# Third Shift



## kroh (May 24, 2005)

Chapter 1: Phantoms

	Soft blue, it was everywhere in the large cavernous room.  Several rows of desks set apart in a stadium-like array boasted computer screens being worshiped by their technicians.  A screen for every seat and a body for every screen, the room resembled a giant amphitheater awash in the electronic glow of the many screens and monitors.   A large wall many meters away boasted a stories tall screen that bestowed power readings and tracking data to any that cared to cast a glance upward.  Dark, except for the lush blue light, the room spoke volumes of the activity that would soon be taking place. 

	High above the hive, a command and control center floated amidst the catwalks in the shadows of the ceiling.  High above the light, the presence of the center was heavenly, as everyone below knew that it was there though none of them could see it.  Several coordinators tracked information from their sections and relayed instructions back as a conductor relays instructions to an orchestra.  Stark still and taking in all around him, a lone figure stood motionless in the center.  High above the action and surrounded by his administrators, the figure remained impassive.  A wireless halo framed his head feeding a data stream directly into his brain.  The signal transmitted all that was necessary for him to know so that he could see any event or hear any exchange as if he were standing where it was taking place.  This man was the _maestro_ and this was his masterpiece.  

	“Sir,” one of his controllers placed a firm grip on his shoulder bringing him from his reverie.  “We are ready to begin.”

	“Has Alpha 1-1 and Alpha 1-2 reported back yet?”

	“No Sir,” he replied dryly.   Small oval glasses turned to regard the man and wonder at his tone.  

	“We lost contact at 18:30 hours and have yet to hear anything.  The group pursuing them is not wearing any insignia and they didn’t believe that it was police or local militia.  All we know at this point, Sir is that they are running for their life and 1-2 is hurt.  Some one who knows what to look for is jamming their locator beacons.  Who ever is doing this knows a little something about how we do business. “

	“What assets do we have available?” the Maestro was thinking it was time for the next movement of this “concert” and dramatic tones were needed. 

	“Not much at the moment,” replied the Lieutenant.  “We have a couple of crisis and crash teams but nothing as covert as what we need for this operation.  We have a tool box full of hammers and hacksaws when what we really need is a scalpel.”

	The figure turned back to the darkness of the pit below and then regarded the giant display screen before him.  Unfolding the arms that rested upon his chest, a small control in his palm conjured up “holo’s” of tracking data and mission reports of everything that had happened up to this point.  The “music” of this mission had started innocently enough but was becoming increasingly complex.  The figure risked a small smile.  He loved to compare these missions to concerts.  The analogy always lined up perfectly.  In some of the greatest concerto’s that had ever been played, many conductors sought the simplistic freedom of a soloist when the need to change the pace of a peace became apparent.  He needed a soloist now.  

	“Get Echo-3 up and running.  I want him ready to jump in 15.”

	The lieutenant took an involuntary step back and stared at his conductor.  The halo on his balding head was still.  The holo’s had faded and been replaced with his arms folded back across his chest.  He stood as he always did, still.  The other coordinators on the catwalk far above the floor looked up from their tasks to regard the lieutenant and then the conductor.	

	“Something I said not working for you?  Or should I promote one of your crew who *will* carry out my orders?”

	“No problem, Sir.  Are you sure that you want send him out so early?  I mean, you only just suspended him for the last time he went out.  Not to mention the fact that the government of…”

	The figure turned and suddenly all other faces went back to worshiping their terminals and the lieutenant took another step back under the withering stare.  “Just get him going.  As you said…what we need is a scalpel.”

Next: Heavy Breathing


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## kroh (May 24, 2005)

Chapter 2: Heavy Breathing	

	Pain.  It was the pain one feels when going for a long run or swimming right after eating.  It was the pain that some one felt when punched in the gut.  It felt like any or all of these pains except for it was magnified by a factor of ten and then some. 

	Mike looked down at his abdomen as he continued to try and pry open the ballistic vest hidden under his shirt.  The vest had done its job, sort of.  It had been hit by a round meant for his partner, Sarah, who sat next to him rocketing the car they now drove in down the empty streets of a normally busy town.  The bullet had fragmented when it hit the vest and perforated the it causing some very uncomfortable bleeding.  The splintered vest had meshed together and Mike was trying to cut down the cloth side of the vest with a pocketknife in order to free himself from it.  

	“You do know this is a rental and if you bleed all over the seat I won’t get my deposit back?”  Sarah was good at making a heavy situation lighter.  Red hair framed a face that could burn away even the heaviest of clouds over a situation.  Mike was grateful for the good cheer

	“I’ll have to owe you,” Mike tried to sound optimistic.  The bullet had hit him in the lower right abdomen and from his experience in the military he knew that the vest had saved his life but the bullet had cracked some ribs.  The scoring of the protective plates had dug into him and was now causing him to bleed a bit.  The bleeding was not severe but it could get worse if not bound soon.  And the jostling of the car at one hundred and fifty kilometers per hour was causing the shorn plates to cut deeper every time he moved.  “Any chance of slowing down a bit?”

	An explosion of glass from the back of the car sent shards flying into the front.  The sound of intermittent gunfire could be heard from behind and a tassel of lights rounded a bend of the last street they had passed to follow in close pursuit.  “Guess that answers that question.”

	Sarah hit the emergency brake and spun the car into a tight turn until the nose of the car faced those of her pursuers.  Rigging the gears into reverse and flooring the pedal she began to rocket down the street backwards.  “Gun please,” she said to Mike with no more concern than asking for a drink or a snack.  Mike placed the gun in her palm and she transferred it into her left hand and began firing out of her window.  Two controlled shots pierced a large box next to what looked like a communications poll and the object exploded in a shower of sparks and flame.  The rupture blew down the poll and knocked it into the lead chase car smashing it into pulp.  The other two cars behind rammed into the first and the pursuit was ended when the first car erupted into a ball of flame.  Another controlled turn had the car in the right again.

	Mike had stopped working on the vest and looked in disbelief at his partner.  “Who taught you how to shoot like that?”

	“Funny thing, that.  Real HOT guy with a hole in his belly taught me.”

	“You think I’m hot?”

	“Well, no, I was trying to make you feel better.  Did it work?”

The car began to slow as Sarah tried to make them look less conspicuous.  She knew that on closer inspection any security force would see the bullet holes and ruptured transplast windshield and know something was wrong.  But she also knew that doing one hundred and fifty in a fifty-kph zone would definitely attract attention.  “Now all we got to do is find a safe place to put in to get that thing off of you and make sure that we can get our…”
A behemoth of plasteel and duramar, the giant tractor trailer truck plowed into the small sedan with the force of a hurricane.   Air curtains and bags along with fire retardant gel deployed into the cabin of the car to protect the occupants even as the frame of the car bent along the grill of the truck.  The car was being pushed sideways against the tires.  The tires soon ruptured sending sparks into the air as the car squealed along its new course.  The truck continued to push until it reached a dividing wall that separated a walkway from a ten-meter drop.	

The car broke through the thin wall and toppled into the empty street below.  Cart wheeling once as it fell the car landed on the front part of the passenger side.  A second blast of impact and fire stopping gel shot through the car to protect the occupants from harm as the car came to an abrupt stop.  All went quiet at the back of the street as the City itself was holding its breath.  A half a minute later the nose of the truck disappeared from the wall as it backed out onto the street proper.  An agent in gray battle fatigues with a utility belt around his waist and dark glasses jumped from the driver’s seat and walked over to peer down onto the street.  Pressing on the side of the frames of the glasses he intoned, “Two, this is eight, nothing on visual and nothing on either low light or thermal. “

“Excuse me, Sir…” The agent turned around to notice the original driver of the truck cautiously approaching toward him.  “If you have no further use for my rig I really should get it back to the yard.”

“You have the thanks of a grateful nation citizen! Good work!”  The driver looked at him with astonished relief and gratitude and caught the offered keys.  “My badge number is ‘44371.’  Any questions you can call this number.”  Handing a business card to the citizen he turned to walk back into his own car.  “Two this is eight, I am going to go down and make sure this is over.”

Next: Launch


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## kroh (Jun 21, 2005)

Chapter 3: LAUNCH

	Soft blue filled the cavernous room.  It was everywhere.   From the back of the room a small sliver of white light cut into the azure expanse.  Cutting the haze like a white-hot knife, the sliver of light grew to a height of just over three meters and stopped, hovering in the back of the room.  A sound like a sharp exhale, issued forth from the sliver causing the back rows of the amphitheater command center to turn to see what the commotion was all about.

	Whipping their heads back to their monitors, flashing red indicators signaled the start of a flurry of activity that soon spread throughout the room.  Section chiefs began to take and relay orders from the catwalk above and issue them to their subordinates down below.  Row by row, the monitors that issued the soft blue to the room lit up with flashing red indicators that turned the pastel blue into an angry storm of red and blue firefly light.  	
	The sliver opened with a gasping sound and turned into a torrent of light to drive away the dull light of the room.  Framed in white halo, a silhouette could be seen waiting within.  A step brought the figure into the room as the light reluctantly gave up his identity.  Each step brought him closer to the precipice that would send him down to the bottom of the amphitheater.  Although the catwalk was where the decisions were made, the depths were where the action played.

	Walking down the ramp to the bottom of the room, the figure passed by the techs that scurried about in the wake of all the new activity.  As some of them looked up, all the whispers began.  The whispers spread and began to grow.  Shouts punctuated the chatter as a prelude to the clapping and hollering that soon erupted.  An excited caucophony of  “Nice!” and “Oh, Hell Yeah!” began to circulate around the descending figure as all who looked up caught site of the midnight blue long coat and dark baseball cap.	

	Reaching the bottom of the ramp, the figure stopped besides a particular workstation.  “Make sure to remove all loose items and change and make sure your tray tables are in their fully upright positions.  Be sure to extinguish all smoking materials…” said the tech.  The figure raised a pistol that looked as though it should be vehicle mounted.  Checking the item to see that it was, as he wanted it, the figure replaced it back into the holster at his side and looked at the tech from under his cap. “Scratch that last part,” grinned the tech.  

	The figure removed his baseball cap and placed it onto the tech’s head and turned it brim backwards.  A stylized “N” superimposed over a “Y” graced the middle of the cap as those behind the tech could now see the cap’s face.  “I’ll be back for that in a bit.  Anything you want me to bring back for you?”

	“A friend of mine gets to run off to exotic locations and blow stuff up and all I get is this crappy T-shirt.”  The two exchanged smirking glances and faced back to the black emptiness of the pit before them.  “Be careful, Bud.  Try not to blow everything to kingdom come like last time.”

	“Keep it warm, I’ll be right back.”

	Stepping off of the bottom most part of the ramp, the figure moved until he was greeted by another sliver of light ahead.  Without slowing, he moved to the sliver as it widened into another doorway.  With his back facing the pit from which he had come, the door slammed shut.  The sound of hissing vents could be heard intermingled with high-pitched tones as the lights in the room he was in went out. 

	“Zach, this is Dave.  Can you read, over?”

	“Everything five by five, all systems.”

	“Opsec in effect from here on in Echo.”

	“Roger that Conductor. “

              The room suddenly flared to life revealing he was in the bottom of a huge pit roughly the size of a football field.  The area from where he had just come sat above him and all in attendance were scurrying to prepare for what was next.  The flat featureless expanse of the pit began to hum as a vibration began to shudder though the glowing white floor.

              “Conductor to Echo-3, thresh-hold in 30 seconds…try not to swallow your gum this time.”

	“Echo-3 this is Maestro.”

	The figure turned to regard the catwalk, which hovered in what seem to be the dark heavens above.  

	“Get our friends and come home.  No fooling around.”

	“Roger that Maestro,” the figure turned his back on the crowd again.

	“Ten seconds, Echo-3, good hunting.”

	The floor of the entire amphitheater was shaking now and the humming vibration they caused was spreading into the air.  Technicians reached for coffee cups and loose pens, pencils and pda’s, as the vibrations threatened to shake the place apart.  Somewhere in the depths of the glowing pit, sounds of the pit vibrating began to drown out the low growl of a solitary ‘Echo’ trying his best not to scream.  He thought to himself that he never liked this part.

	The pit glowed with an unearthly intensity as a static energy shield raised around it to protect the amphitheater.  Suddenly, the main view screen displayed a stories tall word in flashing sequence.   LAUNCH

	The brilliance of the room extinguished in the blink of an eye and all was quiet.  The techs sat for a moment holding their breath.  When they again remembered to breath, they also began to check displays and monitors and holograms for signs that their weapon has reached his target.

	High above the pit, a lone figure stood with a halo ringing his head and taking in information from many sources.  “Good hunting, Son.  Come home to us safe.”  The man turned to his assistant.  “Launch drones and keep the crew’s mind on their jobs.  If I catch one more person betting on insertion platforms or laying odds on how many things he is going to blow up, there’s going to be hell to pay.”  He turned back to regard the forward vids.

	Somewhere in the depths of the pit, emails changed sides with the subject heading…

File-5-2-1

Next: The Echo has Landed.


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