Marcus returned Val’s look with a thoughtful one of his own. It would take fairly good timing to pull it off. But, if he could, the idea he had ran a very good chance of buying the operators the time they needed to get in and plant their explosives. He then nodded.
“I do, actually.” His eyes narrowed slightly. “Can your abilities wrap a light bending fog around each team, Val?” Marcus asked. And it was the water primal’s turn to frown.
“I … believe so,” she said after a thoughtful pause.
“Good. Cloak them with your fog banks. I’m going to use a flare to put a fire source in close to our Soulless friends out there, then skip in grenades to give them a hot potato to deal with. While they’re distracted, our demo teams will move in under cover of your camo fog and start planting their explosives.”
Marcus looked at the waiting RedSky operators.
“As soon as you hear the first round of grenades go off, you will need to move double time.”
“Copy that, sir,” Jenkins said as the other operators nodded their understanding of what the fire primal wanted them to do and began preparing their equipment and supplies.
Marcus nodded himself in satisfaction before looking back at Val.
“Start spinning out your cloaking fog banks, Val. As soon as they’re cohesive, I’m firing the first flare!”
The water primal nodded and turned to her team, already making subtle movements with her hands as she did to gather humidity out of the air and start coalescing it around each operator. For his part, Marcus pulled his pack around and quickly began to root around inside it, looking for the kit holding his flare gun and flares.
To make his idea work, he would need to use a starburst flare, one that would burst apart into dozens of smaller points of brilliance instead of staying in a lump, like a standard flare. That way, he could use whichever point of light that gave him the maximum angle to attack and catch the Soulless assets by surprise.
Marcus’s eyes abruptly narrowed. Which, beyond the first group, they wouldn’t be when those grenades started going off. He needed to use something significantly more stealthy, if he was to keep the various Soulless teams from realizing they were under attack.
As he considered options, the young fire primal found his eyes drifting to his fellow Descendant. As he watched her coalesce the heavy humidity surrounding them into shifting clouds of light reflecting moisture, Marcus had a thought about how Val could help him achieve a stealthy attack without cloaking him in light-bending fog!
Val glanced at him as Marcus stepped closer.
“Just about done here, matchstick,” she said in a low voice, her expression determined as she focused on her task.
“Good,” Marcus said with a nod. “Because I have an idea you can help me with. Something that should make our assault even more stealthy than before!”
That was enough to lift Val’s eyebrow in curiosity. But the water primal was too much of a veteran operator to be easily distracted from the task at hand. So Marcus had to wait until she was done weaving the last of the cloaks before she finally turned to him.
“So tell me, mijo,” she directed with a motion with her chin.
“What’s this amazing idea of yours??”
****
The keen eyed air Soulless let her eyes swing over the perimeter. Other than a mist rising off the canal, it was empty of enemy forces as it had been the dozen times she had checked it before. She was about to turn to the squad of her fellow elementals, as they referred to themselves as, that she was assigned to by Null Faction Operations when a flash of light in the periphery of her vision caught her attention.
Brow lifting in curiosity, she turned towards it. And watched as a starburst flare lifted into the air close to their position.
That was enough to tighten her expression as she grabbed her combat armor and gave it a tug to make sure it was secure around her lean body. The humans used flares to signal some sort of action by their forces. Yet a quick look at the bridge then down at the perimeter yielded nothing. No human troops inbound to their position, or that fire primal that had shredded half their number before getting extracted by human special forces.
Word was one of the stone elementals had managed to land a heavy blow on the primal, and he was seriously wounded. Which was the reason he hadn’t attacked their positions for a second time with that quick strike ability he seemed to possess.
It made sense on the surface, but during their training before their services were purchased by Null Faction, they were told by their initialization team that the four primals, the so-called Descendants, weren’t ordinary hyper humans. They were stronger, faster, more resilient than any elemental. And they didn’t just use elemental powers, they commanded them on a level the elementals couldn’t hope to ever achieve, regardless of any enhancements or black tag modifications.
That translated to the only way they could hope to bring one down, was attack with an entire squad. And definitely get the jump on them, instead of the other way around.
The air Soulless was still pondering that when the fire elemental beside her went down with a grunt of surprise. Frowning, she began to look towards him. Only to twitch in surprise when the air elemental on the opposite side also went down, this time without a sound.
As if that was some sort of signal to open the flood gates, her squad was surrounded by a silent, yet deadly sleet of razor-sharp, cone-shaped ice projectiles. The air elemental managed to elude getting hit twice by sheer reflex and air element-enhanced speed. Then she watched as three of them bent towards her as if they were suddenly guided missiles instead of falling shards of ice. The air elemental barely had time to suck in a surprised breath before they were punching through her armor with ease to penetrate her body, hitting her in the lungs, the heart, and the head. Then she was collapsing dead onto the ground with a slow, quiet hiss of air escaping her abruptly pierced lungs.
Val slowly nodded in satisfaction as Soulless squad after squad were silently scythed down by the combination attack Marcus had proposed, using his skip ability and her command over water to create and put on precise target what he had smirkingly called ‘death hail’, the ultra-compressed ice more than enough to defeat the body armor the Soulless were wearing.
“Damn, mijo. When you have a good idea, it’s really good!” she exclaimed in a whisper after glancing over at him and nodding. Then she was looking at Jenkins with a tight expression.
“Jenkins! You have your hole in the perimeter, and five minutes to plant your explosives. Move it!”
Hidden behind shifting mists that effectively bent light so looking at them dead on only revealed what was behind them, the two primals couldn’t see Jenkins or the rest of the team nod in acknowledgement. But they did hear a muffled:
“Deploying now, ma’am. Be back in five.” Then the mists were shifting forward and even the primals lost sight of them when they moved past the point of reflectivity and the clouds became completely effective.
“Okay,” Val said before looking back over at a determined Marcus. “Got any more of those starburst flares? I’d like to see how many more of those Soulless squads we can remove off the board before the demo packages start going off!”
****
Raymond frowned as he watched through his binoculars as another starburst flare arced into view over the Null Faction position.
“What the hell is going on with these flares?” he muttered to himself, not being able to see what was coming out of the dancing motes of light as they broke away from the main mass to scatter out over the dug in enemy position. Then he was watching as the patrols that were marching along the enemy perimeter started going down in clusters as if being cut down by heavy machine gun fire.
Yet there was no muzzle flare, or the sound of weapons fire lifting through the damp, heavy air. Just enemy assets dropping as entire squads, unable to even take defensive postures before getting cut down by precision attacks. Then the last of the patrols, this one on the far side of the position, was cut to pieces, leaving the perimeter completely bare.
Which was when the machine gun nests and mortar positions set up by the illegal mod soldiers began erupting with very audible and visible explosions that could be heard and seen with the naked eye from the forward fire support base he was currently standing in.
“Major,” he snapped without dropping the binoculars from his eyes and the Ranger officer that was standing just behind him came to attention. “That’s the signal. Advance the first and second companies across the bridge and attack that position!”
“Colonel!” the major replied with a nod. Then he was stepping back from the observation post to begin barking orders.
Primed to begin the assault as soon as the Nightstalkers had dropped them off, the Ranger companies that had been anxiously awaiting for a signal to attack, quickly spun into action. Only minutes from hearing the explosions and commanding the deployment, Raymond watched in satisfaction as two companies of heavily armed Rangers climbed up onto the highway and began to advance south along the bridge.
They were quickly joined by three squads of Task Force Green, known outside of JSOC as Delta Force, the elite Tier One Army operators looking for a little payback for the pasting they had been taking from the hyper humans supporting the Null Faction black tags. And three Nightstalker gunships hung back near the north end of the bridge to provide fire support if the advancing force needed it.
But, as Raymond watched machine gun nest after nest get ripped apart, and armored vehicles get holes punched in them from what had to be Agents Gray and Alvarez’s team performing some expert behind enemy lines operations, the gunships weren’t needed. Between the RedSky team, deep in the guts of the Null Faction position and wreaking havoc, and the advancing JSOC forces, the enemy was getting cut to ribbons.
Raymond’s eyes narrowed thoughtfully. It had been totally off-script, with RedSky acting virtually on their own, even after being told to work with the JSOC forces. But there was no denying it: RedSky did have superior operational knowledge and experience when it came to handling the hyper humans and illegal mods Null Faction was employing across the battlefield. The JSOC colonel only hoped they left enough alive that they could be dredged for intel on Null Faction!
Marcus grimaced as he threw up a hasty expanded air shield to deflect a spray of weapon fire, the red-hot slugs shifted just enough to hiss past him. Using their thermal energy, he then twisted around to sling them in a stream of superheated metal against a nearby knot of black tags, which were engaging Jenkins and his operators, newly successful in destroying one of the Null Faction’s few armored personnel carriers they had deployed.
The black tags grunted as they were hosed down by the searing metal, many of them taking mortal wounds. Then the rest were dropped with precision shots from the RedSky operators. Catching his eye over the untidy heaps of black tag bodies, Jenkins flashed Marcus a quick thumbs up before he was leading the team elsewhere.
Which was when, with a snarl of weapons fire and the shouts of men and women trying to make sense of the chaos, the Ranger companies that had advanced across the bridge, slammed into Null Faction’s faltering forward line. Now only facing illegal mods that, despite some having enhanced strength, stamina, or speed, were forced to use standard weaponry to fight at a distance, the Rangers with their superior skills and tactics peeled the front line open like an overripe banana.
Quick bursts of weapons fire, coupled with well timed flash bang and explosive grenades, knocked aside the staggered black tag defense. Then the Rangers, followed quickly by the Task Force Green operators, were entering the Null Faction position directly. Furious weapon exchanges followed, interspersed with snarling attacks from Marcus and Val. And then, almost before it had begun, the fight to take the Null Faction position on the south end of Centennial Bridge was over.
“Sweep the vehicles and the nests for intel, lieutenant,” the Ranger major directed as Marcus and Val stepped towards him and a knot of his senior officers and non-coms. A quick look yielded the Delta guys were already searching bodies for anything they could use later. Including taking blood and tissue samples to determine which illegal modifications the soldiers had had done.
The major looked over at them as he finished returning the lieutenant’s salute to let the junior officer scamper away to grab a number of his fellow Rangers and begin sifting the remains of the base for the requested intel.
“Agents Alvarez and Gray, I presume,” he said, first snapping them a quick salute as Jenkins and the RedSky team began assembling behind them. He then extended a hand.
“Major Vasquez. Helluva an operation you ran here. These illegal mods didn’t see you coming.”
“It was the hyper humans we were directly concerned with, Major,” Val replied after a quick look over at Marcus. “We knew you and the Deltas could’ve handled the black tags easily enough, but not with those Soulless sniping at you with their elemental abilities.”
“True enough,” Vasquez replied as the Delta team leader, a grizzled African American with a long scar bisecting the left part of his face, joined them. “Their mods didn’t make those … what did you call them?”
“Black tags,” the Delta team leader supplied with a nod towards Marcus and Val. “The brief we got from RedSky operations called them that as well.”
Vasquez nodded at the Delta team leader, then looked back at the two primals.
“Black tags. Nice. Whatever we call them, their mods don’t make them bulletproof.”
“Unlike those hyper humans you took out,” the Delta team leader said with a frown. “Those … well, shit, they were virtually impossible to shoot! Even if you got the drop on them!” He abruptly leaned forward, eyes intent.
“You have a name for those fuckin’ bastards as well?” he asked.
Again Val and Marcus exchanged a quick look before Marcus found a wry smile on his lips.
“We call those ‘Soulless’,” he explained.
“Soulless,” the Delta leader repeated, his frown becoming thoughtful. “Any reason for that?” “You working us for intel now, commander?” Val asked, her brow lifted in question.
The Delta officer snorted.
“Of course I am, Agent Alvarez,” he replied in a matter-of-fact tone. “RedSky by far has the most experience with these types of hyper humans. Along with their terrorist sponsor, Null Faction. I’d like to know as much as possible before we find ourselves in yet another shooting situation over a valuable logistics asset, like the Centennial Bridge here crossing the fucking
Panama Canal, one of the most important transit points on the planet.”
“Fair enough,” Marcus stepped in to say before a frowning Val could reply. “We call them ‘Soulless’ because, while they have hyper human capabilities, we strongly suspect they are, in fact, not human.”
That made both JSOC officers take a half step back.
“Not human??” Vasquez repeated before Val held up forestalling hands.
“My comrade is exaggerating,” she said, throwing a frown in Marcus’s direction.
“Am I, Val?” Marcus quickly countered, not appreciating being chastised in front of two veteran JSOC soldiers. “You haven’t seen inside them. I have.” He turned back to the JSOC men, who now stood with eyes wide.
“They’re not human, fellas. Because they are grown in tanks. They’re clones, derived from carefully cultivated tissue samples.”
Marcus folded his arms as even Val stared at him in astonishment at his revelation.
“They are decanted as fully grown, not born to grow to maturity. And after they are initialized, they are given just enough human intelligence to not stick out too badly so they can better carry out their missions.”
“You have got to be fucking shitting me, kid,” the Delta officer growled. “Clones??”
“Clones,” Marcus confirmed. “Take blood and tissue samples, if you like, and run a DNA comparison if you don’t believe me. You’ll find that each type: air, earth, water, and fire, all are different from each other. But all the air are exactly the same, as are the water, and so on. If you can’t tell which is which, just look for four groups of DNA that repeat over and over for every cluster of dead Soulless you check.” He settled back slightly.
“That should be enough to confirm the use of four cultivated DNA samples to make them all.” “Huh. I’ll get my medic to start sampling,” the Delta officer grimly noted.
“While you’re at it, you might want to ask the CIA, the NSA, and whatever other intelligence agency you want to involve, to tell you about their current efforts to find bio-tech companies that may be developing cloning tech under the radar,” the fire primal added. “Not to mention, illegal mod shops where these black tags are getting processed! Because I’m pretty sure once they have some targets for you guys, you’ll be rolling in hot!”
“Are you trying to give away proprietary RedSky intel, Marcus?” Val hissed as the two of them led the RedSky team away from where the two JSOC officers were furiously discussing the ramifications of dealing with an enemy that could clone replacement soldiers in a significantly shorter time than it took to recruit and train natural born ones, or even black tag mods, which were still regular humans before their modification.
Marcus snorted.
“It’s not proprietary, Val. Yeah, we have most of that but remember that brief we had with those three intelligence bigwigs? The one where Rose said we had been sharing all we had on Null Faction with them when Jackson challenged him?? They’ve been tracking Null Faction across the dark web for a while now. And what they know, JSOC knows,” he tautly pointed out before frowning.
“Although the whole cloning thing, along with the Zoo and its black market arms sales which include black tags … Pretty sure JSOC, or the military in general knows little about that.” The fire primal made a dismissive gesture.
“But it doesn’t matter, Val,” Marcus indicated. “The sooner those jarheads know what they’ll be facing, the faster they’ll start training to counter it. Besides, I confirmed the cloning hypothesis directly from what I pulled out of the Soulless I leached in the quick strike. They were freshly decanted, Val, specifically initialized for this battle. Which meant their essences still remembered being in the clone tubes.”
Val blinked in disbelief as she stared at her grim colleague.
“¡Follame de lado!” she hoarsely whispered. “I knew you could absorb their life force with the leach, but you can also … see their memories??” Marcus shook his head.
“Not as such. Not like your dream walking thing. I can’t look into their minds,” he indicated. “But my leach absorbs their essence, which contains echoes of memory. Like impressions, and remembered sensations. Enough that I can, after a bit to analyze them, piece together everything into a fairly cohesive picture of what they both remember and think about.” Then Marcus abruptly grimaced.
“I’m just glad they are mostly empty, quite literally ‘soulless’. Or I would be pulling in an entire lifetime’s worth of impressions and sensations each time I leached one.” “Going by the look on your face, I’d say you’ve done that once or twice,” Val noted and
Marcus jerked a nod in confirmation. And when he didn’t continue, Val made a small nod.
“Okay. Copy that. Let’s call for an extraction, si? I think I wouldn’t mind getting back into my bed back at the mesa after a long, hot shower!” She sighed. “Then I need to write condolence letters for the families of the people we lost in the last twenty four hours!”
****
Barna looked up at the big screens that lined Monitoring’s tallest wall, each screen filled with images from RedSky operations across the planet. Which included, at the moment, the devastating battles outside of American embassies in Berlin, Germany, where Jay desperately tried to keep a wall of Soulless from advancing into the compound and slaughtering the embassy staff as helicopters, meant to evacuate the trapped civilians, hovered impotently outside of the range of the Soulless’s ranged capabilities.
And Amsterdam, where Doug, having outmaneuvering the initial attack, was now trying to organize a counter attack to buy the embassy staff there time to evacuate with two out of the four helicopters sent there already shot down and burning on the ground. With only half of the transports needed for a swift and effective evacuation, he and the surviving Marines in the protection garrison would need to hold off a second wave of Soulless for at least an hour to get everybody to safety.
Barna felt a muscle jump with tension in his jaw. His people were up against it, the two
Descendants barely able to keep the situation from becoming more deadly than it already was. And, with American assets scattered all over the globe in response to other Null Faction attacks not featuring Soulless, they weren’t about to get any help any time soon.
At least Marcus was successful in rescuing Valentina and getting her and what was left of Alpha Team to the Panama Canal. Which, from what the screens were telling him, was now firmly back in American and Panamanian control after a daring, two-stage assault launched by RedSky’s fire and water primals.
“It’s confirmed, Mr. Barna,” one of the technicians manning the various communications, satellite and logistics stations inside the large Monitoring chamber, said over their shoulder to him.
“Agents Alvarez and Grey have requested extraction from Panama.” “And?” Barna replied without looking at the tech.
“We’ve rolled a C-5 with a full support team out of Soto Cano. It should be in Balboa in approximately 45 minutes.”
“Hrmph,” Barna replied as he let his eyes take in Berlin and Amsterdam again. Both his other Descendants needed help. And he couldn’t afford to wait the flight time to get Gray and Alvarexz back to the Briar Patch.
“Comms. Get me Gray on the line.”
“Yes, sir,” the Comms technician replied.
There was a slight hiss of static in his ear. Then:
“RedSky Actual, this is Gray,” Marcus’s voice replied. “Go ahead.”
“Marcus, it’s Barna,” Barna quickly said. “What’s your core status? Can you immediately jump and redeploy?”
“With or without Val?” Marcus quickly fired back.
“Without. She and what’s left of Alpha Team need a down cycle to be reassessed following the trauma of Nicaragua.”
There was a slight pause as the fire primal digested that. Which was followed by:
“Then I guess yeah, I can jump to somewhere else right away. Who’s in more trouble? Jay or Doug?”
Barna didn’t hesitate to consider his answer.
“Jay,” he replied. “He has managed to reach the embassy in Berlin but he and Delta Team are now under heavy assault, with Soulless assets preventing the evac helos from landing on the roof with their ranged fire.”
“Local help?” Marcus asked tightly.
“Both Berlin city police and the Federal Bundespolizei BFE+ units have been forced to withdraw under heavy fire and several Heer units of the German Bundeswehr have been attempting to reach the site, but have suffered heavy losses,” Barna reported. “NATO is on high alert, but without an identifiable enemy state, cannot use Article 5 to act in support of the
German military’s attempts to relieve the embassy.”
“What’s the American response?”
“Rangers are on the ground at AFB Rammstein awaiting open airspace to make the drop into the area. But Soulless with ranged capabilities are keeping the air above the embassy clear of any US airborne units. Which would include Rangers getting airdropped into the situation from altitude. Which is also the case for any other available SOC units that could be deployed to the area.”
“No shit. Soulless would have a heyday burning those bastards dangling in their parachutes out of the air,” Marcus grimly noted. “Are they considering a ground infil?”
“The Bundeswehr KSK and the BPOL GSG 9 Special Operations have several commando units prepared to go in, but they’re suffering the same issues the Heer units are: the ground fire close to the embassy is too hot to make a ground penetration without heavy casualties.”
“Well, fuck.” Silence followed the grim swearing as Marcus considered possibilities and ramifications.
Only after a good two or three minutes to work the matter over in his head did the fire primal finally continue.
“Okay, is Jay close to a fire somewhere? So I can jump in and coordinate with him immediately.”
“Standby,” Barna said, letting his eyes track to the screens covering the Berlin incursion.
There, with overwatch from high altitude drones, top down from satellites, and scattered coverage from surviving security cameras onsite, the various images detailing the Null Faction assault on the primary embassy at Pariser Platz, close to the Brandenburg Gate. Other screens watched the handful of secondary sites throughout the site, including the old embassy building in what used to be East Berlin during the Russian occupation.
So far those had not come under attack. The various consulates scattered throughout the country, however, were a different story. Several had been attacked by black tag forces, the assaults barely repelled by the Marines garrisoning the facilities in conjunction with BPOL GSG 9 Special Operations forces. Thankfully only the main embassy had Soulless accompany the black tags, the hyper humans quickly swinging the situation in their favor. Or American assets all across the Bundesrepublik would currently be burning!
The square on which the embassy sat, was now empty, with scattered cars and a couple transit buses burning out in the open, casualties of the initial assault. Scanning over the images, it didn’t take the veteran RedSky commander long to assess the situation. And locate Jay and Delta Team, pinned down in the embassy’s administrative section, close to the entrance to the square.
“He’s in the reception area, Marcus,” he said out loud. “But there are no fires you can directly jump to nearby. You’ll have to jump to a fire outside the building near the entrance then work your way to him across Faction threatened ground.”
“Of course I do,” Marcus hissed in response. “Why would anything be fucking easy?” There was another slight pause before: “Okay, I’ve advised Val and her team that I’m jumping to
Berlin. Notify Jay I am inbound. Jumping in three, two, one …”
The line went silent for a second, with even the hiss of the carrier signal muted. Then:
“Holy shit, Barna!” Marcus snapped, his voice sounding a little winded. “You didn’t tell me the entrance was a bombed out hole!” That was followed by the sounds of nearby explosions, and the snarling roar of one of the fire primal’s attacks.
“Okay, I’ve cleared myself some space. I’m going to go and find Jay and his team. Gray out.” And the comms line went dead, leaving Barna staring at the satellite top down screen that showed Marcus scampering across a debris-littered space between where he had jumped into, and the embassy building itself, the thermal imaging showing Jay and his team hunkered down inside close to the Marine checkpoint. Then the fire primal winked out of sight as he utilized his skip ability to move across the space more quickly and efficiently.
A couple skips put the grim fire primal in the shadow of the blockish embassy building itself.
Peering around the corner at the main entrance, Marcus frowned as he noted at least three full Soulless teams were holding position in and around a ragged line of armored police vehicles, the blue personnel carriers marked with BPOL lettering and badging. The armored carriers were nose towards the building, a sign they had been moving into position when the Soulless stopped them and forced the police personnel to retreat before they could close within ten meters of the entrance.
Just as the fire primal finished his initial recon of the carrier position, several gouts of flame arced away from it towards a cluster of vehicles on the opposite side of the square, close to the stone column of the Brandenburg Gate itself. Those were in military urban camouflage, marking how close the Heer units had gotten before the Soulless stopped them. And a glance at the sky yielded a handful of US Army Sikorsky helicopters in orbit, waiting to have enough space to move in and start the evacuation.
With an eye back on the Soulless and their impromptu fortification, Marcus lifted a finger to his ear piece and tapped it until it hissed with an open RedSky frequency.
“Jay, it’s Marcus. Can you hear me?” he murmured into his throat mike.
“I got you, Marcus,” Jay’s voice, taut with fatigue, replied. “Barna said you were jumping in. Where are you?”
“Outside, looking at the entrance and its three Soulless teams,” Marcus indicated, his eyes narrowing as he caught sight of several black tag soldiers, most of them in civilian clothing with tactical gear strapped on overtop, carefully easing into position in and around the scorched police vehicles as well.
“And a shit ton of black tag operators in civilian clothing,” he then added. “Did they exfil out of the crowd to attack or something?”
“Dunno,” the earth primal confessed. “The place was already under siege by the time I got here. We airdropped in, and I lost a third of my team to ground fire from those Soulless bastards. We managed to retake the reception area from a bunch of black tags, and secure the ambassador and her staff, but with the entrance blown out, we have no cover to use to advance into the street and secure the rest of the property. The Soulless fire and air elementals keep picking us off when we try to move into the space left by blowing out the entrance.”
Marcus nodded to himself. It was a standoff; at least until either side was reinforced enough to make a brute frontal assault to push the other side out of the way. As long as the Heer and the BPOL GSG 9 Special Operations units could keep additional Soulless or black tags from reinforcing the position in front of the entrance, he should be able to work with Jay to push the enemy back enough to start the evacuation.
The fire primal abruptly grinned ferally. Or just retake the embassy from the enemy and crush the Null Faction here, like they eventually did in Panama! Whichever came first, right?
****