Forge of Vengeance
There, a huge white building, its columns like the skeletal legs of some ancient desiccated beast. Its domed roof, perhaps once an observatory, but if so long since whitewashed into opacity. The lawn, disturbingly emerald, but lush and longer than reason could dictate, led all the way to the deceptively thin perimeter fence. Deceptive due to the electrostatic ambience that invisibly straddled the flimsy railings, noticeable only by an abundance of live insects on the one side, and a profusion of dead ones on the other. It was the dark, dark of night. A subtle glow came off the lawn, reflected by the shallow flowerbeds and well trained trees on its perimeter. The constant infrared and ultraviolet security scanners resulted in not only a flawless security response record, but also plants that grew twenty-four hours a day, every day, and always emitted an eerie pale blue aura. The most illumination visible in the human spectrum was cast by the floodlights that lit the Obelisk, a testament to arrogance and self-pride. The pond that accompanied it seemed suited to little other than making a big splash if the thing ever fell. Within the East Wing, shaded from the shine of the Obelisk and The Glow of the lawn was an excessively large office. Shielded from nuclear blasts, and other nasty things, a scrawny little man with a baritone voice was shouting with all his might at a much larger man, who shouted back in a deep bass using very little of his maximum volume.. “We just need a little more time!!. and money.” His voice bordered on the verge of unmanly shrillness. “Yeah, more time! HAH! You’re THREE YEARS overdue!” The big General guffawed with enough disgust to shake the red oak of his desk. How could this bespectacled nerd muster the nerve to ask for even more time! “And money? You want MORE money! Oh, that’s rich! Thirty billion dollars is already three times your original contract, and you ain’t given us shit!” The General started to tuck his thumbs in his belt, casually hid the fact that his paunch then wouldn’t let them get out, and swivelled in his chair to look out of the window. Looking at the back of the greasy red leather chair, the scientist swayed irritably from foot to foot. He was of course technically a Professor, but he could stare down anyone who called him that, as he thought it made him sound too old. He didn’t need six years of study to tell him this wasn’t going all too well, unlike the years it had taken him to qualify and become the US head of ‘Development for Military Nanotechnology’. He’d been warned what would happen if he ever had a lapse in conversation and mentioned his work to an outsider. He found it hard to make such exciting things all day and refrain from telling anyone about it who wasn’t there at the time. So he told his staff what had happened, even though they had been present when he did it, generally about 20 minutes ago. Dragging his mind back to the present and the very pressing problems he was facing, the Project Head knew he HAD to keep this man interested, as severed funding for government projects usually had other things severed too. “B…but sir! The Nano-rats! We can barely kill them now!” He gave a brief explanation as to why he hadn’t produced a successful human/nanite sybiote, along the lines of rats and humans being identical in terms of physiology, but human subconscious minds being much more active in terms of involuntary activations. The results were, apparently, interesting. Interesting involving a mop, he reminded himself. Now, the General was not a cruel man, but from the scientist’s point of view this may be debateable. Nonetheless, the General always felt good about himself when terminating Projects and saving taxpayers’ money, mainly because he could then channel the funds into his own pocket for a couple of months, before fully severing all ties with a Project. “You have no useable results and no sign of the money and resources I funnelled into you!” He swung his chair back to face the scientist, who gave him a puppy-dog-eyes look. “Stop that! It’s unmanly. And get your worthless ass outta here! You have two hours to clear any personal effects from your labs. DISMISSED!” Now the scientist didn’t have a military record, but he took the sudden coldness of the big man’s shoulder to mean it was time to leave. Sullenly he was escorted out past dozens of burly suited guards, and ejected via the back way. They were kind enough not to toss him bodily out a window, but despite being gently placed onto his feet at the door, he still didn’t feel entirely at ease with the situation. Something bad was going to happen… From a nondescript warehouse seven miles west of him, an imposing convoy of four black armoured trucks and two APCs lumbered into the night. Sixty-four Operatives, four Sergeants. From a side road leading to an expansive estate, turned a hard tuned, ferocious sports car, screaming and spitting into line with the convoy. Dejectedly loping to his beaten pickup, the researcher clambered into the driver’s seat and keyed the ignition. Nothing happened. He could happily make little robots to repair an organic creature from within, but the engine on his old truck was beyond him, simply because it was so under-complex. Calmly stepping out of the car, he walked slowly to the bed at its rear, and removed a four-foot steel pipe form the webbing straps that held it. Proceeding to the front of the vehicle, he carefully lifted the hood, swung his arms back, and pounded the crap out of the engine with the pipe. Calmly closing the hood and tossing the pipe into the undergrowth, he re-entered the cabin, and turned the key. A quiet grumble acknowledged the starting of the vehicle’s engine. Pulling off into the night, the Head Researcher wondered what was going to happen to all the work he had been doing, all of his personnel. Where would the work be stored? Which departments would his staff be transferred to? What would he be assigned to? And could his Caz come with him? The more he thought about it, the more he worried. He remembered some old things, things government lackeys say around campfires to scare each other on work outings. How if you didn’t work hard and meet your deadlines, you’d be just that: Dead. He could imagine it vividly: the black armoured cars pouring out black armoured troops, to go in and sweep his lab clean. Getting more stressed by the second, he steadily increased his speed until he was pushing nearly sixty mph, fast for his old three-geared pickup. It threatened to rattle apart around him; but the weight lost as bits fell off did make him go slightly faster. With one eye over the wheel, the other glanced at the crumpled paper on his lap, which had his lover’s cell phone number scrawled on it. Dialling into his hand he connected to the voicemail through the hands-free he’d built into his car. “Listen Caz, you really don’t want to be in the lab tonight. I couldn’t get us more time and I think they’re gonna clean out the project, completely. So just go home. No, wait; go to your mom’s house. See you there.” He drove his ancient truck too fast round the last bend, clipped the back left wheel on one of the sentry bollards and, very slowly, the vehicle fell on its side. Coughing up dust and grit he popped his seat belt, then clambered out of the shattered passenger window and hit the ground running. As the Head Researcher reached the rear entrance checkpoint and scrabbled with his numerous ID cards and fingerprint/retina/DNA sampling, a much more casual approach was being taken by the Operatives. Coming out of the black armoured trucks that had borne them, they moved with a fluid purpose, the result of rigorous training and genetic selection. The four Sergeants each took their squads in different directions, to efficiently sweep the complex and kill everything they found. The code pass and samplers on the main doors were sorted in seconds, as the painfully well dressed man had all he needed to unlock them. Various bits and pieces had come out of the shoebox sized space at the rear of his sports car, misleadingly called a trunk. As the blast doors rumbled wider, Alpha Squad set up firing points on either side of a killing zone in the centre of the loading bay. They were to ensure no-one slipped out alive. With practised ease four Operatives removed their thirty-box magazines and tossed them to their nearest compatriots. After attaching the end of an ammo belt from their backpacks to their rifles, they made ready to fire. Deep inside the complex, the research team went about their business. As the only person who knew what was about to happen came in through a back way he’d personally had installed, the Operatives were patiently standing in the main elevator. 219 stood casually, his suit slightly creasing due to his stance. The Bravo Squad Operatives stood stock still, silent, waiting beside him as the elevator trundled down. A sudden shrill piping broke the silence, but not one Operative jumped. 219’s current ringtone was the most recent irritating advertisement theme. “Yes?” Even his speech was well groomed. “No…no, not now, I’m working. I’ll pick you up at eight, wear something… suitable.” The voluptuous voice coming out of the mobile fizzed and faded. “Sorry, I’m just going into a…tunnel. Screw you later.” Sliding the phone shut he palmed it into his left jacket pocket. Silent yet again, the great elevator continued its slow descent. Scrambling through the piles of cables and other ‘useful’ stuff that he’d put back here over the years, he really wished more of it had been sent for scrap. Tapping into his hand again he tried to call Caz a second time, but had no luck, despite the signal boosters that were installed nearby. Cursing his own hoarding instinct, he moved on and down towards the bulk of the base. Deep inside the facility Caz was in no situation to answer her phone, and as Lead Research manager she had to keep things moving, and it was not going as well as it should. Inside an atmospherically sealed test room, a rat was working its way across a series of challenges, each one bringing it closer to its prize: a feeding tray on the far side of the chamber, its every move logged by the banks of computers in the rooms beside it, As she watched, the little furball moved with purpose, more aware of its environs than she was of hers. The nanomachines that her team had developed hung lightly in the air of the rat-run, relaying information to the rodent as a glowing line in its vision, its own nanites overlaying the information onto the rat’s optic pathways. As it passed a checkpoint in the maze, an automated turret deployed from the wall, and firing a single round neatly opened the rat, spilling innards into the air. Unperturbed, it simply yanked itself back to its feet, its guts shrinking back into it as the nanites hauled them into position, then repaired the flesh and bone until it matched their opinion of how the rat should be. Utterly unfazed, Rat66 was allowed to claim its prize, as it needed no enhancement to make short work of a slab of Brie. Caz smiled a little, to herself. The recent Titanium/Boron lattice had been her idea, and it worked like a charm. Powerful induction coils descended inside the test chamber, the magnetic field dragging the now helpless lab rat across the floor and into a magnetic torus that served as its home. As they were so expensive to make, the nano-rats were kept rather than dissected, as the nanites relayed more data than any dissection could ever find, rendering one pointless. At that moment, she heard a dull thump from another part of the base, and all the lights went out. Quiet ‘whups’, reached her ears, impeded by the screams of her co-workers and team mates as they scrambled about in the absolute subterranean darkness. From her position under a computer bank she heard the constant squeal of suppressed rifles, the tinkling of hot brass as the empty cartridges streamed from the weapons. A foot from her face the air felt different on her skin, the smell of Kevlar and leather tannins gently tickling her nostrils. Muffled cries from her right indicated the last one from her team still breathing, and in a hail of silent bullets, that breath stopped too. Flinching from the ejected brass raining onto her legs through the table slits, she bit her tongue and took the burns rather than move and make a noise. The Operatives had combivision HUDs inbuilt into their full face helmet respirators. Passive infra red plus passive and active ultraviolet gave them a clear, but crudely coloured, view of the facility, even in total darkness. This they used to deadly effect as people, who given warning may have been rather resourceful in their self defence, were given no option but to feel around in the dark, and get riddled with bullets. Still moving ever forward, the Head Researcher hadn’t reached the rear entrance when everyone was plunged into darkness. Pulling an emergency penlight from a nightglow station on the wall he quickly found the door and tapped in the three different eight digit codes he’d set for this way in. He moved in near silence with his tiny light being swallowed by the blackness after only a few feet of illumination. The smell of blood, mixed with light oil, clung in his nose. As he reached the main lab he found his staff slaughtered, their blood sluicing into the cleaning system. His poor light led him to an APU console, where he routed limited backup power to the side lights of the corridors. In the darkness Caz prayed. The darkness that saw all her friends killed may just save her life. It was then that the dim side lights kicked in. The smooth inhuman helmet turned to see her, and opened fire. As shock claimed her body, her still conscious brain was trapped in an unresponsive shell; she saw her love leap onto the Operatives back, cracking his faceplate repeatedly with a multimillion dollar microscope. The Operative turned and scraped him off his back with one strong arm and a filing cabinet as leverage. With one boot on the Head researchers’ throat he fired crisp bursts into his kicking body, until he stopped moving. Satisfied with his mission, the Operative took two satchels from his hip and placed one between the two mainframe terminals and one in the animal holding area, before leaving sharply to finish the sweep pattern. All about the base every Operative place his two satchels, filled with a plastic explosive and GSX slurry mixture, before moving to the elevators. As the sergeants formed the men, 219 strolled back into the shaft. Slight scratches showed how he had spent his time, but these healed even stood there, waiting for the final plastic charges to be set on the elevator mechanism. Rat66 was hungry again. Strangely free all of a sudden, he decided to make his move on the large red thing on the ground. As she came closer to lunch, a large cold thing with 4 fingers and a thumb grabbed her. Suddenly she felt very weak, and lost consciousness. Softly dialling into his hand, he wouldn’t give up, not with Caz so close. Maybe he could save the both of them? Calibrating his palmphone, he commandeered 66s nanites to heal him, but trickling over his wounds, they could do little more than seal the arteries. He was still bleeding. As its nanites returned, Rat66 sprung back to its feet and bounded off. Caz was truly doomed now, still aware, but trapped inside a manikin body. Through her unblinkable eyes she saw him use the rats’ nanites to heal himself. ‘How clever he is.’ She thought. “Caz! Caz! You’ll be ok! We’ll go out the back! We can get away!” He was crying now, she could see how he really cared about her. The satchel charge just yards away started beeping. Forcing air through her tortured throat she could barely enunciate the words. “Get…out.” “Get ….them….please….” She died right there, her drying eyes fixed on his. His pain turned to fire, his loss to fuel, and with these he clawed his way across the floor to her. Closing her eyes, he kissed her gently on each eyelid. “Sleep well my darling.” He whispered, then turned and left, despite the gut wrenching pain that wanted him to vomit. Walking tall he strode through the half-lit hallways to the test chamber control room, where he diverted all power to the containment vessels.. Accessing the resource manager he flooded all materials towards the chamber storage, deactivated every safeguard and engaged every limit override. Password? O M E G A A N G E L Nothing would deny him his vengeance. Nothing. Hauling his body onto the raised basin in the centre of the chamber, he hardly noticed the trail of blood he had left behind him. He waited to die, waited to come back, as a fluidic mass of nanomachines rolled over his body, filling the basin to brimming. But nanomachines had never been pioneered with sentient species. As their very operation relies on the governing of the host brain, a dangerously unpredictable thing like a subconscious could have catastrophic consequences. The results with chimps gave research people nightmares. Purest rage flowed through him, into and out of all spectrums of pain and revenge. Conscious and subconscious, unified in their wishes for the first time in the history of a sentient species. This is how his mind died. This is how the nanomachines found it. Through wishing for ultimate vengeance, to destroy those who have wronged him utterly, he became Vengeance Terminal. Fluidic nanites, numbering in their tens of billions, flowed over and into him, a flood of golden power. As they moved, they perfected. From bones to skin they hardened, toughened, reinforced, rebuilt, and repaired. Every slight crack or fissure of his bones became smooth, the calcium bonded to titanium, the frame coming together to take the weight of the most powerful armour ever made. Muscles were built and toned, blood vessels realigned, made more efficient, and his heart completely rebuilt, a long loop of muscle capable of constant flow. Childhood scars and flaws became mere shadows then disappeared from him altogether, his skin perfect and pale, nails short but functional, teeth dragged parallel and polished. His every sense became more than what any man could ever posses by a hundredfold. Body perfected, his mind became unlocked as the nanites used its power for their own ends, and with the simple device in his left hand they blasted a datalink to the nearest network and drained ARPAnet of combat data. Running a million simulations a second, they defined his armoury, the most efficient and flawless killing tools ever conceived. Black and gold armour emerged from the rippling mass of gold on his skin, the Titanium-Boron composite applied in laminates by the nanites, then stripped off and into his body for storage. Whole again, and more so than he’d ever been, he drew his first breath as Vengeance Terminal. As the elevator reached topside, Alpha squad came out of their tactical positioning and formed up with the other three squads. Only one Operative was missing, having been hit by a remote turret after walking into a live test chamber. None of the others had even hesitated to leave him behind, there were plenty more to take his place. Trooping out to the waiting APCs, two of the Sergeants took two dozen men each, loading them onto the four waiting trucks. The remainder was split into two squads of eight, each manning one of the APCs. 219 watched the drones go about their business, and as the Delta Sergeant walked past him towards the slowly closing doors, he turned to follow. “Blast weld the doors. You spread the plastic at the bottom, and I’ll handle the top.” As 219 held out a manicured hand, the Delta Sergeant handed him a foot long cylinder of malleable high explosive, and a coin sized remote detonator. The two story high blast doors shut with a dull clunk as they neared it. With preternatural ease 219 leapt to the top of the doors, his grip secured on the lamp that burned hotly over them. As the Sergeant began smoothing the plastic over the seam where the doors met at the bottom, 219 did the same at the top, making ridged lines that would force the steel together as it exploded, welding the doors closed. His part finished, 219 stuck the penny sized circuit into the centre of the ridges and backflipped neatly away from the doors, landing lightly in his thousand dollar cowboy boots. As he walked back to his sports car, 219 took the detonator from his immaculate trousers, and with great drama held one finger over the first sequenced firing button. As he waited for the Delta Sergeant to climb into an APC, he brushed some imaginary dust from a sleeve, and considered which lurid act to perform upon on his date for the night. As the Operatives were all ready to leave, and he had much more…fun, things to be doing, 219 stroked his thumb along the row of firing buttons. The sequenced blasts sounded as a dull thumbing, getting slowly louder, and not as the sudden earthshaking crack he was expecting. Again he ran his thumb along the row of micro LEDs, but no sounds other than the slow rumble of the elevator reached his perfect ears. With a clank the elevator halted, 219 mashing the detonator in his fist, hammering the buttons to fire the explosives and seal the blast doors, preventing whoever had survived from reaching the outside world. Gesturing to the Bravo Squad Sergeant, he crushed the useless device between his fingers and dropped it, then stamped to his car. The Sergeant took a very similar looking device from his belt and encoded the blast sequence relative to the way the explosives had been set, and with his other hand ordered the Operatives back into firing formation. The door mechanism had been sabotaged from within, but like the similarly tampered elevator, it didn’t stop the ‘Survivor’ from making it out. As 219s screaming engine grew quieter with distance, the blast doors screeched their own tune, as they were effortlessly dragged open. As a man sized shape came into view between the mighty doors, the Sergeant fired the sequenced charges, causing the earth to tremble as deep parts of the complex were explosively remodelled from laboratory to tomb. The charges blew from the furthest parts forward, timed so as not to interrupt the flow of gasses and shockwaves from one blast to the next, causing the maximum damage from the tactically placed satchels. As the lift locks were blown to pieces, the elevator plummeted back into the explosions, sucking air in like a plunger, causing a massive back blast of flame to come roaring past the lone figure as he stepped slowly forwards. The door charges fired, sending a corona of golden debris into his back, ripping the soft black long coat and sending it fluttering around him. The Operatives obeyed their standing orders and opened fire, the pulses of burst fire whupping through the night before slamming into the man square on. Unperturbed, he quickened his pace, the shells merely scratching his skin, with thin golden flashes where the paltry wounds healed in seconds. As their target seemed impervious to small arms, and was getting closer, Bravo Sergeant had the APCs open fire, the 20mm explosive shells tearing chunks out of the tarmac as the gunners their walked fire towards their target. Pirouetting aside their fire, Vengeance Terminal forged his armour, golden fire racing over his skin in hexagonal tracks. Fluidic titanium welled from its storage, carried by the nanites and applied as impenetrable armour over his skin. Every joint gained servos and actuators to boost his already augmented strength and speed. As his armour completed itself, VT halted. Around him, invisibly hanging in the air was his nanohalo of sensors. They could tell him anything about his opposition that he could wish to know, and right now, he knew they had nothing that could even scratch his armour. Just over the small of his back, a pulsing golden fire of nanites carefully assembled his mighty pistols. Firing huge armour piercing explosive bullets, and loaded to fire up to 20 between reloads; they easily outperformed the twin autocannons mounted on the APCs. Drawing his gigantic sidearms, VT ran towards the Operative formation, which kept firing until the thundercracks of VTs first shells tore them apart, limbs flying sideways away from nearly vaporised bodies. Leaping towards the nearest formation, VT landed neatly, with an Operative crushed beneath heel. Attaching his Cannons to the armour on the small of his back, VT grabbed an Operatives helmet in each hand and proceeded to swing them in deadly arcs, their own light armour acting as ballast weight as it smashed into the others. By now the other Squads had disembarked the trucks themselves and opened fire on VT, killing their own men with the ricochets as their shells pinged of his black and golden form. Now in melee range, VT forged his Nanosword, a six foot long titanium razor. The double edged blade nanite sharpened to an atoms width, it passed through the Kevlar and composite armour of the Operatives as if it moved through air, the immense pressure causing such heating as to cauterise most wounds. As the last of the Operatives on foot fell into five pieces, the APC gunners resumed fire as VT strode towards them, Nanoblade glinting iridescent in the moonlight. Holding the formidable blade in his right hand, he swung with infinite precision and separated the turret from the vehicle. The cut edges of homogenous steel flashed briefly, incandescently hot. Effortlessly lifting the armoured turret, he shook loose the half-Operative still clinging to the insides. Linking to the firing computer he took aim at the four trucks, who had tried to escape whilst he was distracted, and unleashed a hail of high explosive rounds, ripping through their soft aluminium frames and shredding the engine blocks, blasting them apart from within. Finished with the trucks, VT flipped the turret and jammed it upside down into the opening where it had come from, then locked the trigger. With his ever sharpening nanosword, he leapt onto the now fleeing and only remaining vehicle. Thrusting the blade straight down he cut an arc though the rear of the APC, letting the engine fall out in pieces. As the tracks grumbled to a halt, VT flipped onto the ground in front of the AFV, grabbed the glacis plate with enough force to mould the steel to his fingers, and flung the twenty ton vehicle back into the wreckage of its allies. His nanoblade still drawn, VT set about deconstructing those who had taken his life apart. Job done, VT considered the shards and fragments of cooling metal arrayed in front of him. His anger at those who had wronged him had not dulled. ‘These men just carried out someone’s orders,’ He thought ‘But they had still decided to do it, and deserved exactly the end they had met.’ With such an immense rage unabated, VT unfolded his freshly forged wings, and with his nanosenses felt the feel of the wind on them, just as he would have felt it upon his skin. Easily holding an APCs turret in his left hand, he deployed a small but immensely powerful jet turbine from the armour on each of his calves, and together with the larger engine between his shoulder blades, lifted off into the night. With armour bonded to his skin, Vengeance Terminal could never cry. But as he flew quietly through the evening sky, golden droplets ran down his faceplate, being absorbed into it again near his chin. Later that night, as the General had received his report and debriefs from 219, and thought it time to go home. Hearing a high whine, he offhandedly considered how dumb the President was to authorise flights over the White House. Any idiot with a microlight and a cause could bomb him whilst he slept. With an almighty smash and tinkling of glass, a large metal-armoured object came through the roof. From his seat, the General leant forward slightly to get a better view, before pressing the intercom to talk to his secretary. “Call a cleanup crew, and tell the guys a DARPA to be more careful!” He stood up and shuffled past his huge desk to get a better view. It certainly looked familiar, like an APC turret. But he didn’t see them from this angle very often. With a thought VT sent the firing signal to the turret computer, ordering it to fire for effect until empty, causing the turret to spew forth explosives that devastated the room. As an infinitely small part of his rage dulled, VT pitied the cleaning crew.
All images and text copyright Nathan Davis 2005
