We come to it at last! The Revengers have taken to their latest assignment with a vengeance, tracking down the location of the famed artifact foretold in the Tyrene Code. And after taking on the security forces and committing all our backup to the fold, we now go to break through the last barrier and find the artifact itself!
What will it be? An alien device, a high-tech experiment gone wrong, a machine from the future, or something else entirely? The answer lies within the warehouse, and we’re about to break in!
Note: My apologies to all Revengers for the long delay in this publication. Check out the previous mission update if you need a recap!
* * *
The sudden pop that came with materialization. He had done it a hundred times and still couldn’t get used to it. Looking at the woman currently wrapped in his flexible arms, Pax’s sense of self-pity was momentarily dwarfed by the sympathy he felt for her.
“Are you alright?”
“I’m fine,” Erotica said, stretching out her frame as soon as his arms retracted from around her. She noticed him still looking and shot him a sideways glance. “You seem uncomfortable though…”
Pax frowned, and blushed just a little. Their little act of sudden relocation was uncomfortable enough without her suggesting he had copped a feel. Even if she was uncharacteristically soft and warm, underneath those extremely tight clothes…
“Let’s get going!” he said aloud, remembering they still had a job to do. “Where are the others?”
“There,” she said, pointing to the stairwell to their left. Pax looked to see Atrum and Styka scaling the steps and heading to what appeared to be a catwalk above. All around them, the noise of boots clamoring against steel grating could be heard over the faint sounds of machines buzzing.
[We’re in] he said, reaching out to the two of them. [Where do you want us?]
Atrum was quick to reach back and sent him the plan, all condensed in a dizzying flash of revelation. [I’ve spotted a terminal up here] it said. [Looks like a power station with controls to the entire facility. I’m going to attempt to shut it down. Cover us from below.]
Atrum then broke off and went back to running across the catwalk. Styka pealed off and head in a separate direction, putting herself between Atrum and several guards on their way up to meet them. She sent them all over the railings with some well-placed kicks and punches. They fell to the floor not far away…
As Pax watched, he could sense thoughts passing between Styka and Atrum too, the two staying in constant contact and advising each other of their progress. He envied them that. With his partner, all communication had to be conveyed verbally, and she liked to charge her words in just such a way…
“Hey, stretch,” she said, punching him in the shoulder. “We got company!”
Pax looked where she was pointing, saw several gun men moving in. Bullets began to fly, prompting them to drop to the floor as hot metal ricocheted around them. Erotica waited for a lull in the bullets before saying anything, once again forced to contend with the slow, verbal process.
“You want to deal with them, or shall I?”
“Let’s do it together,” he said. “I’ll distract them, you get in from behind and surprise them with those high-kicks of yours.”
“I’m sure they’ll be very shocked,” she said, stretching one last time to limber up. “Let’s go!”
* * *
“How you doing down there, Captain?”
Panacea looked down to see Smackdown looking a little worse for wear. She had seen this look before, usually on the faces of people who were about to tangle with a doubt of severe nausea.
“Just keep us steady,” he said. “And put me down as soon as you can!”
Panacea laughed. Not far away, Tsunami and Freedom were taking care of the last of the men manning the walls of the facility. All of them kept up their fire, spraying bullets and shotgun pellets into the air, and always to no avail. The two women skimmed through the air quickly, evading every shot before taking to the walls themselves to dispense some ass-kickings.
For Tsunami, this involved knocking her targets off the wall with some hard blasts of air. One man managed to get a shot off before being taken out, but his bullets went the way of his body, straight to the ground! Freedom flew in quick and disabled the last of her attackers with her sword, her steel flashing as it sliced through automatic weapons and body armor in quick strokes. Disarmed and helpless, most ran, but some still needed to be dispatched with a swift kick to the head.
In less than a minute, the walls belonged to them, and Panacea flew in to drop the Captain off.
“Thank God!” he said as soon as they touched own. Panacea landed next to him and began dispatching aid to the guards, making sure none were irreparably harmed, leaving the Captain to address the others.
“Alright, ladies! We need to get inside. This place is almost ours, and we need to make sure we disable the security systems before they can bring in any reinforcements.”
“Got it,” said Freedom. “There’s an access door around the side, and it sounds like our friends are making a go of it inside.”
Smackdown nodded, looked to Tsunami. “You still with us, Hawa?”
“Yes, Captain,” she said quietly. “You don’t need to be checking up on me, you know.”
“Good,” said Smackdown, uncertainly. He knew that something truly awesome and powerful lay within the facility, and that for Tsunami, the question of what that was had to be weighing on her mind heavily. And yet, she was holding those cards extremely close to her chest…
“Alright,” he said, cocking his rifle one last time. “Let’s storm the fortress!”
It all happened by the numbers. Freedom kicked in the door, Smackdown fired in a smoke grenade from his airburst launcher, and they moved inside in quick, two by two formation. All around, machinery hummed and they could hear the sound of loud metal clinks. But the gunfire had stopped and there didn’t appear to be any other traces of telltale noise. No whet packing sounds or grunts, the signs of men getting their asses kicked by his faithful squad.
Smackdown put his finger to his ear. “Atrum, Styka, Pax, Erotica… sound off.”
He didn’t get a reply right away. He raised his voice so he could hear himself over the machinery.
“First squad, this is the Captain. Sound off!”
In the corner of his eye, he saw a sudden glint of movement. A blackened husk of metal being raised towards his head. Smackdowned turned to raise his weapon, and then got a flash of purple across his vision. It took a second for his mind to catch up to what had just happened, but he quickly breathed a sigh of relief.
“Erotica,” he said. “Perfect timing.”
The skin-tight clad woman stood over the body of the fallen guard. His broken goggles and lulled eyes were a testament to the power of the punch he’d been given. The sidearm he had been training on Smackdon’s head lay a few inches away, and Erotica was sure to kick it beneath one of the nearby machines.
“Your welcome, sir,” she said playfully. “Atrum is waiting for you up top. Shall we go?” She extender her hand to him, palm down, all demure-like. The elbow-high gloves were a nice touch in completing the impression.
“Sure,” said the Captain, accepting the hand. “Show me the way.”
He was reunited with the balance of the infiltration team a moment later. In the far corner of the building, atop the catwalks and above the machinery, he was presented with the controls for the entire facility.
These consisted of a set of old analogue buttons and dials set into a grey metal frame. Colored lights dotted the controls too, but few, if any of them were labeled, and those that were were anything but legible.
“Can you interface with it?” he asked. Atrum shook his head and frowned.
“I don’t know. This equipment is ancient. I can’t exactly hook up my laptop and hack my way in. This is going to require some old fashioned tinkering, sir.”
“How long?”
Atrum shrugged. “A few minutes. Or I could just hitting buttons and see if any of them happen to – accidentally – shut down the alarms. And then there’s still the matter of unlocking all the doors to the interior of this facility. I’d feel safer I could take this panel apart and starts inspecting the electrical system a little.”
Smackdown sighed heavily. A few minutes was pushing it. There was no telling if the guards had managed to get off an SOS before they had all been taken out. There were no alarms blaring or flashing red lights, but that was no guarantee that one of them hadn’t triggered a silent alarm…
“Alright, get to it. I’ll see if we can’t get third squad to cover our backs in the meantime.”
Atrum nodded and opened his satchel. He began producing spanners, wire cutters, and a series of microtools, placing them down before the panel and getting to work taking it apart. Smackdown, meantime, put his finger to his ear again and called out to the rest of their team, still waiting in the field…
“Captain to third squad. Do you read?”
Again, there was no immediate reply. He grunted angrily. What was it with people not replying to the link?
“Third squad, do you hear me? Respond please!”
* * *
They stood and watched in quite awe. The column was long, moved quickly, and was packed to the brim with threatening looking vehicles and weapons. And they were all headed in the same direction…
“Where the heck did they come from?” asked Bonfire.
“We would have noticed them if they had a camp nearby,” said Angel. “No, these guys were lying in wait. We’ve been set up.”
“Fat lot of good it’s going to do them,” said Judgement, smiling and bristling noticeably. “Those boys don’t have half the firepower they’d need to stop the even three of us.”
Angel put her finger to her ear. The Captain was demanding an update again, but she wasn’t sure how to tell him. She and Tsunami had been there when his friend fed him all that info. They had tried to tell him something about this wasn’t right. How to tell him that he had been betrayed?
She could worry about that later though. Right now, they had a mounting crisis and their commander needed to be told.
“Captain, this is third squad. We’ve got eyes on a military convoy coming up from the south. They’re proceeding to the facility.”
A pause, a noticeable and understandable pause. “How big are we talking?”
She did a quick assessment on the force that was passing along the ridge-line before them. “Two Light-Armored Vehicles, four Humvees, estimate twenty men, armed heavily.”
She heard a slight mutter emitted from the other end. The Captain neglected to release the link before cursing under his breath.
“Can you stall em?” he asked.
Angel chuckled. “Oh yes, we can stall them…”
“Good! Because if I know these men, and I do, then that’s not the last card they have to play.”
The link terminated and Angel looked to her companions. “We’ve got the go-ahead. We’re to take out that convoy, make sure that the don’t get in sight of the facility.”
Bonfire’s hands lit up with small controlled flames. Judgement bristled further, the gold stripes on his flesh becoming larger and more prominent. The thought of being committed to the fray clearly seemed to agree with them.
“Looks like we’re going in after all,” said Judgement, smiling from ear to ear. “Let’s show these buggers some serious wrath!”
Stories by Williams 