Into the Lightning Gate

CH01

The Agent

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She crouched silently in the shadows, carefully hidden in a small room off a mostly disused side corridor. Somewhere dark and silent. With a thought, a glowing, blue-lined map flickered to life in front of her, projected directly into her brain’s optic processors. She surveyed the schematic, first locating her position and then her target. It was close.

The map flickered away with another thought, replaced by her command menu. She selected one of the items, watching it grow a brighter blue than the rest. Then she waited, timing it for the perfect moment to trigger the command–the moment when the nearby security guards were positioned so the program could achieve the most optimum impact. Their precise locations were fed to her through passive sensors, measuring everything from nearby temperature differentials and air movement to tiny vibrations in the floor and walls around her.

Ten seconds.
Three seconds.
Execute.

The local power grid abruptly suffered a severe malfunction, plunging the area into total darkness. She stood up from her crouched position and moved through the nearby door into the corridor. She was a shadow in the dark.

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She flicked a gloved finger, scrolling through the menus that swam across the holographic display like a school of neon fish, finally landing on the one she was looking for. She selected the command to load the data to local memory, pulled a slim data crystal from a small pouch on her belt, and stuck it into the waiting port. A tiny yellow light flashed above the port, indicating a connection to the console, and a new icon appeared on the display screen. She herded the mass of data on the screen toward that icon with a small gesture, starting the transfer to the data crystal.

An alert popped up in her vision. Her sensors had detected signs of movement outside in the corridor. She glanced down at the prone figure of the station guard that lay crumpled at her feet. She’d disabled them before they could raise any alarm, swiftly snapping their neck with a sickening crunch. She knew that her combat suit’s stealth field shielded her from any station scans, so either she was about to be visited by a guard on their regular patrol route, or her subversion of the station systems had somehow triggered a silent alarm. It caused her no concern. Based on the floor vibrations picked up by her passive sensors, she estimated that she had another twenty seconds before being discovered. That was fine. She only needed ten.

A quiet tone sounded from the console. The data transfer was complete. She removed the data crystal and returned it to its pouch on her belt. Moving swiftly, she pulled a blade from a sheath at her waist and got into position. By the time the door slid open, she was in place beside it, her back to the wall. She observed a blaster barrel poke through, followed by the armored station guard who was holding it. She dropped her stealth field, shunting its power into the electro-muscular servos in her armored suit, then struck–a quick and powerful chop with the side of her hand at the guard’s neck. Their head tilted back. Twisting around with a dancer’s grace, she shoved her knife into their throat. Close enough for a kiss, her breath fogging up their closed faceplate, she watched their eyes roll back in deathly ecstasy as their lifeblood quickly drained away. She withdrew the blade and shoved the guard’s dying body back in one fluid motion. The remaining guard had barely registered the disturbance ahead before suddenly dancing with the corpse of their former partner.

While the fumbling guard desperately tried to recover their balance, she lunged forward and slammed their helmet into the corridor wall. The guard’s fog of dazed confusion left them defenseless against her blade as it stabbed into the soft, rubberized collar around their neck, slicing through the carotid artery, then severing the spinal column. Their limp body slid down to the floor, painting a sanguine map of their melee on the wall behind them as they bled out.

An alarm began to squeal, and the corridor’s lighting shifted from bright white to blood red. But she was already gone—the two crumpled bodies in the passage, the only witnesses to her departure.

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A particle blast sizzled by, the radiant blue fire missing her head only by mere centimeters, as she ducked back into cover behind a corner. Three guards had taken up positions near one of the station’s maintenance airlocks. They clearly knew where she was headed.
She was still on track for her exit, but she was cutting it close. Her timing had to be precise. She pulled a slim black disc from a pouch on her belt and set its timer for three seconds, then reached out and slid it down the short corridor toward her welcoming committee. The disc began to emit a hypersonic wail, and the guards started to scream, desperately covering their ears in a futile attempt to block out the piercing banshee cry.

Her mission timer counted down in the lower right corner of her vision. Thirty-five seconds remained. She launched herself down the corridor, rushing past the helpless guards, and reached out for the access button on the maintenance airlock. She punched it, and the door whooshed open. Thirty seconds. She jumped into the airlock, hitting the prominent Emergency Cycle button. The door immediately slid closed, locking and sealing the chamber off from the station with a series of loud clunks. One of the guards looked through the window in the airlock door and began to gesture wildly. The hypersonic wailing must’ve run its full course. It didn’t matter. The door was sealed and couldn’t be opened from the outside once the cycle had begun. Twenty seconds. The lights above the airlock door changed from blue to yellow, and a buzzer began to sound. Suddenly the door behind her blew open, and she was yanked out into space. The moisture from the scant remaining air crystalized around her like nighttime snow in the naked vacuum. Five seconds. Her suit was vacuum sealed and temperature-controlled, so she felt no discomfort as she sailed backward into the cold and black.

The three guards she left behind watched her in dumbfounded shock through the small airlock viewport. Then a new sun flared briefly to life as the station blossomed into an impossibly silent, expanding sphere of burning gas and twisted metal after the powerful explosive she’d placed inside finally finished its countdown.

But she was already gone.
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