the suit in about the upper chest area of the suit. The armor was in standard configuration, allowing for the greatest range of movement while still offering full NRBC (Nano, Radiological, Biological, Chemical), fragment and glancing hit protection. More armor could be added to allow for greater survival of even direct hits once the shields failed, but that configuration greatly decreased the gracefulness of an armored infantryman in exchange for only slightly greater protection.
Like most humans, their instincts commanded the op-for’s troopers to first look at eye level, then down and lastly upwards, for that is the order of threats early man had been programmed to deal with. There were very few avian predators on the home world of Humanity, and none had posed much of a threat to mankind. Adriel used this inbred bias to her advantage. Dropping from the ceiling after a mental command to the molecular bonds extruded through her gloves and the soles of her boots, she engaged blink time.
Not even a heavy power armor suit would have protected the trooper from an angel of death dropping down on him from above. He and his fellows seemed to freeze in mid stride as the blink drive spooled up. A targeting grid fell across her vision, highlighting the squad’s exploitable weak points, movement vectors, probable weapons and defenses status and showing her the cylinder and cones of their weapons field of fire. Since this was a training exercise, Adriel kept her twin two foot long psionic blades sheathed. The simulation room’s many high speed computers and plethora of monitoring devices recorded her clenched fists smashing down on either side of the first trooper’s ‘helmet’. If the blades had been active, they would have criss-crossed slightly below where the infantryman’s head would be. Pulling her fists off of the now sizzling conformal shield bubble around the luckless infantryman, Adriel tucked and rolled forward in mid air till she was a full 240 degrees past her start point. Planting her feet on the trooper’s back, she sprang off of his shield and scissored her arms together in a blow that would have under different circumstances cut the second trooper in half at the waist. Her hands ignored the slight tingling sensation as they touched the active shield. She dropped out of the blink, transferring her momentum to the second trooper and causing him to topple backward towards the other seven men in the squad now crowding the hallway leading to her room.
Reactivating the blink, she used the now stationary platform her second victim to leap at the next two. They were still trying to process why a small waif thin bundle of destruction had appeared before them on the falling form of their comrade, but they had already instinctively twitched their grav guns towards her position. To bad they were far to slow to do much more than that. With her trajectory leading between the next two troopers, Adriel extended her arms outward for a phantom strike that would have cut them both in half at the belly button. Arcing through the air, she hit the ground and somersaulted forward, driving her fists solidly into the upper torsos of the next two troopers. She dropped out of blink as she did so, allowing the two struck troopers time to fly backward into their comrades before she sprang into the air and reactivated the blink. The two remaining troopers were frozen in place with shouts of surprise dying half formed in their throats as the universe around her slowed to a crawl from Adriel’s perspective. With their downed fellows tangled up amongst them, temporarily blocking their attack lanes and hampering their movement, the next two were combat ineffective. The squad’s Sergeant was not so incapacitated and had even managed to squeeze off a shot at her. The simulated bullet was nothing more than a low powered tractor beam and hologram emplaced and controlled by the rooms computers. Physical contact would cause only mild discomfort as this was only a simulation, but in her current unarmored/unshielded state it would count as a ‘kill shot if it connected with her.
Her takeoff had caused her to pirouette in mid air, and her outstretched arms whipped by the still forms of the troopers with phantom blows that would have decapitated both of them. After the kill strike, she used the ‘dead’ trooper’s shoulders as springboards and leapt upwards. Tucking into a ball, she somersaulted over the simulated bullet with the grace a ballet dancer would envy. She landed on the ground, with only the squad’s Sergeant ‘alive’ and directly before her. Dropping down to all fours, Adriel’s foot swung outward in a vicious arc she deliberately slowed so as not to snap the Sergeant’s armored, exoskeleton encased legs like dry twigs. Just as the blow was about to connect she dropped out of blink. The sergeant had just enough time to realize he was falling from the leg sweep before his armored back hit the floor. Even as the fall jarred him, his suit’s sensors saw a lightly armored too-small figure seemingly fade into focus out of thin air above his prostrate form. Clad in a black, Ninja-esque jumpsuit that totally covered her, the only distinguishing feature being luminous blue eyes through a slit in her face covering. A fist moved impossibly fast and caused a starburst of interference when it struck his shields square in the center of his helmet’s field of view. The seasoned officer jerked back in shocked surprise within his suit even as its systems died save for the termination message scrolling across the primary display. In less than five seconds, his entire squad had been killed by something that was definitely more capable than he had been led to believe.
- - -
The other two groups stopped their progression to their waypoints as their datalink dispassionately informed them of the ‘death’s’ of their comrades. The speed at which they blinked out denoted that they had been drastically under informed of just what they would be facing.
The closest one to their now ‘deceased’ comrades’ position was at the far end of a long hall at the top of a set of stairs. Their sensor drones picked up an approaching target coming up the stairs behind them even as they began to die in small flashes of light. Hunter killer drones were doing their duty, blinding the remote eyes of the squad as their prey approached them. In an eye blink, the hunter had become the hunted, and the troopers were already down a third of their number. The squad fell into a firing line behind what cover the simulated building had. The debris and ancient furniture wouldn’t provide much more than visual cover to modern weaponry, but combined with their armor’s EW suites and shields, it could provide a precious few seconds of extra time when their enemy was confused as to their actual location. Mechanical thumbs flicked the troopers grav gun’s setting selector levers downward, and the weapon’s parallel mounted phaser barrels set on wide beam stun flared sighing cones of energetic blue light towards the only lane of approach open to their quarry.
Adriel’s augmented senses picked up the speeding phaser blasts ahead of her as she topped the stairs, automatically dropping her into blink to give her a chance at dodging the beams propagating at the speed of light. Just the same, it was only her superior reflexes and rate of action that allowed her to dodge the expanding cones hurtling towards her. Springing straight up, she rotated her body 90 degrees towards the troopers’ position even as she rolled so she was facing the ceiling. In a heartbeat, with a virtually subconscious thought to activate them, the variable molecular bonding augments in her feet and hands reached out through her boots and gloves to latch onto the roof like countless atom sized Velcro hooks. Wired as she was, her augments read her thoughts, saw her intent and acted accordingly. While she could control them directly, combat was much smoother when she didn’t have to ‘think’ about every individual action and could instead concentrate on dealing death. She had been designed as a weapon after all, and the scientists of the Terran Empire were particularly adept at making weapons of destruction over the centuries. Practice makes perfect after all.
She scuttled across the roof of the room, the attention of the troopers below her still riveted on the top of the stairs because from their perspective they had only fired split seconds before. The molecular bonds let go and she leapt into the sky. Rolling as she flew, she extended an arm and clenched her fist. Her first target would have fallen to the floor in two pieces thanks to a diagonal slash through his torso had her attack been anything more than a simulation. She continued her dive until she met the floor. Tucking into a ball, she somersaulted forward underneath the next closest trooper’s wide beam stun phaser blast and drove her fist into his torso on a trajectory that would have caused her blade to intersect his heart and spine. Adriel rolled forward into a handstand and cart wheeled to her left. Her foot nearly intersected another trooper’s grav gun, but the sim-room’s computers recorded the fact that she would have had a psionic blade extended in normal combat that would have cleanly cleaved the weapon in half.
As she continued to wheel in front of him, Adriel commanded a quick bust from her AG fields. The downward side of her arc terminating, laughing at gravity, she extended her right arm as she was buoyed upwards, dragging it across the trooper’s shield in a diagonal slash that would have opened him like a tin can. Alighting on the wall with only the slightest sound, she sprang off of it on a pre planned and carefully thought out trajectory. Passing through the ranks of the squad still left ‘alive’, careful not to intersect with cones of their stun beams, her nonexistent blades dispatched a further four troopers in rapid succession including their Sergeant. By this time her blink drives were starting to power out, so she dropped out to give them time to recharge as she softly landed in the upper corner behind the remaining two troopers. With her feet planted on opposing walls and a hand on the roof of the room, Adriel contemplated sending a psionic blade arcing through the other two troopers before they fully took stock of what had happened. But that was against the rules of this encounter, so she didn’t do anything. She was confident in her EW masking her position sufficiently to allow her to dispatch the remaining two squad members before they could get her. She tensed like a coiled spring as she prepared for her final attack run.
Suddenly, a voice blared out from the room’s com speakers. “KNOCK IT OFF! KNOCK IT OFF!”
Surprised at the sudden termination of a test that was proceeding so smoothly, Adriel reached out with her telepathic senses. The savage primal force of the emotions she encountered caused her to blink in surprise. Shock mingled with considerable pain, but overriding all in most of the techs in the control room was a near blinding torrent of rage. The voice spoke the cause even as she sifted it from the stormy sea of rampant emotions. “Terra’s been attacked!”
- - -
By Jeremy ‘HappyTarget’ S.
- - -
7And when He had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, "Come and see." 8And I looked, and behold, a pale horse, and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.
Revelation 6:7-8
- - -
In the classical antiquities of Earth, the myth of the Furies, the Erinnyes, three sister goddesses of punishment arose. It was said that they made their home in Erebus, the darkest pit in the Underworld. There, they tortured those who had yet to atone for their sins relentlessly and without mercy. No prayer, no sacrifice, no tears could move them nor protect the hapless object of their persecution.
It was only natural then that the Terran Empire would willingly embrace and expand upon that myth for its own designs over 25 centuries later. The Empire created its own Furies, and it didn’t limit them to only three beings (Tisiphone, Alecto and Megarea) like the Ancient Greeks had either. Imperial Scientists made as many as were required to keep the many enemies of the Empire in check, both within and without.
Immensely powerful, their loyalty to the Empire unquestioning, anyone marked for elimination would find not a hint of hesitation when the inevitable finally arrived. Just enough of their existence was leaked by select sources in within the Empire to foster a healthy fear that soon became sufficient to keep the less desperate or greedy among the Empire’s ranks in line all on its own. Some might have said that with their purpose fulfilled, they should have been disposed of and forgotten, for their powers could pose a deadly threat should the Furies become corrupted. But the Empire wasn’t one to cast off useful tools, and the Furies had proven most capable and loyal assets.
So they remain, the unwavering guardians of the Empire, ceaseless stalking death for those who are deemed its enemies. If you believe in a higher being and an afterlife, pray to whatever deity you worship for forgiveness and a chance at continued existence. Should you cross paths with a Fury, you will find none of either.
But what happens when you take the next step beyond what a Fury is?
That is where the Shades reside, creatures virtually unaffected by time or death, like shadows of shadows, these tireless predators have only one purpose: to kill…
- - -
Stardate: 01092387
Location: Darwin Research Station, Terran Empire Space
“I still say that this is a mistake!” The elderly woman wearing a white lab coat argued with her protégé turned superior, shaking her head and causing her gray hair to dance. “You’re pushing things to far, to fast! If something goes wrong we’ll have no way of controlling her! She could kill us all with a mere thought!” Her blue eyes were fearful and she wrung her wrinkled, age spotted hands together in consternation. The almost dazzlingly lit room caused the polished silver and obsidian Sword and Earth emblem of the Terran Empire to gleam brightly on her coat’s right breast. But the emblem wasn’t normal, diverging from the customary forms in a singular and significant way. The distinctive double helix of DNA entwined the sword, denoting the elderly woman as part of the Empire’s eugenics program.
Her fearful eyes, still bright with a keen intellect despite her advanced age, kept darting back to the artificial womb that dominated the center of the sterile white and stainless steel laboratory. It was a vertical transparent cylinder with white caps on either end connected to the floor and ceiling with a veritable maze of pipes and cables. Monitors and control consoles ringed the circular room, all designed to provide extensive data and direction for what was going on inside the pinkish fluid filled tank.
Within the womb resided a lump of differentiated cells still no bigger than her clenched fist, but already distinguishable as humanoid. Human it most certainly was not. Not anymore at least. Oh sure it had a lot of the basics in common, but the scientists working at this top secret laboratory complex had pushed humanity far beyond anything God or Darwin likely intended. Mutation of innate human abilities as well as cautious but liberal splicing of useful alien DNA had allowed for the re-emergence of Homo Sapiens Supernus following their demise at the end of Earth’s final world war over 330 years ago. However, by her line of thinking, that cluster of cells growing in the artificial womb could well end up becoming Homo Sapiens Invictus and prove the undoing of man. Minor modifications were one thing. Adding a resistance here, an enhanced ability there, all strictly controlled and monitored for all to real security concerns, was a minor thing given the tools now available to mankind. Activating the largely dormant and drastically underdeveloped but none the less innate ESP abilities humanity possessed had started the Fury program. They were even more tightly controlled and supervised, for their powers were of the like that Khan Noonien Singh and his ilk could only dream about.
“Come now Dr. Kingsley, you worry too much.” The room’s sole other occupant replied with an almost serene calmness that she had possessed since she and Sara had first met. “Sure she will be the most powerful one yet. But that is why she will also have the most aggressive routines of loyalty and obedience yet devised implanted within her to ensure she remains controlled. And she should pair up rather nicely with Subject X 3139 when the time comes for the bonding.”
Subject X 3139. An anomaly that should have been terminated as soon as they unforeseen and uncontrolled mutation occurred, Sara Kingsley thought. Yet then, as now, she was overruled by her superior. It hadn’t always been like this. In the beginning, many years ago now, Sara had been the chief scientist of this laboratory, with Dr. Toby Russell a young lab assistant fresh out of Starfleet Medical. But now, thanks to a remarkable string of successes that Dr. Russell achieved on her own after absorbing Sara’s experience, the apprentice had become the master and had been elevated to the highest position inside the lab. A sudden thought struck Sara, and she cursed herself for not seeing it before. Subject X 3139 was no anomaly at all. She has orcastrated this entire thing from the beginning just so she could push the envelope. I always knew she was reckless, not caring how results were obtained, merely that they WERE obtained in the most timely fashion possible.. But this was beyond reckless. A Fury, even unpaired, was too powerful an entity to cavalierly increase its abilities. Baby steps were required to ensure that control was guaranteed to keep abreast of the increases in their capabilities. Subject X 3139 and Subject X 4028 were both showing signs of being considerably more than a baby step over their fellows, even at this early stage in their development.
“And regardless, the go-ahead has already been given from the Terran Council and Section 31 Chief Directorate as per my recommendation.” Toby continued, cutting off Sara’s thoughts. “As such, we go ahead weather it offends your delicate sensibilities or not. For progress, one sometimes has to take risks. If Robert Oppenheimer hadn’t taken any risks, we might never have unlocked nuclear power.”
And we all know how well those same risks turned out during the limited nuclear strikes of WWIII don’t we. But she kept her thoughts her own and instead said, “I would still like to lodge a formal complaint that I think that this research is to dangerous to pursue at this time.”
“Fine, lodge it. You’ll see how wrong you are when X 3139 and X 4028 become operational.”
- - -
Stardate: 02232387
Location: Darwin Research Station, Terran Empire Space
“Again Adriel, this time no showing off. Just complete the objectives as outlined.” A voice said in her head. It sounded vaguely exasperated, like a parent with long experience trying to control an unruly and willful child.
Her enhanced senses told her that her previous objectives had already been beamed away. Glowing blue eyes danced with mirth, but otherwise her features remained unchanged. Although she was actually only a few weeks old, implanted memories similar to those used in Imperial Starfleet Clones allowed her to at least understand the concepts of a joke even if they didn’t allow for her to fully implement the associated emotions. Being a telepath helped in this respect somewhat, for she had a wealth of data sources on emotional responses she could analyze and absorb that no Imp Drone ever could. But even so, she was a definite novice when it came to expressing emotions. Commanding people to shut down their voluntary muscle functions had most emphatically NOT been part of her assigned objectives. She had done that extra bit all her own because a stray thought from one of the techs supervising the tests indicated he would find it funny. New people were beamed into the mock up street. She could sense their nervousness. They well knew that they were to be used as training aids for Furies, and that scared them.
Rightly so, she thought. If I felt like it, everyone of them would die in heartbeat. The power that was at her beck and call was chilling, even to her sometimes. She could kill without remorse or regret true, but during her down time she often was scared of what she could do with the most casual of thoughts. That was likely part of the programming Mother had given her to keep her in line. But knowledge of that didn’t make it any less forbidding to her. Fear was one of the few emotions she had completely mastery over, which she thoroughly regretted. Especially when others thoughts said that the rest of the spectrum of emotions were infinitely preferable. The emotion love stood out most clearly, by most accounts it was very conductive to pleasure.
“Go.” Mother’s voice said inside her head, and Adriel continued to study her stunted emotions as she proceeded with her assigned task. She reached out with her mind and began to walk down the simulated street. Furies sometimes had to be covert, and this was a test of her ability to be just that. Which was why when she made every person on the street loose control of their voluntary muscles, it sort of ruined the exercise.
Subtle proddings threaded their way through chinks in mental defenses most telepaths would never have even found. Once inside their minds, she set about actively deleting any notice of her presence. The crowd subtly parted to make way for her on an unconscious level. Even as her mind reached out and worked its magic over the biological systems in her path, her nanites swarmed out and set up remote linkups with the technological systems. Most security systems were closed loops to prevent just what she was doing. If one could hack into a security net, one could actively delete oneself from the scanner reports and could fully control any automated systems tied into the net. Furies got around this by using their nanites to make a remote connection to a closed system. With the recent introduction of Borg based technology and the bounty of information store-housed in the captured Borg databases, they made dominating the past generation of computer software available to the general public almost child’s play. Non-Terran systems were much harder to predict, for they were very likely all to alien in nature to allow for easy compatibility. But the nanites were clever little beasties, and they executed their primary function very well.
She passed down the street without a single person nor a single sensor taking note of the girl that appeared seven or eight years old passing like a specter through their midst. After slipping through them, she turned and stared directly at the lone camera she hadn’t dominated.
- - -
In the distant control room, a message appeared on the monitors. Dr. Toby Russell blinked as her progeny casually overrode the screen’s assigned function. Her powers were advancing every bit as fast as she had hoped, and Section High command and the Terran Council Special Projects Oversight Committee had taken a keen interest in her as well. “Yes Adriel, I am satisfied. All right, let’s proceed to the next set of objectives…”
Stardate: 03052387
Location: Darwin Research Station, Terran Empire Space
Today’s testing would revolve around her upgraded combat speed systems and her melee efficiency. She was given the next generation of what is colloquially known as ‘bullet time’ when she was made, and now she is finally going to be able to test it in simulated combat. Whereas previous versions of bullet time revolved around speeding up a body’s response time to allow for vastly increased movement speeds and reaction times, there was an upper limit to just how far the physical body could be pushed with such systems. Adriel’s systems don’t have this problem, as they involve speeding up a small pocket of space time around herself, allowing her to operate at very fast speeds while the world seemingly slows around her. Of course this brought about an entirely new set of problems in that she aged seemingly much faster to the rest of the universe whenever she enters that state. While this can be controlled somewhat with standard regenerative therapies, she was fortunate that Section was also working on the long-gev treatments and chose to make them available to their new and promising project. They allowed Adriel to remain very close to her apparent physical age even after extended periods of using what she had ‘heard’ the techs call ‘blink time’.
Adriel took up position inside the mock up building, her extensive stealth systems operating at peak efficiency. The opposing force’s power armor sensor suites shouldn’t detect her presence until they are right on top of her position. She waited silently as a grave. Patience is one of her strong suits, and she could make a rather believing impression of a shadow without much difficulty. Her enhanced hearing picked up the whisper quiet approach of an op-for scout drone’s AG drive field interacting with the air. The fly sized forward recon element was a vital component of any capable infantry force’s battle plan. The op-for is playing things cautiously, sending in their mechanical spies to try and flush out my location. she thought to herself. Although the drone’s sensors are much more limited than a suit’s, they were being used in sufficient numbers to augment this deficiency. It was evident that one would eventually nail down her position, so she brought some of her previously dormant EW sub-systems online. They already know I’m in the building, so complete stealth no longer serves me, time to give them some targets of my choosing. Three false signatures of varying strengths, but all greater than her actual stealthed one, appear inside the building as her own drones come online.
They are carefully placed so that the enemy will have to pass through terrain of her choosing to get to them. She let the enemy’s robotic spies get close enough to get a sniff of her false signatures, then her other set of drones activated. These are not EW decoys like her first set. These are hunter/killers, and their light weaponry reaches out and smashes the defenseless scouts with ease. Little more than a needle sized grav-gun with sensors, datalink and AG drives, the hunter/killer drones are designed specifically to eliminate enemy drones, and they are decidedly efficient in that task.
Adriel’s passive sensors detect the near immediate flare of activity outside as the op-for’s suit sensors come online and bathe the building in EM and subspace searchlights. She largely ignored them, for she was secure in her stealthing’s ability to hide her at this range. She found a crack in one of the op-for trooper’s mental defenses and slithered through it to read his thoughts. They had only been told that they were to execute a simple breach and clear of the building against a lone opponent who was armed with melee weaponry only. That explained why they dropped a power armored infantry man’s usual phobia against continuous use of their suits active sensors in exchange for the raw power active sensor sweeps provided. In the grand scheme of things, she was considered an easy target.
- - -
Her Mother knew enough about standard infantry tactics to understand that the op-for team were drastically underestimating Adriel. But then they weren’t in possession of adequate intelligence as to her true capabilities. When it came to an actual op situation, only a handful of Section 31 personnel would have access to such intelligence, and so the troopers stumbled about in ignorance of the death that was stalking them even now.
- - -
At least they’re showing some level of sense Adriel thought, for only six of the op-for platoon were running on active sensors. The others were likely using tight beam burst coms to limit her ability to listen in. If they remained within LOS of each other, they could even use old fashioned laser coms to virtually eliminate her ability to tap into their com net. They entered the building and began to spread out and split off into groups. Their own hunter killer drones picked off her remote sensor drones steadily, but she was still able to track their movements thanks to what leaked past their mental barriers. True telepaths she had to work to read, but no non-telepath could possess sufficient wards to block out her abilities.
The first group approached her room, and the trooper in the lead was one of those whose sensors were active. Adriel activated her second tier of EW, casting a more inviting target on the other side of the room while maximizing the degradation factor of her jammers. Totally motionless, she was ready to strike at her targets even as the first flash bang arced through the door. The ball sized grenade was designed to both blind, deafen and shut down voluntary muscle impulses within a fairly large volume. It also carried a concentrated EMP like effect that while having only minimal effects on biological tissues was thoroughly capable of at least temporarily shutting down modern high-tech devices. Adriel’s systems were immune and hardened enough that the grenade did virtually nothing other than cause a slight hazing of her visual quality as her augmented vision shifted to other levels unaffected by the primarily EW spectrum flash of the grenade. Auditory augments blocked out the raucous acoustic assault even as it began, the noise dying half formed inside her ears.
The combat grid fell over her vision, telling her distances and threat values of her unwitting prey as they closed on the heels of the flash bang’s explosion. They did so with the rapidity of well trained troops, but they were still limited to the maximum response time and slightly enhanced speed their human bodies and power armor provided them respectively. The trooper wore the armored carapace of current TE frontline power armor, the arms slightly longer than looked normal because it was easier to fully armor gimbal gauntlets than individual fingers. The ‘head’ of the power armor was actually above the wearer’s head, included mainly to provide a more human looking figure than anything else. The wearer’s head was actually safely enclosed in the armor’s ‘cockpit’ about a half a foot down from the ablative armored shoulder blades of the suit in about the upper chest area of the suit. The armor was in standard configuration, allowing for the greatest range of movement while still offering full NRBC (Nano, Radiological, Biological, Chemical), fragment and glancing hit protection. More armor could be added to allow for greater survival of even direct hits once the shields failed, but that configuration greatly decreased the gracefulness of an armored infantryman in exchange for only slightly greater protection.
Like most humans, their instincts commanded the op-for’s troopers to first look at eye level, then down and lastly upwards, for that is the order of threats early man had been programmed to deal with. There were very few avian predators on the home world of Humanity, and none had posed much of a threat to mankind. Adriel used this inbred bias to her advantage. Dropping from the ceiling after a mental command to the molecular bonds extruded through her gloves and the soles of her boots, she engaged blink time.
Not even a heavy power armor suit would have protected the trooper from an angel of death dropping down on him from above. He and his fellows seemed to freeze in mid stride as the blink drive spooled up. A targeting grid fell across her vision, highlighting the squad’s exploitable weak points, movement vectors, probable weapons and defenses status and showing her the cylinder and cones of their weapons field of fire. Since this was a training exercise, Adriel kept her twin two foot long psionic blades sheathed. The simulation room’s many high speed computers and plethora of monitoring devices recorded her clenched fists smashing down on either side of the first trooper’s ‘helmet’. If the blades had been active, they would have criss-crossed slightly below where the infantryman’s head would be. Pulling her fists off of the now sizzling conformal shield bubble around the luckless infantryman, Adriel tucked and rolled forward in mid air till she was a full 240 degrees past her start point. Planting her feet on the trooper’s back, she sprang off of his shield and scissored her arms together in a blow that would have under different circumstances cut the second trooper in half at the waist. Her hands ignored the slight tingling sensation as they touched the active shield. She dropped out of the blink, transferring her momentum to the second trooper and causing him to topple backward towards the other seven men in the squad now crowding the hallway leading to her room.
Reactivating the blink, she used the now stationary platform her second victim to leap at the next two. They were still trying to process why a small waif thin bundle of destruction had appeared before them on the falling form of their comrade, but they had already instinctively twitched their grav guns towards her position. To bad they were far to slow to do much more than that. With her trajectory leading between the next two troopers, Adriel extended her arms outward for a phantom strike that would have cut them both in half at the belly button. Arcing through the air, she hit the ground and somersaulted forward, driving her fists solidly into the upper torsos of the next two troopers. She dropped out of blink as she did so, allowing the two struck troopers time to fly backward into their comrades before she sprang into the air and reactivated the blink. The two remaining troopers were frozen in place with shouts of surprise dying half formed in their throats as the universe around her slowed to a crawl from Adriel’s perspective. With their downed fellows tangled up amongst them, temporarily blocking their attack lanes and hampering their movement, the next two were combat ineffective. The squad’s Sergeant was not so incapacitated and had even managed to squeeze off a shot at her. The simulated bullet was nothing more than a low powered tractor beam and hologram emplaced and controlled by the rooms computers. Physical contact would cause only mild discomfort as this was only a simulation, but in her current unarmored/unshielded state it would count as a ‘kill shot if it connected with her.
Her takeoff had caused her to pirouette in mid air, and her outstretched arms whipped by the still forms of the troopers with phantom blows that would have decapitated both of them. After the kill strike, she used the ‘dead’ trooper’s shoulders as springboards and leapt upwards. Tucking into a ball, she somersaulted over the simulated bullet with the grace a ballet dancer would envy. She landed on the ground, with only the squad’s Sergeant ‘alive’ and directly before her. Dropping down to all fours, Adriel’s foot swung outward in a vicious arc she deliberately slowed so as not to snap the Sergeant’s armored, exoskeleton encased legs like dry twigs. Just as the blow was about to connect she dropped out of blink. The sergeant had just enough time to realize he was falling from the leg sweep before his armored back hit the floor. Even as the fall jarred him, his suit’s sensors saw a lightly armored too-small figure seemingly fade into focus out of thin air above his prostrate form. Clad in a black, Ninja-esque jumpsuit that totally covered her, the only distinguishing feature being luminous blue eyes through a slit in her face covering. A fist moved impossibly fast and caused a starburst of interference when it struck his shields square in the center of his helmet’s field of view. The seasoned officer jerked back in shocked surprise within his suit even as its systems died save for the termination message scrolling across the primary display. In less than five seconds, his entire squad had been killed by something that was definitely more capable than he had been led to believe.
- - -
The other two groups stopped their progression to their waypoints as their datalink dispassionately informed them of the ‘death’s’ of their comrades. The speed at which they blinked out denoted that they had been drastically under informed of just what they would be facing.
The closest one to their now ‘deceased’ comrades’ position was at the far end of a long hall at the top of a set of stairs. Their sensor drones picked up an approaching target coming up the stairs behind them even as they began to die in small flashes of light. Hunter killer drones were doing their duty, blinding the remote eyes of the squad as their prey approached them. In an eye blink, the hunter had become the hunted, and the troopers were already down a third of their number. The squad fell into a firing line behind what cover the simulated building had. The debris and ancient furniture wouldn’t provide much more than visual cover to modern weaponry, but combined with their armor’s EW suites and shields, it could provide a precious few seconds of extra time when their enemy was confused as to their actual location. Mechanical thumbs flicked the troopers grav gun’s setting selector levers downward, and the weapon’s parallel mounted phaser barrels set on wide beam stun flared sighing cones of energetic blue light towards the only lane of approach open to their quarry.
Adriel’s augmented senses picked up the speeding phaser blasts ahead of her as she topped the stairs, automatically dropping her into blink to give her a chance at dodging the beams propagating at the speed of light. Just the same, it was only her superior reflexes and rate of action that allowed her to dodge the expanding cones hurtling towards her. Springing straight up, she rotated her body 90 degrees towards the troopers’ position even as she rolled so she was facing the ceiling. In a heartbeat, with a virtually subconscious thought to activate them, the variable molecular bonding augments in her feet and hands reached out through her boots and gloves to latch onto the roof like countless atom sized Velcro hooks. Wired as she was, her augments read her thoughts, saw her intent and acted accordingly. While she could control them directly, combat was much smoother when she didn’t have to ‘think’ about every individual action and could instead concentrate on dealing death. She had been designed as a weapon after all, and the scientists of the Terran Empire were particularly adept at making weapons of destruction over the centuries. Practice makes perfect after all.
She scuttled across the roof of the room, the attention of the troopers below her still riveted on the top of the stairs because from their perspective they had only fired split seconds before. The molecular bonds let go and she leapt into the sky. Rolling as she flew, she extended an arm and clenched her fist. Her first target would have fallen to the floor in two pieces thanks to a diagonal slash through his torso had her attack been anything more than a simulation. She continued her dive until she met the floor. Tucking into a ball, she somersaulted forward underneath the next closest trooper’s wide beam stun phaser blast and drove her fist into his torso on a trajectory that would have caused her blade to intersect his heart and spine. Adriel rolled forward into a handstand and cart wheeled to her left. Her foot nearly intersected another trooper’s grav gun, but the sim-room’s computers recorded the fact that she would have had a psionic blade extended in normal combat that would have cleanly cleaved the weapon in half.
As she continued to wheel in front of him, Adriel commanded a quick bust from her AG fields. The downward side of her arc terminating, laughing at gravity, she extended her right arm as she was buoyed upwards, dragging it across the trooper’s shield in a diagonal slash that would have opened him like a tin can. Alighting on the wall with only the slightest sound, she sprang off of it on a pre planned and carefully thought out trajectory. Passing through the ranks of the squad still left ‘alive’, careful not to intersect with cones of their stun beams, her nonexistent blades dispatched a further four troopers in rapid succession including their Sergeant. By this time her blink drives were starting to power out, so she dropped out to give them time to recharge as she softly landed in the upper corner behind the remaining two troopers. With her feet planted on opposing walls and a hand on the roof of the room, Adriel contemplated sending a psionic blade arcing through the other two troopers before they fully took stock of what had happened. But that was against the rules of this encounter, so she didn’t do anything. She was confident in her EW masking her position sufficiently to allow her to dispatch the remaining two squad members before they could get her. She tensed like a coiled spring as she prepared for her final attack run.
Suddenly, a voice blared out from the room’s com speakers. “KNOCK IT OFF! KNOCK IT OFF!”
Surprised at the sudden termination of a test that was proceeding so smoothly, Adriel reached out with her telepathic senses. The savage primal force of the emotions she encountered caused her to blink in surprise. Shock mingled with considerable pain, but overriding all in most of the techs in the control room was a near blinding torrent of rage. The voice spoke the cause even as she sifted it from the stormy sea of rampant emotions. “Terra’s been attacked!”
- - -
. So I entered "Terran Empire - Unity" into Google, and was directed here. I was thrilled to discover a couple short stories set in the universe. (and that you were still alive,