SmackDown: MadMike's Revenge!

Round 2, Dudecore: Claymore - @bloodsword

Claymore

by bloodsword

Deep in the heart of EVIL, Inc., a secret agent contorted his body to get past the red laser tripwires. If he'd even so much as breathed on them he would have been immediately vaporized. He somersaulted beneath the crotch of an RDU—robot defence unit—that was in sleep mode. He cooed to the crying kittens, thus destroying the security's CARE Protocol.

He wasn't worried. As the best agent in GOOD Corp.'s intergalactic ranks, this mission was a cakewalk.

Beat EVIL's ancient—albeit extensive—security system, hack into the data vault, steal the cipher, assassinate the head of EVIL, get out, and be home in time to catch the new episode of Lunar Coronation Street.

That was when he found himself locked in the gas-spectrometer room. His stomach trembled.

Rule one, he thought to himself. Never eat Venusian tacos before a mission. Should've known better.

He plugged up and forced himself not to breathe as he maneuvered through the room and out the door. His years of training put to good use.

Unfortunately things went tits up right then and there. He turned to see fifteen RDUs aiming their .50-cal cannons at all his tender places. How the hell had this gone wrong?

And then it dawned on him.

No.

Moving slower than a space slug, he lowered his hand to his waist and tapped his comms unit. And seconds before the RDUs blew him to pieces, he screamed out the coded message to the boys and girls back home in High Command: "Fuck you, MadMikeMarsbergen!"

Clay 'The Claymore' Severn frowned as he slowly unjacked the storage chip from the direct neural interlink embedded into his skull.

"This is what they sent you?" he quietly asked, referring to the vid he had just watched as he stared down at the chip in his hand. Picking up his voice via a conductive mandibular implant, his nano-communicator sent his encoded question deep into the twisting ether. It didn't take long for the ether to answer back.

"They didn't send it, Severn. We pulled it directly from Agent Talos' fragmenting mind via his interlink," a soft voice replied. The voice was decoded and transmitted directly into his inner ear by the nano, beyond any eavesdropper's ability to overhear.

"We know it looks like something out of an old school spy vid from the 2030's. Most of it is gibberish, background noise created by Talos himself in an attempt to protect his mind as they tortured him. But we think some of it is encoded information that he managed to download before they caught him."

Severn's frown deepened as he continued to stare at the chip. Encoded information? How in Ganymede were they going to figure out which was which?

"If you're asking me to winnow the wheat from the chaff, you've got the wrong agent, Central," he murmured, closing his fist around the chip. "I'm the blunt instrument, remember?"

"How can we forget?" the voice replied, its tone wry. "You remind us every time you blow something up."

Before Severn could frame a suitable retort, the holographic readout dominating the forward panel of his transport pod began flashing an alert.

"Hold that thought, Central," he muttered as he began to work his control interface. "I'm entering Earth space. I need to lockdown."

There was a time, as recently as a couple hundred years ago, where entering Earth space didn't require security lockdowns and communications blackouts. That was because all of the inhabitants of the Solar System were on the same side.