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(Chapters 1 – 4 By EleCivil and Ryan Miller)
It had been raining in Marineris for a solid week. Those guys at the ministry of weather couldn’t keep it up forever, but they weren’t running out any time soon.
Hawke walked down the street in new boots like the black side-zips he had in the army. First thing he had done with the money from Kelly was buy new clothes to replace the military surplus outfit he’d been wearing since his days in the special forces. A long, black trench coat made of leather repelled the rain nicely and durable black pants with a surplus of pockets reminded him of his days on Titan.
“A soldier without pockets is a dead soldier,” said his sergeant in basic, stressing the necessity to be prepared. Hawke always took what that grizzled old warrior said to heart, since there wasn’t anyone else in his heart in those days.
He stepped in a large puddle and stopped, ready to curse the scientists who programmed the weather. But his boots, unlike his old, worn shoes, kept his feet warm and dry and he smiled.
“Nice try,” he told the puddle under his breath.
He walked across the street to Three Green Men, a bar on Capital Street where Kelly’s message told him to go, and leaned up against the outside wall, hands in his dry pockets.
“You got his message?” asked a voice from the shadows in the alley.
“Of course,” replied Hawke. “And why the hell are you still outside?”
John walked out from the alley, holding the collar of his coat tightly against his neck, though his brown hair was still dripping. He said, “If we go in there, people could hear us, and Kelly’s men aren’t popular in many circles.”
Hawke would never consider himself Kelly’s man--or anyone else’s--though he was smart enough to keep that to himself.
“They could hear us, but we would be dry,” said Hawke. “And I prefer guarantees over possibilities.”
He walked inside the bar, leaving John out in the rain scanning the tables for liabilities through the fogged window. Then he decided to walk in and join Hawke.
Three Green Men was a popular nexus and rendezvous point for those affiliated with the underworld, and was very dangerous for anyone who wasn’t. A common saying was that “There aren’t any bar fights at Three Green Men, just bar deaths.” The bar itself wasn’t that large, only running a few yards down the wall. Round, crowded tables dotted the smoky dining room. Hawke took a seat alone a table in the back by the space heater.
John sat down across from him and said, “You have an odd appreciation for warmth, Raven.”
“Space is a very cold place,” Hawke replied. “It teaches one to appreciate simple amenities. How’s the wrist?”
“Take a look,” said John, thrusting his bandaged hand in Hawke’s direction and recoiling in pain after a failed attempt to give Hawke the finger.
“Lasic restoration’s a bitch, ain’t it,” said Hawke, smiling wryly.
John sat up straight, smoothed back his hair with his good hand and said, “The boss has a new assignment for you.”
“Is it real this time?” asked Hawke.
“It’s very real, and very important,” replied John. “He thinks you need more training, but we’ve run out of time.”
He reached into his jacket and produced a slender, gray note pad, which he placed on the table in front of Hawke. The LCD screen showed the picture and statistics of a man with balding, white hair wearing a lab coat.
“This is Dr. Strom Boudoir,” explained John, “an ex-Faction scientist who specializes in bio-metrics.”
A smirk grew across Hawke’s face as he looked down at his new hit. Bio-metric weapons had orphaned him, ravaged his home town and killed Scott. The thought of Scott brought emotions Hawke wasn’t ready for and he forced them back to the icy chasm his mind had stuffed them into.
“Dr. Boudoir was recently contacted by high-ranking officials of the Martian Government and we don’t know why,” said John. “What we do know is that he is supposed to meet with them two days from now and Kelly wants to stop that meeting.”
“Shouldn’t be a problem,” said Hawke, mulling over the savory ways he could kill Boudoir.
“There’s a catch,” said John. “There’s a second target and, like your first assignment, the second target is to remain alive.”
John leaned over and pushed a button on the note pad and the screen switched to the profile of a young man. Hawke had seen many boys before, but this blond immediately struck him as one of the most beautiful. His hair and clothes were plain and nothing stood out as extraordinary, though the innocent look in his blue eyes captured Hawke’s attention.
“This is Boudoir’s son, Seth,” continued John. “The kid’s a mystery. We don’t have anything on him, not even a birth certificate or dental records. But the boss insists that you bring him back in one piece.”
“What’s this mean?” asked Hawke, pointing to a note on the profile that said, “Do not engage under any circumstances.”
“It means no pulling shit like shooting the kid in the wrist,” replied John.
“What does Kelly want with him, any way?”
“You think I got where I am by asking a lot of questions?”
“And how am I supposed to bring him back to Kelly? Ask him nicely?”
“You’re the professional, you figure it out. Call me when you have the kid and I’ll tell you what to do from there. And remember: not even a scratch on him.”
Hawke picked up the note pad and looked softly into the eyes of “Target Number Two.” He hadn’t let himself think about boys since Scott died, and part of him wondered if Kelly would let him keep a picture of the kid when the mission was over.
A long cloud of red dust sped across the Martian desert as Hawke’s taxi drove him to the bio dome at Olympus Mons. The cabby had made polite conversation until he left Merineris, cabbies having a superstition about the Martian Wilderness. They feel it’s bad luck to look back when they leave a bio dome, so the driver spend the rest of the trip with his eyes glued on the red desert in front of him. Hawke didn’t mind being given time to study the dossier John had given him.
Strom Boudoir had been working with Grey Faction as an advisor to their experiments. Being one of the first to pioneer bio-metric technology in the 2060s, his advice on the progress of their weapons was considered gospel and his work with Grey Faction consumed his life. During the waning days of the war, Boudoir decided to leave Grey Faction for what was officially documented as “ethical reasons.” Seems the old man started to feel sorry for the death and destruction he’d caused. He even went as far as to adopt Seth, one of the many war orphans he had created. But the life of one young man—no matter how handsome—wasn’t enough to keep Hawke from grinning as he thought of Boudoir’s death.
It was still raining as the taxi pulled over next to an apartment building on in downtown Olympus. Hawke wondered if there was a conspiracy between the two bio-domes. As he walked up the stairs of the building, never having trusted elevators, he thought back to a time one of his special forces buddies had told him about capturing live targets. A mixture of white wine, crushed hydrocodone and human blood all dried on a piece of paper and burned would create fumes that could knock out a charging rhino and leave no evidence. With both doc and son unconscious, he could take out Boudoir and inject Seth with enough sedative to get him back to Kelly in one piece.
But he wasn’t on a hit that night, just reconnaissance. He needed to case the building and look for easy entrances, video cameras and, just in case, quick exits. He reached the door to the 4th floor and made note of the camera in the stair well he would have to take out. He stepped into a carpeted hall with only a window on the end giving light through sheets of rain. Reaching into his pocket, he took out his new leather gloves. He wasn’t green enough to leave evidence at the scene of a hit, even before it took place.
Pulling his gloves tight, he walked down he hall towards apartment 430. It was an un-rented apartment and right next to 428, where the Boudoirs lived. He hoped the balcony outside would be close enough to reach his targets undetected. But someone else already had. The door to apartment 428 was left ajar and the familiar smell of blood and GSR had wandered into the halls. Cautiously and slowly, Hawke pushed open the door.
Hawke had seen dead Factioners before and had been the cause of many, but he never expected to see a dozen of them thrown around the dark living room of an apartment in downtown Olympus. The couch in the middle of the room had three bodies lying over it and the TV that used to be hanging on the far wall next to a window was broken in half on the floor over two other men. Splinters of a table and chairs to his right sat where Hawke guessed the kitchen used to be and five more mangled bodies had been tossed on the floor. And the door on his left leading to the bedroom had been torn off the wall. A starving lion with a taste for furniture and terrorists would have done less damage.
Hawke stepped into the apartment over a body that looked like it had been shot in the chest with a howitzer. He stooped down next to the body and ripped the red cloth badge off the shoulder of the blue uniform.
“Terrans,” he said, inspecting the badge. “What the hell are Terran Factioners doing on Mars?”
He stood up and threw the badge on the floor in disgust. He turned and stepped through the doorway to the bedroom Strom and Seth shared. There were two beds, one for father and son, and a single window on the far side. And, in the streetlight that came in through the shades, Hawke saw Strom lying in his bed, a 9 mm hole where his heart used to be.
“Damn,” muttered Hawke, half because his hit had been taken and half because he wasn’t the one who pulled the trigger.
The kid’s bed was empty, though there was blood on it, lots of blood. And there was more on the window frame by the kid’s bed, a window frame that wasn’t completely closed. He’d already lost one half of his hit that night and didn’t want to lose the other.
He kneeled on the kid’s bed and pushed up on the bottom of the window, his hands slipping on the cold blood. When he got the window open, he looked down into an alley with a dumpster along the wall right underneath him. Hawke knew it was a long shot, but he wasn’t going to find the kid interrogating a bunch of Grey’s sacrifices.
Hawke’s intuition was right. He found a pool of blood next to the dumpster and a crimson trail leading down the sidewalk. Hawke jogged down the trail, trying to catch up with Seth before the rain washed the trail away. Every once in a while, he would find a spot where the kid decided to rest, leaving a little red pool under the awning of a closed café or in the doorway of another apartment building. After several blocks, the trail took a turn into some warehouses by the space-docks and led under the trailer of a delivery truck parked in front of a loading platform.
Hawke stepped up the stairs of the platform and ducked low as he crept around the back of the truck. Just as he thought, there was no trail on the other side. Hawke wasn’t letting himself get excited, though. If the kid were dead, then he would be worthless. If the kid were alive, he’d have to convince a boy who had just watched his father get murdered that a total stranger in a black trench coat meant him no harm.
“Who’s there?” asked a shaking voice from under the truck.
Hawke crouched down and looked around for the source of the voice.
“I heard you walk up to the platform,” said the voice. “Now you’ve stopped. What are you doing?”
“I saw a trail of blood and wanted to see where it ended,” replied Hawke.
“Now you know, so go away,” said the voice.
Hawke realized it was coming from under the trailer. Still crouching, he stepped towards the edge of the platform.
“Look, kid, you’re obviously hurt pretty bad,” said Hawke.
“I don’t care. I don’t want to go to a hospital,” said Seth.
“What if you die?” asked Hawke.
“I’ll be fine,” replied Seth.
“What if I told you I could get you patched up without taking you to a hospital?” asked Hawke.
Seth crawled out from under the truck, but only far enough to stick his blond head out from under the trailer. When Seth looked up, Hawke saw his pale face and a bloodstain down his left cheek.
“Where?” Seth asked.
“I have a friend who was a medic in the army. She can take a look at you,” said Hawke.
“She can look at me, but can she help me?” asked Seth.
A smirk forced its way across Hawke’s face. He stood up and hopped off the platform, landing on the pavement next to Seth.
“She’s patched me up a few times,” replied Hawke. “And she doesn’t work at a hospital.”
Seth’s head went back under the truck.
“I’m serious,” said Hawke, stooping down to look under the trailer. “I won’t take you to a hospital.”
“I believe you,” said Seth, who was now standing before Hawke at the front of the truck. “I had to make sure no one else was here.”
His left arm held his side as he bled through his white undershirt and his legs shivered in his white cotton shorts. Hawke was surprised to see Seth was a little taller than he was.
“My name is Seth, by the way,” said Seth, extending a slender, bloodstained hand towards Hawke.
“Call me Raven,” he replied.
“Where the hell did you find this kid, Raven?” asked Deidra. She wore a gray tank top over her jeans with Seth’s blood on it and her strong shoulders showed the effects of 5 years of active duty. She pulled off her latex gloves and threw them in the trash. She had just finished stitching up Seth who was now sleeping in the bedroom of her apartment while getting a blood transfusion. Hawke sat in the kitchen cleaning blood from the inside of his coat. He’d let Seth wear it on the way over to Deidra’s place.
“I followed a trail of blood that led under a truck by the docks, and that’s where I found the kid,” he replied.
“What are you doing in Olympus? It’s a 3 hour drive from Marineris,” she said.
“Work brought me here,” he replied.
“I ran the kid through FIKUS. He’s the son of an ex-faction scientist. Don’t tell me that’s just a coincidence,” she said, sitting across from him at the table.
“It’s just a coincidence,” he replied.
“Damn-it, Raven. You hold on to grudges like a bulldog. Now what the hell was it? You saw a boy who made you miss Scott and you decided to take it out on Dr. Boudoir?”
“You leave Scott out of this!”
“I know you miss him, Raven. I miss him, too. But even if you kill Damien Grey himself, it wouldn’t bring back Scott.”
Hawke let out a snort and kept scrubbing the blood out of his coat.
“About the kid,” said Deidra. “Do you know when he was shot?”
“No,” replied Hawke. “Why?”
“I am trying to figure out how much blood he should have lost.”
“Should have?”
“He was shot in the liver at close range. People with liver injuries bleed profusely and don’t stop until they receive medical attention. With a wound like that, he should have lost a lot of blood.”
“He did. It left a trail 7 blocks long.”
“But he’s fine. When the body loses too much blood, it goes into shock, giving blood only to the parts it really needs. A kid with an injury like that should be in a coma if he isn’t dead. But he’s fine, he even has normal blood pressure. I gave him a transfusion, just to be safe, but I doubt he needs it.”
“He was the son of Strom Boudoir. I bet he’s been subject to a few experiments before.”
“Probably. But I want to keep him here overnight and make sure he’s ok. I have him sedated right now, so he shouldn’t be a problem. And do you know who shot him?”
“It wasn’t me if that’s what you’re thinking.”
Hawke grabbed a dry towel and wiped water off his coat. He stood up and fished through the pockets, saying, “I need to step outside for a minute.”
“You heading back to Marineris any time soon?” asked Deidra.
“No, I’m staying here until the kid wakes up,” he said, taking out his cell phone. “But I need to make a call, first.”
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