The disruptor was up, the range finder sending a pencil-thin laser into the shadows that hid the voice's owner.
"Show yourself." Keplar grated. "Or I'll turn everything in that corner into swiss cheese. Your call."
The shape that slowly moved forward and into the light was one that sent a chill racing down his spine, his hand abruptly slick with nervous perspiration as his goggles gave it a shimmering halo brighter than anything he had seen in years. The last time he had seen one, it had been a female.
Her dark gray wings extended as she swooped in, her long blond hair pulled into a tail and held in place with a circlet of black metal, she was an avenging angel that attacked his squad during his second tour. A white tunic with a red cross marked her as a Templar, an elite soldier that used her wrist-mounted laser whips to slice through his buddies like a razor through silk. He could still see her face: hauntingly beautiful even hardened in resolution as she cut his squad to ribbons.
This one was taller, the wings white instead of gray, clothed in a modern business suit instead of a Templar's red and white tunic. But his face was as handsome as hers was beautiful and as filled with resolution as he stared at Keplar.
"A celestial." Keplar husked. The most deadly and powerful of all the mirrors. Then he was firing, holding the trigger down to send a steady stream of plasma-suffused alpha particles screaming at the big creature's chest and face.
By all rights and the laws of physics, his disruptor fire should've punched at least thirty holes through the celestial's broad and muscular chest. And it should've put another five or six through that too perfect face. Yet, in denial of every one of those laws and rights, he missed.
"Grrrk." He gurgled as the celestial's massive hand went around his throat and lifted him into the air. The disruptor dropped from suddenly nerveless fingers.
"If,..if you're going to kill me, get it over with." He managed past the vise-like grip the powerful creature had on him.
The celestial regarded him for a long moment with ice blue eyes, obviously considering something. Then he was carefully putting Keplar back on the ground.
"I'm not here to kill you, Gabriel Keplar." The creature said, his voice smooth and effortless.
"I am here to hire you."
In the midst of preparing to go for his gun, Keplar brought himself up short.
"Beg pardon?" He stammered, looking back at the powerful creature whose shoulders strained the seams of his well tailored suit. Whoever this thing was, it had money to have clothes like that.
A slight smile touched the celestial's lips at Keplar's stumbling question.
"I said, I am here to hire you." The smile disappeared. "But not to rundown another faceless mirror. I need you to retrieve my business partner. Before he sells the secrets he stole and gets this entire world destroyed."
The picture slid onto the desk: a high res, 2-D that showed some suit with a thin face, graying hair and a long nose. Beside it was a cred access card, it's gold fringe announcing its value in the hundred of thousands. More than enough to get that new door he wanted. Seeing the gold fringed cred access alone made Keplar pay attention. Then the celestial spoke, recapturing Keplar's attention.
"My former partner, Reginald Barclay." The mirror said, tapping the image as if Keplar was too stupid to make the connection.
"He's human." Keplar ignored the unconsciously made insult to say with a frown. The big celestial nodded.
"That, he is. Together we discovered a way of creating a large gateway between this world and the one that was created during the Fracture."
That made Keplar's eyebrow slowly lift. There was another world out there? One created by the Fracture? Then Barclay's picture returned him to the here and now.
"I don't chase humans." He stubbornly said, nearly biting his tongue when he caught sight of the access card once more. Still, a man had to have principles in this dying world, if not anything else. And Gariel Keplar's principles said he didn't chase down his own kind, not for any reason.
"Even if his actions could unleash a new Fracture War?" The celestial pressed and the big mirror sighed when Keplar folded his arms in mute resistance. "Perhaps a different tact, then: what would you say if I said you could see your wife again?"
"My, ... wife?" Keplar's face tightened. It was the morning after the Fracture and he had come down to see if his wife had made coffee. She had just recently graduated from university with a PhD in quantum physics and he was a promising young officer in the military. Their future couldn't have been brighter. Even when the riots and fighting had started after news of the tear's intercept course had been revealed by the government and he was put on stand by in case the military was needed to restore order, they had gotten strength and hope from each other.
So when he found what he thought was her in the kitchen, he had smiled and reached for her to give her a good morning kiss. Only to turn her around and find an insect's face staring back at him.
"She's gone." He growled, abruptly enraged that this thing would know anything about his wife. "Killed in the event that created the mirrors."
"No." The celestial said. "Not gone; swapped. Sent to the other world in exchange for the mirror that appeared in her place. She is still there on that duplicate planet, alive."
This time he didn't hesitate. He darted out to scoop up his gun and brought it up to press the muzzle against the celestial's face. To his credit, the big mirror didn't even flinch.
"Liar." Keplar whispered, heart suddenly pounding. Her death had been what hardened his heart, what turned him into an unrelenting hunter of mirrors for the past 20 years. If she was alive this whole time, trapped in a world crammed full of mirrors,...the thought was enough to drive him insane!
The celestial frowned.
"You've fought enough of my kind that you know we don't lie." The mirror bluntly replied. "If I say there's another world out there, created by the Fracture, there is. And if I say you can travel to that world and find your wife alive there, then you can."
Keplar let the disruptor slowly fall, knowing the celestial spoke the truth, because he knew that was all they could speak. It was perhaps their only flaw: the inability to lie. Chilling of course, when a celestial said they would kill you, because you knew it would happen with a certainty.
Yet that flaw now offered him hope for the first time in 20 long years. Hope that he would find her, and look into that beautiful smiling face once more.
"So how do you get to this mirror world?" He cautiously asked and the celestial smiled.
"Strange that you should ask." He said, drawing what appeared to be two wrist-thick silver cylinders from his pocket. A twist on one end allowed him to pull the cylinders, initially only as long as Keplar's middle finger, to something that was nearly as long as his forearm. The celestial then spun the top cylinder in a tight circle without letting it separate from the bottom.
That must've activated something because, in the next motion, the big mirror pulled the two cylinders apart and in doing so revealed a shimmering material, like an opaque soap bubble, filling the resulting space. One cylinder went down onto the floor where a flash of light anchored it. The other the celestial stretched nearly to the ceiling before a twist of one end triggered another flash of light and it stayed pinned in place by some invisible force. He then took hold of the quicksilver film in between by the two sides and pulled them apart to increase the space by nearly double, leaving a roughly oval shape in place.
"You go through there." The celestial said, pointing at the shimmering quicksilver oval as he handed Keplar what appeared to be a duplicate set of silver cylinders. "And you'll need these to get back."
Holstering his gun, Keplar took the cylinders and looked at them for a long moment. Then he was turning to step to the desk and take the 2-D with Barclay's image on it. Folding it in half, he tucked it into an inner pocket and looked at the smiling celestial.
"Be right back for that access card." He said and stepped into the quicksilver space.