Young Writers Society

Silver sat perched high atop the building opposite, and watched. She used no scope, no binoculars, no enhancers, she didn’t need them. Her vision had been strong originally, the augment that replaced her left eye only made it stronger. Her intensity well hid the growing boredom. Her brain absently considered tapping her claws along the edge of the building, but reflex built in from many many covert ops stifled it before her muscles even tensed. She wouldn’t get distracted. It was a temptation, but never a very strong one.

She watched the target down below. He stood upon a podium already elevated by some sort of makeshift stage, probably the best the colony could afford to give him. It was no Oriah city. Crowded around waiting for him to begin the supposedly important speech were fans and protestors alike. They all muttered and spoke to one another, which on their own would have been inaudible unless she focused, but together they created a dull roar from the sheer mass of people who had turned out to see him.

That was why he was here of course. No doubt he was judging this city harshly for not being Rampart or Oriah. Cities like these working colonies, so densely populated but still somehow sweating to earn their title. There were thousands and thousands of “voters” or at least people who had convinced themselves they were voters. The top dogs in the ID faction needed them if for nothing else than the ease of fixing the ballots. They still had to keep it at least plausible in the eyes of the public that they had won things fairly. Really just to keep the more “honest” of the politicians from trying to use their charisma to get a rise out of the citizens.

He cleared his throat, silencing the crowd, and began. Silver didn’t listen, not to that anyway. Her attention drifted from potential threat to potential threat. Just because she hated ops like these didn’t mean she’d be doing any worse, lest her rating went down. As little as she cared what the higher ups thought of her, the lower the rank the less overall roaming freedom one got without direct supervision, and she would not have that.

Her eyes lingered on each potential problem a few moments longer than they needed to. A cyborg with a backpack. A Humanoid feline hybrid with their hand in their pocket. A… something muttering to a robotic reptile who clearly had un-negated battle augmentations. That was the risk with coming out here to work colonies, the law enforcement was pretty lax. One of the selling points of switching factions, or so she was assured by about every propaganda poster for Hex R.E.M. or Intra-gen that ID tried to stifle. But that was why she was here, bodyguard duty with flare, or so Dawson had tried to sell it as. She knew he was just doing what he was told, she tried not to make herself too much of a problem for him. She got to hide the whole time and watch a secondary line of defense that the enemy wouldn’t see coming and thus wouldn’t be able to effectively hide from. She supposed this wasn’t as bad as being one of the lackies who actually had to be up close with the guy. Dealing with all the chaos down below, all the other creatures they had to handle, made her shutter.

She hated these jobs in general, they felt so trivial, she didn’t get many of them. It wasn’t what she was built for and even the higher ups knew that. The one upside was that she knew who ID was serious about protecting, who they wanted in the offices visible to the public. This often gave her some idea of what the state of general affairs were. If it was someone more charismatic, things were rocky with public relations, if it was someone more serious they needed someone to inspire the public or some shit, but this time was special. This time, for the first time their chosen candidate wasn’t human. Now of course this was only distinguishable by the few scales that peaked up past his suit and the claws that sat in place of regular human nails.

It was one of the very few things that could make Silver smile, if just for a second. Inter species relations must have been at an all time rock-fucking-bottom to force ID to do something like this. Even supposedly being one of the more inhuman friendly factions, she’d never have expected them to resort to this unless the city was practically falling down around them.

She glanced around. Sure the street wasn’t in the best condition, the most popular stores sold shit that constantly gave people substance abuse problems, most of the buildings were in disrepair, and there were maybe a few more anarchy logos than usual, but this city wasn’t doing too bad. What had the higher ups so worried?

This was a work colony, there weren’t many out here who had the extra energy to allocate towards starting a rebellion. Surprisingly that was more of a human thing. They had started the wars that forced enemy factions to build beasts. They had started weaponizing the mutants and various extraterrestrials that had sought asylum on this planet. There was a noticeable lack of human presence in the Carna work coloney. For more than one reason really. There was the obvious: humans were more likely to get hired at most jobs so they didn’t have to resort to risking their lives in places like this. It was also that by comparison to most other species, humans weren’t ideal for manual labor. Humans could rarely lift their own body weight unless augmented, and broken bones took them months to heal because usually they couldn’t handle the surgeries or rapid fix solutions that other creatures could.

She absentmindedly drew her claws across her right forearm, talons following the grooves of the mechanical limb.

The muttering of the crowd kicked up from a dull roar into a straight up roar and it snapped her from her thoughts. The visible security detail was holding the particularly rowdy citizens back, and Silver wondered if he had said something inflammatory in a positive way or a negative one.

Half the horde was yelling, but it seemed positive.

Not her problem regardless. She got back to surveying the crowd for real threats, she almost jumped down when she noticed a lafiterope, one of the few extraterrestrial, commonly called extra, races that had actually mingled pretty well with this planet’s social system. Tall, lean, gray, very sharp bone-like facial construction, but you could always tell when they were thinking for how they reflexively fanned their tail fins out or cocked their skull mounted appendages. She had luckily noticed he hadn’t had anything resembling a weapon or bag on him before she descended to investigate.

Things passed in relative peace after that, and the politician up and left without any attempts on his life. Which she maybe resented slightly. More than that thought, it shocked her. If they had been cautious enough to send her out here that had to mean there was some sort of threat looming or they were concerned about one. Maybe the inhuman choice was a better one than the tops gave it credit for.

As the herd disbanded she started to climb down, she veered off to the side so as to not make a spectacle of herself. She let the stealth colors slip away, the dark fur and light fur switching places, as her stripes turned black and her base coat turned white. She landed among some of the stragglers but they paid her no attention. It was a weird but not unpleasant feeling, to be one of the crowd. It was one of the reasons she hadn’t been as pissy about this op as she might have been.

She sort of liked the work colonies, because for their population she wasn’t all that unusual. She was a nine foot three augmented meta with blazing white fur and black stripes. The blades on her tail might have earned her a few glances but overall it was like they couldn’t even see her. She was always the most noticeable in a room, save for a few very specific rooms, and it wore on a beast. Here there were creatures as tall as her, some taller, and beastier, she was far from the weirdest or most inconspicuous, she felt strangely at home.

She wandered over to the side of the city she was told to expect pick up.

She left the half of the city that was still lovingly called the barracks. Most colonies tended to rename the more populated half of the colony when they became a city instead of a shanty town next to a mine, but good old Carna didn’t seem to be in the market for change. She exchanged the suffocating close quarters of structures and far too many pedestrians for the crashing open land of the work site. The half of the colony dedicated to digging and the machinery that did the digging. It was dotted in massive craters, mud puddles, and a few camp-like setups for mechanical maintenance. The buildings were far and few here. Most of the constructed objects came in the form of makeshift scaffolding that staggered down the massive holes. Huge digging or flying machines that growled and groaned as they barfed smoke and ash into the air. The digging ones snuffled along the ground, looking for where their masters wanted them, more than willing to run you over if you stood in their way. The flying ones hovered high in the air like vultures, waiting for something to die.

It was here that she reaped some of the benefits of being as tall as she was. It was hard to miss a beast that big and that bright. So while she was perfectly capable of leaping clear of any of the drills, she didn’t really need to. They saw her, and while the machines would be happy to crush her, the drivers did their best to avoid an additional hour of paperwork.

Silver reached the far end of the work site and ascended one of the few structures that had been built well. It had clearly once been the center of some sort of foreman structure, but time had pulled it down to its bones. There was steel and concrete, maybe a few spatterings of glass to watch for, but it was still secure. It seemed to be where the few creatures who didn’t work through it, ate lunch.

She was about to let herself lean back and relax until they commed her for extraction when she saw something. Not smelled, the air here was heavy with the heat of melting and scorching that burned the lungs, and full through with dust and dirt that would have had a lesser creature doubled over in a coughing fit. No, there was no smelling here. What she saw was a muzzle she recognized. It was a boar crossed with something that looked feline. He wasn’t small, but he wasn’t anywhere near as large as her. She knew this creature from the faction’s defectors list that sometimes played across the screens in the mess hall. And deffectors had to die.

It wasn’t necessarily uncommon to see beast soldiers out in the cities surrounding bases. Sometimes they escaped or on exceedingly rare occasions were dismissed. But these creatures were usually pures, single base beast soldiers, particularly weaker ones like smaller canines or cougars that were a dime a dozen. Or sometimes cyborgs that didn’t quite have the stomach to kill when told to. What they were not was metas. Metas were an investment by the faction, splicing two or more beasts together did not come cheap no matter what method was used, lab grown or stitched. ID did not dismiss them. If metas were rebellious or disappointing, they were trained or they were decommissioned.

It always brought a smirk, to her eyes at least, when she thought of how they used that word. The techs were “kind enough” to use put down. like that made it any better. The leadership preferred to be more professional. The creatures who could afford to protest it did so because they claimed it downplayed the death of a sentient being. Trivialized the loss of life to a mere corporate phrase. Silver didn’t understand why this was the thing they chose to harp on instead of the fact that agents were not created, working, or dying of their own free will, but what did she know she was just one of the idiots in the program. The very thing that fired up protestors however was the very thing that gave her a strange sort of calm about the whole situation. Downplaying death made it more palatable perhaps, or maybe it was just the way she had been trained. She had to decide death wasn’t a big deal, and that included her own.

ID was anal about the decommisioning policy for runaways mostly because they were “competitive.” They couldn’t risk current agents, or as it was so gently put, current technology, falling into the hands of the enemy factions like Hex or Gen. Specifically Hex or Gen, because they along with the ID division made up what most creatures referred to as the big three. The three strongest factions in the world. The ones with the most land and technological advancements at their disposal. Just exactly how much no one would tell, but all who fell under ID’s leadership were assured ID was well in the lead. So in short, no real way to know.

Unless you worked in intelligence. Silver didn’t always, but she did often enough to get a clearer picture of the world than the faction would have preferred she have. She was in and out of enemy territory and in contact with enemy agents. She knew what kind of soldiers and tech they had, and ID was right. As far as she could see. They were leading this rat race. They had more metas, more advanced cyborgs, medical facilities, and weaponry. From what she’d seen of enemy factions their cities were large, particularly Gen’s. However, Intra-gen seemed to focus on naturally occurring creatures, superhumans or extra’s to supply them with advantages. They didn’t as frequently make their own. Hex on the other hand was very tech focused and very human focused. Silver didn’t like ID. This was no secret. She had pissed on corporate shoes more than once simply because the opportunity had been available. But she hated Hex R.E.M.

She had spent her early years on the border battlefronts back when the war had been at a higher intensity. She had spilled and seen spilled more blood than she cared to remember, but the one thing that she prided herself on was how often she had dealt damage to Hex. Gen she could take or leave, but Hex bastards glowed with a special sort of anthropocentric stupidity that she couldn’t ignore. Speciesism was bad everywhere, the rating system hadn’t been created out of love. Human, near-human, inhuman, beast. But most places had the decency to try and hide it. Pretending like the social mechanisms of the time had trapped them too.

Silver usually ignored it, she spent enough time among her own kind to care less what other creatures thought. The thing was that Hex didn’t hide it, they prided themselves on it. Hex founded their entire existence on wiping out anything near-human and below, and sending the extra’s back to space. It was all about reclaiming the planet for humanity. Humans had made beast soldiers to begin with, now they actively wanted to wipe them out. I didn’t consent to being created, and now you have the audacity to say I need your consent to exist!? It made her blood boil.

She noticed the drill the defector’s group was working with had stopped again. Her brain started to search for a secluded spot to deal with the defector. That wasn’t easy to come by when she could count the number of buildings that side of the colony on one paw. Sure there were the mining tunnels, but it didn’t seem like he did any work sub-terrainially, so that was out.

There was always just jumping him here and flashing her markings, there wouldn’t be a soul on site brave enough to stop her if there was a soul who cared enough to try. But that brought with it a lot of attention, she knew ID didn’t like attention drawn to these matters. If they hadn’t sent teams to actually go looking for this guy he was likely just an escapee with little actual intel on ID. A very low risk target, probably not all that dangerous either. She really could let this go if she wanted too… but she didn’t want to.

Silver was antsy. She had been confined to training simulations all week, and hadn’t seen real combat in just short of a month. It wasn’t good for her, well Nero would have said that at least. She was itching for something like this after the bodyguard stuff had gone perfectly according to plan. She needed this! She’d follow him, that was all. She’d see where he went and act if the opportunity arose. That was sensible.

She lingered a while, waiting for the unmistakable beep of her com link. She kept it on her augmented ear, the magnetized ones were stronger than the clips. Silver worried she looked suspicious, not that she really thought anyone cared, but if she looked suspicious for too long she might be seen by her quarry. She faced the same problem as before, with nowhere to corner her target there was also nowhere to wait it out. So in favor of the mission she got her paws dirty.

With the constant influx of work no one really questioned where new hands (or paws) came from, drifters were welcome as pay usually came at the end of the week. If the foreman of whatever group you managed to walk into was decent he would pay out equally what the mining had earned, and maybe keep a bit extra for himself. If he wasn’t so decent he’d pay out what he thought you were worth. It was an overt way of saying who he wanted to stay on, who he didn’t want to stay on, and who he didn’t give a shit about. The mining was all done independently, so it was really luck of the draw when it came to the morality of who you walked in on, though most foremen weren’t so decent.

Silver needed a group that was close to the defector’s, but wouldn’t enter his group. Both because it would have made her presence too apparent and because they weren’t exactly doing something she could just join in on. Crews had only a few types of jobs and would only take a very specific amount of each. There was the foreman, the mechanic, the heavy lifters, and general labor. About anyone could be a general laborer, they sorted ore, cleared out rock that the drills couldn’t get, and handled more delicate ores. To be a heavy lifter you had to be able to, at minimum, be able to lift the drill. Mechanics required an understanding of the machines they were working on, and foremen had to own the machines and have some sort of rapport with ore dealers.

The defector’s group was currently repairing their drill, the defector appeared to be a heavy lifter but he wasn’t a very good one, as she spotted his arms shaking while the mechanic worked.

She picked a group that was also having trouble with their drill, though this trouble wasn’t mechanical. One of its wheels was stuck in a half-started drill crater; she wasn’t sure how that had happened, but she would have bet money on user error.

It was a group of five. There were two inhuman hybrids that had feathers and looked related, a creature that was easily just as tall as her, but made of stone and scales, a feline humanoid and a robot who was a little over human size. All except for the feline were at the back pushing and occasionally half slipping in the mud as the drill groaned but stood stubborn and unmoving.

She wandered over, glanced at the feline and nodded to the drill. They shrugged and nodded. Speaking here wasn’t always the best choice, as there was always some noise blaring painfully and there were several evolved dialects that were capable of thoroughly hampering communication.

Since they hadn’t objected, Silver joined the group. It was muddy, which she didn’t mind, and uncomfortably close, which she did. She had smelled them on the way over, that wasn’t unusual, her sense of smell was almost as strong as her sight. Useful in most situations, but when she plunged in to help she was immediately assailed by the wave of B.O. It almost made her reconsider the plan.

Still, she stayed with it. This was a good enough vantage point and it was near enough to the end of the work day to make staying close integral. So she braced herself and decided to draw this out. She didn’t put all her strength into it immediately, she didn’t need this thing to move, she just needed to linger and look like she was supposed to be there. She shifted the drill a little, just to make it look like she was contributing, and to keep the others trying. This went on for a little while, but there was only so long before the crew got tired of it.

One of feathery humanoids, this one with lighter colors closer to gray broke away first.

“This is useless, we should just get one of the choppers to help us out.” She complained.

“No! I can get this!” Their lifter assured, seeming to Silver to be more than a little concerned about his place in the group.

“Yeah if we give you another two hours, I’m with Shi, we should pay off one of the choppers.” The robot broke away.

The other hybrid looked up at the creature of stone and scales and shrugged, “Sorry big guy, I’m with them.” And abandoned his post.

The heavy lifter looked, or turned where Silver would have expected eyes to sit in what she thought was his head on her, making a motion to swat her away. “Get out of here scavenger. I got this.”

She felt something in her chest flicker. She had been intending to draw this out as long as she could, taking advantage of the prime recon location. She could have stepped off and let their gavel monster burn himself out. She should have just stepped off and let their gravel monster burn himself out. Thing was she had just been presented with the one thing that she found she could never resist. Condescending challenge.

Her eyes narrowed, “Fine.” She backed out of the crater and stood with the others, crossing her arms as she watched him struggle for a few minutes. Just as she was sensing the foreman was about to call someone over she descended back into the crater.

The heavy lifter was about to yell at her when she cut him off. “You still have the energy to keep pushing?”

He didn’t answer.

“Didn’t think so. Out of the way cement mixer, make room for the real heavy weight.” She put a special edge to her voice at the end.

He looked like he wanted to hit her, and for a second she was certain he would, when the foreman intervened. “Give her a turn, you had your chance.”

He made a noise Silver was sure would have translated to a growl had it come out of her mouth, before backing off and joining the others.

The drills tended to range in size, from ones about the size of a land based car to about the size of two garbage trucks stacked on top of one another. This one fell nicely on the higher end of that spectrum and Silver was somewhat amazed it hadn’t crushed one of the crew members already. When she actually put her strength behind it the whole thing shifted with no more strain than shoving a couch. She pushed it up and out of the crater in moments then turned to the heavy lifter, slanting her mouth almost into a grin.

The rest of the group came running over, the forman yelling “You could have done that the whole time!?”

She shrugged and moved off. Not imagining they’d want her around after she had wasted all that time. She didn’t know if this was actually true, but she ignored whatever they called after her anyway.

From there she slunk off to find somewhere else to watch from. As she was wandering the site she heard her com unit beep. She clicked the button that doubled as the indicator light and the voice of the pilot came through.

“Silver Blood, this is Quad Wing 8. Heading over to pick you up, eta thirty minutes, copy?”

“Scratch that Quad Wing. I need some more time, something came up.”

“You need back up Silver?”

“Nope, I’m fine on my own. Tell Dawson the op went cleanly, this is just some… self care.”

“Copy that Silver Blood, I’ll relay the message and swing back around in a few hours. Quad Wing out.”

With that out of the way she turned her attention elsewhere. She spotted a group performing general maintenance. It wasn’t altogether uncommon for mechanics to band together and set up a sort of traveling shop on whatever space wasn’t being mined that day. They usually had to split the pay but it was certainly easier than going group to group looking for work that could be gone the next day.

She approached the no-sided tent and spit balled which of the creatures inside was the one most in charge. It seemed to be an android, not surprising, she heard mechanical folk in general complaining that it took a machine to know one, when they were vying for a job with a human. They were working on some sort of engine, and were clearly very into their work as it took physical contact to get their attention. When they did look up, they gave Silver a questioning glance.

“I’m strong and pretty durable. Any work here?”

Turned out they had just lost their heavy lifter to a machine crew that morning. Good timing.

Silver spent the early to middle of the evening lifting machine parts and holding things in place with her augmented arm as mechanics welded it. It was boring as hell, but preferable to the stench of the other group. She zoned out for most of it, only giving one, or if she was feeling really talkative, two word answers when they pried. They asked about where she had come from, if she had any family, and where she was going. That earned a “somewhere else”, “no”, and “dunno” respectively. They picked up pretty quickly that she wasn’t the talkative type, but she was good at what they were asking so they couldn’t complain too much.

Silver’s stalking came to a head when she noticed the defector starting to move off in the direction of the barracks. Thank God. She waited a moment before excusing herself and starting on the same track. Usually she’d let them get some distance and follow by smell. That had a lower risk of alerting the target, but being as she hadn’t been close enough to get his scent that wasn’t an option here.

Once they hit the side of the settlement with buildings she climbed, ascending the building as easily as walking up the stairs. Her fur inverted again, in the almost dying light white on black was much less obtrusive than black on white. She moved cleanly between roofs, occasionally getting ahead and looking for a good place to side track him. She found it as they started to reach the more desolate streets on the side of town that housed groups instead of families.

Silver reviewed what she knew as she kept far enough to stay out of sight, but close enough to keep track. He was a beast, so he didn’t have family, maybe he had friends. She needed to intercept him before he got wherever he was going unless she was prepared to deal with whatever attention that would draw. His head was boar, and she knew pigs didn’t do great with sight, relying much more on sense of smell. She had already taken this into account but the wind wasn’t making things easy on her. She tried her best to stay downwind of him, but the occasional shifts meant she might not get the element of surprise. She would find a way to compensate, and as he wandered towards the area she had been mulling about in pre-op she got a little more confident, now she had a plan.

Silver ran ahead, it wasn’t difficult. This place was nothing compared to the towering structures of Oriah city. These roofs were close in size and the alleys between them were small. Not to mention a lot of these had fire escape ladders, albeit of questionable quality. The city was practically a training course.

She was half way through the leap when she found two alleys that lined up almost perfectly. She landed cleanly before sliding back enough to hand her legs off, sliding further until she was gripping the edge, and then just letting go. It was maybe four stories, not too high. She landed quietly, her hind limbs bending until her fore paws reached the ground effectively spreading the shock.

Tucked in behind the wall of the alley she waited. Her eyes wandered as her ears and nose took the reins. There weren’t many creatures out here after dark that weren’t dangerous, or at least considered themselves dangerous. So she didn’t have to do a whole lot of weeding out, as there were really only two other creatures moving along this particular street. One that had a metallic clang to its step that she instantly discounted, and the other had a scent that was very heavy with char, but Silver didn’t let her thoughts wander to what that meant. Then there were the soft steps. They were quiet with practice, but audible with weight. That was it. That was her quarry. As the wind shifted again the reek of fur infrequently washed filled her nostrils.

As he passed between the alleys Silver’s muscles loosed like compressed springs. She tore across the street and bounded straight into him with an unintentional snarl. This sent them both tumbling to the ground of the adjacent alleyway and generally out of the public eye.

He rubbed his head and got to his feet, grumbling all the while. “What the hell?” That was the first time he got a good look at her and his stance tensed. “So, they finally sent someone.”

The glint in her eyes didn’t match the careful neutrality of her expression. “Naw, I was just in the neighborhood at the right time.”

He laughed cynically, shaking his head, like he had just discovered a parking ticket on his windshield. “So, you gonna take me alive?”

She was tempted to mimic it, she wasn’t a fan of how dismissive he was being. But she could fix that. Slowly the carefully moderated chromatophores relaxed, the sharp red stripe down her back practically glowing in the dying light. “No.”

His eyes widened, his brain immediately reclassifying this from mere inconvenience to something far more life threatening. She swore she almost saw a tremor in his hands. They didn’t say anything for what felt like longer than a few seconds when Silver got bored with the theatrics. “You going to make this easy?”

He swallowed and seemed to consider his options, she swore she saw a yes on his lips before tightening his jaw in sync with his fists taking control of his traitorous muscles. His tone took a sudden seriousness as if he had only now decided he wasn’t going to die a terrified bitch, “No.”

Her jaw fought a grin that matched the sadistic glow in her eyes. “Good.” She lunged forward into him, claws lengthening from the still biological paw.

He blocked the first slash and the second with his forearms, that still left him with near bone deep cuts that started dribbling blood as soon as they were able. He wasn’t a complete novice, he could block the pain out for the time being, but that was because those slash marks certainly wouldn’t be what killed him.

Before he could manage any way to get close enough to do some damage Silver decided she didn’t want to stop at medical for her sense of fair play. She went right for the exact same spot, slicing her claws right through the bones of his forearms. His arms started to shake as they tried in vein to use the decimated muscle. He stumbled back, panic telling him to put distance between them. He glanced down and it only took that glance for her to spin and sweep his legs out from under him with her tail, knocking him to the ground.

He rolled quickly to his side, then rose to his knees and back to his feet. The momentum brought with it a little confidence as he sent a punch in the direction of his attacker. She wasn’t still in the same spot to receive it, instead she caught his arm and twisted. Her grip grew tighter and tighter, finishing what she had started. He felt the bone about to- his arm forearm bent down the middle with an audible crunch. He yelled and tried to recoil but from there she dealt a flurry of blows that put him back on the ground and out of breath. All he had left was the adrenaline fueled fear pulsing in his head.

Silver halted for a second, stepping onto his chest, and cracking something within it before leaning her head down to give him a good view of her teeth. “Any last words?”

He was stuck in a cycle of rapid breathing, and Silver thought he might not be able to break it when the words came rushing out of his mouth in a wet and glue-like sludge of fear and rage.

“You think killing me will make you feel better about your own sorry miserable life?! Because I had the balls to leave and you’re still doing their bitch work? You sick animal! Fucking executioner!” he spat a mix of blood and saliva as far as he could get it.

She sneered without actually smiling. Her paw slid down to the holster. “Well I’m an executioner. So I won’t feel anything.”

“Wait! Wait don’t! Please I-!” The last thing Xeito saw in that life was the flash of Silver’s pistol.

She watched his form go limp, dark liquid pooling under his head. She considered his head for a second. She’d need some way to confirm the kill. He would have doubtlessly removed his implant by now. She didn’t have anything that could contain his whole head, her gaze held for a moment on the defector’s tusks… That could work.

Silver wandered out of the alley pulling a damp paw out of her equipment bag before zipping it. Her fur colors shifted back to classic, black on white and no stripe, then she pressed a digit to the com unit magnetized to her artificial ear. “8, you still nearby?”

***

Silver had a policy- no tradition of not talking with the chopper pilots. She didn’t like the idea of them playing the role of bar owner or mother to a child after they came home from school. She was not going to give this rando any more information than was absolutely necessary. So she drew on the same social skills that she had evoked when in the tech tent, one or two word answers, he got the idea eventually.

While she hated conversation, she did enjoy riding in air based vehicles, specifically when they had windows. She secretly loved looking out at the world passing below like a hyper realistic screensaver. She was slightly bittersweet at the notion she would likely never be able to see those places up close, but this was better than nothing.

The dying light had given up to complete darkness and her eyes adjusted accordingly, she didn’t get the full color in the dark, but her augmented eye could rival the vision of many of the raptor based soldiers. As they headed away from Carna it became much more noticeable that the colony was actually built on what was essentially a mountain with the top sliced off. A mesa, but much much bigger.

It stayed pretty flat moving out from there, one or two similar mesas rose several miles in the distance, one of them occupied with a much smaller colony whose lights were barely noticeable even this close. From there the terrain slowly grew into forest, parted by the Rymast river. A massive body of water that it was speculated circled the entire planet. There were very few places that it fell under a mile wide, and the max depths in most of it were largely unknown. She stared into it with a cultivated detachment, letting her brain turn the shifting graininess of the river into ominous shapes waiting in the water just below. Her mind found the water far more interesting than the ever growing settlements that sandwiched the massive blue line in.

The river's adjacent terrain eventually gave rise to the rolling inconsistent geography and forests she almost considered home, or at least what surrounded home. The forests were difficult to read from up there. She knew the terrain better from the ground. She had run almost every square inch of that jungle, thanks to dozens and dozens of training exercises, and the occasional free time jog. It stretched several miles in all directions but here the trees stopped short. The ground died back down to a hybrid of ash and brown dirt. She knew there had once been forest here, and it had tried to come back, but ID took care of that. They had a company who specialized in controlled fires. Then at the heart of it all the unassuming block that was ID base Delta 12. The base looked pretty boring on the outside. She couldn’t say much changed about the look on the inside, but looking at it from there you’d never know just how deep the base’s roots ran and just how far they managed to stretch.

The pilot looped the chopper into the hangar, landing cleanly and starting to shut the engine off. Silver pulled the door open and hopped out.

Check in was first, let the higher ups know the mission had been accomplished, and she was back in the pool for whatever they had for her to do next. So she weaved her way through the choppers and planes, reaching the hanger door and plunged into the halls. The halls ran the entire place making up the grid like streets of any of the more organized cities. For all intents and purposes this place was a city… well a town. The base contained somewhere in the range of five thousand or so occupants. It wasn’t one of the larger bases but that didn’t make it small by any means.

Much like the others that frequented this base or lived in it, Silver knew her way around without so much as a glance at the signs that decorated the walls. The higher levels were generally uncluttered by signs for shops or meet ups, or graffiti. Silver generally didn’t like to take the more crowded halls. Weaving between others or worse still waiting patiently for them to meander along at their own pace did not appeal to her. She instead cut through one of the office wings and went through the east wing mess hall. From there she took two lefts and hit a room with checkers, rather, the creatures, usually humans, who did the checking in. She knew they had once toyed with the idea of making check-in self-serve. That had never happened because whether or not they would ever admit it none of them trusted beasts to check back in, and they couldn’t use their clever little shock implants if it didn’t register they were back in base.

Silver stepped into line. Her mind began to wander as she waited, first to the a-drive, which she tested gingerly with her more durable mechanical limb before deciding it was safe to strap against her back. Then she recalled the memento in the bag strapped to her thigh, she was getting an idea. A strange tingle ran through her shoulders as she felt strangely like Vik.

She reached the desk at the front of the line, her checker seeming to be a middle aged looking human female, perfect.

“Scan.” The checker ordered with a voice that was clearly running solely on routine.

Silver turned around and pressed her upper back to the black plastic looking scanning strip that ran up the wall next to the desk. A bright red light ran down the plastic, beeping pleasantly when the scan detected the implant between her shoulders.

“Code name?”

“Silver Blood.”

“Mission status?”

“Complete.”

“Anything to declare?”

The desire to smirk tugged at the edge of her mouth again, but she resisted. “As a matter of fact…” She placed down on the desk, in front of the human, a bloody boar tusk, with a small piece of what was probably flesh still clinging on for dear life. “Who should I talk to about rating credit?”

The checker shrieked.

***

Dawson’s office was a place she found herself more and more these days, for reasons other than mission briefings. Currently she was zoning out on one of the old movie posters he had framed up in his office, or maybe it was one of the musical posters. She could never remember. Meanwhile he tore into her about something. She didn’t know exactly what, but she could guess. The tusk had really just been the final straw in a slightly longer list of mischief than normal. In that month alone she had done at least four things he could cite her on. But he wouldn’t. Silver was a UV rated fighter, when you got categorized that high on the “danger rater”, god she couldn’t believe she had actually started calling it that, the higher ups didn’t really have time to punish you for the small things. Especially when you never got caught. She usually never got caught. No one would have cared if she hadn’t pulled the tusk out to spook the checker… Why had she done that?

Silver did things to burn off her excess energy, that’s what the haphazard bounty hunting had been. What had the checker been?

“Silver! God, are you even listening?”

“No, not really.”

Dawson looked like his head was about to pop. Then he let the air out of his lungs slowly, deflating like a popped tire. “You know what, fine. What do I care, it only reflects on me when you pull shit like this!” He snapped. “Do you even know why you’re in here? Did you pick up that much?”

“No, but I’m pretty sure it’s the tusk.”

“It’s the tusk, the theft, the killing, the fact that all of this is getting more frequent with you and it’s being noticed by more than just me.”

That caught her attention. She shifted from her entirely leaned back bordering on kicking up her feet on Dawson’s desk position to sitting up straight. “Who’s it being noticed by?”

“I was getting to that. Silver, look you know that I report to a guy who reports to a guy who reports to a guy and so on. Well a couple guys up, someone's noticed the uptick in your bullshit.”

“What are they planning to do about it exactly?” She hadn’t meant it to sound like a taunt crossed with a threat, that’s just how it came out.

“Easy. They just think you need a little more structure in your life.”

“Are they reassigning me!? I’ve done all their shitty ops flawlessly. What do they think sticking me under some unit leader is gonna accomplish? I think we already established, I don’t play well with others.”

“Silver! God! You’re the queen of interrupting me today. No.”

“No, what?”

“Let me finish!”

“Don’t be so melodramatic.”

“They tried to assign you, but none of the unit leaders would take you.”

Again she almost smiled! It was a weird day.

“So, they decided you’re experienced enough to lead your own unit.”

She was certain her eye twitched. “Come again?”

“They’re reassigning you from solo ops to unit leader.”

He had the audacity to be happy about this?

“I don’t want to be a unit leader.”

“Tough shit, I don’t make the rules. I just pass ‘em on.” He seemed pretty pleased with himself after that. She fought a deep urge to tear him a new one, and instead settled on just growling. Something like that towards any other human would have definitely gotten her cited, and would have definitely been grounds for punishment. Humans were scared of anything that wasn’t human, well most humans were. Dawson, Silver had found, was a rare breed among them. He wasn’t scared of her or any of the other beasts, though she had never figured out why. These qualities were the reason he got assigned to deal with some of the beast agents that had a more checkered history. It was something she respected him for, and usually one of the reasons she tried to stay out of trouble.

Silver stewed in her rage for a moment, her mind rooting around for anything to say that could get her out of this. Nothing. She sighed and let her gaze fall a bit.

Dawson’s expression eased up a bit, “Look, Silver it is not gonna be that bad. There’s a reason that unit leader is a rank above solo ops. It means you get to pick your team, your own missions, you get to be in charge of training them and unit leaders get to leave base unchecked!”

“You know that’s not what I’m worried about.” She muttered.

“You haven’t had a lapse in eight years.”

“I haven't had a team in eight years.”

“Just take it slow at first.”

She shook her head and turned away a bit.

“I’m sure you’ll do great.”

“You suck at gambling based entertainment don’t you?”

He laughed, “Well my wife thinks so, but we won’t know until you try.”

“What if I won’t try?”

“Then they’ll assign you a team. You’re not getting out of this.”

She bared her teeth at the wall then finally met his gaze again. “Fine. Where do I see the candidates and what is my deadline?”

“You have a week from tomorrow, your candidate pool is on here.” He held out a beast geared tablet to her. Beast geared, meaning it was larger, stronger built, and had a reinforced screen to guard against claw marks.

She took it, staring half a second at the blank screen, “Anything else?”

“No. Just be sure to check back in when you’ve got your list.”

“Right.”

Silver tucked the tab under her arm and lost track of her mind shortly after pushing through Dawson’s office door.

***

Her brain moved slowly through images she worked day and night to forget. Her body was somewhere, but her mind was not with it. It was doing something, but she couldn’t see it past the red. When she came back to herself she had sore arms and a vague notion that she had dumped her gear in her quarters. She was in one of the gyms, no telling what wing or level, most of them looked the same, but this one seemed to be meant for larger meta’s like herself.

She immediately started taking stock of herself. Nervously checking for blood. She hadn’t lapsed, that wasn’t what that was. She knew what a lapse was. That had been… something else. Whatever it was, as long as she hadn’t done any damage she was fine. She wanted to wash the taste of those memories out of her mind, clearly exercise wasn’t doing it. She needed something stronger.

She didn’t frequent bars. She was in them once a month tops and that was only when badgered by one of the three beasts she considered friends. She chose this one because she knew one of her associates did frequent bars, specifically this one. Rory claimed it was the best one in Delta. Silver had no clue what could have made it better than the other three bars in the base, but who was she to judge?

Seat specifically at the bar selected, Silver sat down heavily. She had swung by her room and found the data tab tossed on her bed. She didn’t know why she had- no that wasn’t true. She knew there were easily over four thousand candidates in the pool at any given time. She’d need the week she had to get through enough to find anyone who met her standards… whatever those were. She figured the alcohol might make it easier. She ordered “something strong” and turned the tab on.

“Make it two, but get me something twice as strong.”

She knew that voice.

Silver looked up blearily.

Rory was a pure crocodile, she had a few metal patches on her back, but overall was mostly natural muscle. A beast designed for brute strength, she had surpassed her training unit when it became abundantly clear she also had a brain under all the crocodilian armor. She had known the creature who had owned Silver’s tail before he had been cut up. Their relationship had been weird at first. Silver had tried to apologize then Rory had said “he was an asshole anyway” and their friendship really took off from there.

Rory sat, with a strange grace, on the stool next to her, “You look like shit. You cut sleep last night?”

“Dunno, what time is it?”

“Two-ish.”

“In the morning?”

“No.”

Damn, how many hours had she lost? “Then what the hell are you doing in a bar?”

“The hell are you doing in one? I haven’t seen you voluntarily socialize…. Yeah, never.”

“No one said anything about socializing. I just came here to drown some shit.”

Rory looked down, but didn’t pry. She was good like that. “Well you’re in luck. I’m a croc, drowning shit is my specialty.”