Fallen Earth: Official Fiction #17: A Gathering Storm, Chapter Three: The Quarry

The story continues in the third entry to the "Gathering Storm" saga, where a menacing threat looms above all factions alike:

Sabine exhaled slowly and carefully, minimizing the white vapor of her breath in the frigid night air.

Small rocks and stones shifted and sometimes dug painfully into her hands and arms, but she paid them no mind. She could just make out her goal: the ridge line about twenty meters away. Beyond that, assuming she was at the right spot, should lie a small valley where her quarry were camped.

A sudden flash of light on the far side of the ridge startled her, followed a heartbeat later by a loud bang. Clutching her rifle to her chest, she froze in place, and for long moments remained completely still, listening. At first she thought she'd been spotted by a guard, but it soon became apparent that whatever was happening had nothing to do with her. A few shouts echoed out of the valley, followed by a period of silence.

Sabine remained motionless in the darkness, straining her ears for any stray sound, but even with her enhanced senses she heard nothing. She waited just a moment more before continuing the slow crawl toward the ridge - and then heard the distinctive sounds of an engine starting and a vehicle driving away. As far as she knew, her targets didn't have any vehicles. They must have had visitors.
Her curiosity getting the best of her, she rose to a low crouch and and covered the last bit of ground quickly, going prone again just as she reached the ridge crest. Slowly, ever so slowly, she raised her head up over the edge, just enough for her dark gray, almond-shaped eyes to clear the line of sight. In the valley below she could make out the camp she had expected to find: several roughly patched tents in a semi-circle around a couple of cook fires. The fires were still burning, providing a fair amount of illumination in the camp, and several barrels containing some unknown but almost certainly toxic substance were stacked inside one of the tents.

Sabine would have seen the details of the camp just as clearly without the firelight. When necessary, her mutant talents gave her sight as sharp as an owl's...strength akin to a bear's...even the endurance of the wild boars that roamed the Province. As a result, she had little need of night finder goggles or other elaborate technology. Superstitious sorts, such as the CHOTA, claimed that these abilities were the result of a mystical kinship between human and beast. Others claimed that they were the result of the mingling of human and animal DNA. In the end, it didn't matter to Sabine how she came about them. They were tools to her, just like her rifle, or her skinning knife.

She saw no sign of movement in the valley below. She expected to see her targets, but there was nothing... just an empty camp. She had been sent there to eliminate an encroachment of the Shiva's Favored: twisted, deformed mutants from the irradiated wastes outside the Province, intent on defiling and polluting the land wherever they went. So far, all attempts to communicate with them had been rebuffed, usually violently, and the Vistas had decided that enough was enough. They could not tolerate these mutants spreading hazardous materials around the last remaining vestiges of healthy wilderness, and so wherever Shiva's Favored were spotted, they were eliminated.

Ordinarily a full team of Vista Rangers would have been sent in to deal with a problem like this, but Sabine preferred to work alone. Besides, she figured there was less risk to fewer people this way, just in case those barrels turned out to contain something really nasty.

She scanned the camp again for any sign of life, and then saw it: parked behind some scrub just outside the perimeter was a small truck. Moments after she spotted it, movement caught her eye from the forested area beyond the camp. Two men carried the limp form of another man - no, a mutant, one of the Shiva's Favored - toward the truck. Without any caution they threw the limp form into the truck's bed. She could see that the men wore jumpsuits, and that there was a patch or logo on their shoulders, but even her sharp eyes couldn't make out the details at that distance.

As the men opened the doors to get back into the truck, Sabine raised her rifle and brought her eye down to the scope. She focused in on a patch.

Techs. Should've known.

Sabine recognized the patch design as belonging to the Theoreticians. She let the crosshairs of her rifle drift up to the man's temple, and fought the urge to pull the trigger. It would have given her great satisfaction to snuff out these two *******s...but no. The Techs were not her target. That could wait for another time. She was damn curious, though, as to what they were doing here and what their intentions were toward the Shiva's Favored. And besides, Ranger Soto -- no, Citizen Speaker Novia Soto now, she reminded herself with a wry smile -- would want to know what the Techs were up to.

Rifle in hand, Sabine stood and made her way down the rocky hill toward the encampment. She moved quickly, but still quietly enough that she didn't startle the hare she leaped over on her way down the slope.

Once in the camp she quickly double-checked each of the tents.

Empty, just as she thought.

She whistled, a low sound that anyone else would have mistaken for the call of a night bird. Moments later a dark shape appeared at the edge of the camp's firelight. Sabine knelt and called softly.

"Come here, Shar."

The sleek form of a black panther approached her, reflected fire glinting in his brilliant yellow eyes. Sabine opened one of the many small pouches on her belt and pulled out a chunk of dried fish, which she offered to the animal. The large cat took it from her hand and then nuzzled once against her leg before settling down to enjoy the snack.

"I may need your help, Shar. We've got to find out where those men have gone." She scratched the cat behind the ears as he gnawed on the fish. Shar was an animal, nothing more, but Sabine knew he understood her.

While Shar enjoyed the dried fish, Sabine explored the rest of the camp. There was very little remaining. She didn't dare examine the barrels too closely for fear of what they might contain. Near the center of the camp there was a scorch mark - probably the result of a Tech flash grenade. Based on the signs, she figured that there had been about eight Shiva's favored and four Techs. The Techs had apparently taken the mutants by surprise, blinding them with the grenade. However, there were no signs of blood -- no shell casings, either -- and she hadn't heard any gun shots.

A mystery.

She liked a mystery.

The tracks from both the truck she had seen and the one she had heard earlier headed south. Sabine slung her rifle across her back, re-adjusted the gray knit cap over her short, dark hair, and began to follow the tracks. Off to one side of her, Shar slipped back into the darkness.

# # #

The eastern sky was just beginning to brighten when the trees and scrub faded into an open plateau. Sabine had followed the trail of the Tech trucks all night, and was beginning to feel a little weary. She got a quick adrenaline boost, though, when she spotted the small compound with two trucks parked outside it, built into the base of a large rocky outcropping. She paused and knelt behind a patch of scrub to assess the situation.

Snap.

She heard the twig break just a couple meters away from her. Clutching her rifle to her chest, she instinctively tucked and rolled off to the right, coming up with the weapon aimed squarely at the face plate of an armored Tech. The first rays of sunlight reflected off the visor and the chrome-plated pistol pointed dead-center at her chest.

She grinned at him. "I guess we have ourselves a draw."

"Would be true," came the modulated voice, "if my friend behind you didn't have you dead-bang with both barrels."

Sabine cocked her head to the side. Still keeping the Tech in view, her peripheral vision just registered the second Tech, crouched with two pistols aimed point-blank at her back.

"I guess you've got me," she said, lowering her rifle just a bit. She let out a low, defeated sigh that turned into a short whistle.

Immediately darkness burst from the undergrowth, and the one-hundred-fifty-pound panther smashed headlong into the Tech behind Sabine. Stunned, he managed to fire one pistol harmlessly into the air just as Shar's powerful jaws latched onto his neck, tearing into flesh and sinew. With blood gushing from his torn jugular, the man died only seconds after hitting the ground.

Simultaneously with Shar's attack, Sabine fired her rifle from the hip, catching the first Tech in the throat just below his armored face plate. He fell backwards into the scrub, clutching at his neck, his cries for help coming out as a garbled gasp. Sabine stood and fired two more rapid shots - one head, one heart - before turning to check on Shar. By then the large cat was crouched over his no-longer-moving prey, licking the blood from his muzzle with quiet dignity.

Uncertain as to whether there were more guards, or if anyone in the bunker might have heard the gunshots, Sabine acted quickly. She made a gesture to Shar that sent him leaping back into the cover of the surrounding brush; then, keeping low to the ground herself, she moved toward the bunker. She stopped at the trucks, ducking down behind the nearest one to pause and listen.

Nothing. No movement anywhere.

I kill two patrolling guards, and no one even reacts?

Sabine went prone and slithered toward the entrance. As she reached the door, a huge rusted monstrosity set into permacrete, she moved back to a crouch, taking as much shelter as possible in the recessed doorway. The thing was obviously some pre-Fall relic of the years when GlobalTech had owned the Canyon. She had to give GlobalTech credit; things they made didn't just go away. Many of their structures, even the ones abandoned for the century since the Fall, were still intact.

The GlobalTech logo was still visible, though barely, on the side of the structure. The door had obviously been forced, the locking mechanism shattered a long time ago, which made entry a lot easier for her.

Rifle clutched in her left hand, Sabine reach out and slowly pushed the door open. It creaked loudly on its ancient hinges, but there was no sound from within. She turned back toward the brush and made another gesture and whistle. She knew that Shar would follow a safe distance behind her, out of sight but ready to come to her aid at a moment's notice.

Peering inside, Sabine could see a small, empty room, and stairs leading down. She breathed a short sigh. If everyone was downstairs, underground, they might not have heard the shots from outside. She relaxed a little, but only a little.

The room itself was barren, completely devoid of any furnishing. Only some dust and small chips of permacrete that had broken from the cracked ceiling lay on the floor. Moving swiftly but quietly, she made her way across the room and down the stairs. As she neared the bottom, a body came into view, sprawled on the floor of the hall beyond. Fresh blood still pooled on the ground around it.

At the end of the short hall, past the corpse, stood a partially open door. She heard no sound from inside it except the hum of a generator. Approaching the body on the floor, Sabine could see that it was one of the Shiva's Favored, shot two times in the back, its misshapen face frozen in a grimace of agony. One down, she thought to herself. Keeping her back to the wall, she edged toward the room. The stairs and hallways were dark, but the room beyond the door was well-illuminated.

Peering into the room, she paused, shocked, her breath hitching in her throat.

It looked like a torture chamber, and a bloody one at that. Man-sized cages lined one wall, and one of them had its door ripped from the hinges, the metal of the hinges twisted and sheared. The rest of the cage doors simply hung open. Medical tables and monitoring equipment were scattered about, upended and smashed, as well as other machinery that Sabine didn't recognize.

Bodies littered the room, Tech and Shiva's Favored alike, punctured and crushed and torn.

As best she could tell, the Shiva's Favored had broken loose, and the two groups had killed each other in a titanic struggle. A couple tranquilizer guns lay discarded on a table. That at least explained the mystery of why she hadn't heard any gunshots at the camp. She stepped into the room, careful to avoid the bodies and blood on the floor.

One of the Shiva's Favored lay on a metal table. Its chest had been cut open in an autopsy-style Y incision, the top of the ribcage removed and its internal organs exposed-

-and as she watched, its heart still pumped in a ragged rhythm. Sabine moved closer, transfixed, and its eyes shifted over and locked with hers, filled with knife-sharp desperation. The mutant's throat tried to work, tried to force out words, prevented by whatever paralysis held it.

Sabine shuddered and, raising her rifle, put a round through the pitiful creature's skull. The report in the small room was deafening, and she staggered back out to the hallway, her feet almost slipping in the blood on the floor.

This is crazy!

Sabine had seen a lot of death and carnage in her time. Killed a lot of people herself, even...but never had she witnessed anything like this. She considered the Shiva's Favored to be enemies, but she would never....

What could these Techs possibly have been doing? She closed her eyes for a moment to steady herself. It was madness in there, but she had a job to do. Soto would want to know about this. Hell, the other Techs might want to know what their own people were up to.

Sabine stepped back into the room and began to search for any evidence of what the Theoreticians were actually trying to do. Gathering computer disks, notes, anything; she might never learn the real truth, but she silently hoped that something she found would prove useful.

Useful enough to keep anything like this from ever happening again.

# # #

Fifty miles away, Novia Soto stood by a broken window on the second floor of a ruined building, gazing out over the arid landscape. A slight breeze ruffled her long, raven hair, and the morning sunlight made her yellow-green eyes glow faintly.

"I'm not sure I like what you're proposing," she said softly, her voice low and musical, yet filled with unmistakable authority.

Behind her, a lean, rangy man shifted his weight from foot to foot, uncertain of whether or not he was supposed to be standing at attention. Several days' growth of beard shadowed his square, powerful jaw, and his pieced-together body armor had dirt ground permanently into it. Twin machetes rode in sheaths on his back, and he had an enormous handgun strapped to his right thigh. His movements, minimal as they were, held a tightly-wound, wolf-like energy.

"I think it has to be this way," he said. "Honestly, I would've asked for you, yourself. But we have zero guarantee of success at this, and I don't want to see the Vistas left without a leader."

Soto turned and eyed the man coolly. "You mean you don't want to see us with a different leader. One who might not be so sympathetic to your cause."

He shrugged lightly. "One without your foresight."

Soto folded her arms across her chest and leaned back against the wall, her eyes narrowing slightly. "You've already contacted others?"

"Only one. A Daedalan named McCutcheon." He chose to ignore the brief scowl that flickered across her otherwise exquisite features. "Also I have a lead on a way to contact an Enforcer known as White Rabbit. ...And believe me, I have as little love for the Enforcers as you do for the Techs."

"Hm. What is your plan for the CHOTA?"

The man shook his head, the ghost of a smile on his lips. "I'm not sure yet."

"Fair enough." She unfolded her arms and ran one hand through her hair. It was a gesture of habit, clearly something she did when contemplating a problem. The man found it captivating, and tried not to stare.

"All right," she said finally. "If it's one from each Faction...and a Province-wide peace might arise from this...you have my approval. I have a Ranger named Sabine Watanabe. I shall send her to you."

He cleared his throat. "Just to be clear...yes, it's possible that an inter-Faction truce could come about because of this. But it's much more likely that, if we don't make an attempt, we're looking at a Province-wide slaughter. If what I suspect is happening is allowed to continue-I-I can't think of a settlement that would survive."

"I understand that, Mr. Nasden. You've made your point. Sabine will find you within twenty-four hours." She faced the window again. "You may go."

Satisfied, Leon Nasden nodded once, turned on his heel and walked out of the room.

TO BE CONTINUED