The Search for Life - A Near-Future Science Fiction Dystopia
an excerpt

Chapter 17 – Deus Ex Machina

Isra awoke to the sound of terrified crying and sobbing. The sound was dim at first, and she couldn't quite understand why. Something wrong with her sound? She suddenly remembered the last thing she had seen before going under: the flash of the Assassin's gun, and her eyes exploding. She didn't dare to try open them. Maybe if she kept them close, surgeons could still save her eyesight?
She tried moving a limb, she couldn't feel it. In pure panic, she opened her eyes – and was promptly blinded. The bright blue light shining from the roof made her eyes water, and she blinked repeatedly as they adjusted.
She was lying prone against something hard – probably a computer shelf. The air was still saturated with stinging, thick smoke, which somehow mixed with the tin taste of blood on her tongue when she breathed it in. She tried moving her arm again, still hearing the sobbing. A woman's voice. Her arm lifted itself, the strap of the sniper rifle hanging around it.
It was then she realized her helmet was broken. What she saw was the real textures, the real smoke, the real colors. She tasted, smelled and felt the air with all her senses, and although she couldn't account for why she couldn't feel her arms (a bad sign), she could nonetheless apparently move.
“Oh god...Joachim. Someone HELP!” It was Dr. Bat-Jered, apparently. She seemed upset. Isra tried getting up, and to her surprise, it worked. She couldn't really feel her legs either – just that numb feeling of pressure on the soles of her feet, like she was standing on somebody else's legs. She tried moving, towards the voice. She still couldn't see anything at all in all the smoke, and moved, shuffling forward. Blood was slowly returning to her limbs, but she still didn't feel any pain. Her helmet created a crescent of sharp glass shards around her vision where the visor had shattered – but by some miracle she herself had survived unharmed. Her legs and arms and torso were likewise battered by splinters and places where bullets had clearly ricocheted off or hit. Her Predator armor was, in short, totaled.
As she neared the door from which the cries were issuing, the air conditioning system in the following corridor had swallowed up most of the smoke, and her vision cleared. It wasn't a pretty sight. Right in front of her, a little distance from the doorway, lay the prone, apparently unconscious or dead figure of an assassin, blending into the floor, nearly invisible but not quite. His gun pointed ahead, at the effects it had. Joachim was propped against a blood-stained floor, holding his side or his hip or leg – she couldn't tell with all the blood – and Shekinah was being a complete mess over his wounded form. The ex-Assassin noted Shekinah's SDM bag was heavier now than it had been when they first met.
“What...” Isra's voice was hoarse, and she imagined hearing sirens. Sirens! Underground. All sounds were still oddly muted. “What happened?”
Shekinah gasped as the Assassin spoke, but upon recognizing the voice of Sara, she quickly broke down again. “That...thing...popped out of nowhere and shot Joachim. Then there was a lot of shooting behind him, and just as he was about to turn back to me...” She looked at the inert, nearly invisible form on the ground. “...he just crumbled with sigh. I have no idea what happened. But...you have to help Joachim! He's bleeding!”
Isra didn't know either, but even in her fuddled state her doctor's instincts kicked in. A quick glance at Joachim revealed a number of bad wounds, some of which would need to be staunched right away or he'd die. She wasn't sure if there were any bullets left in the body – she hoped not – but if there were, he'd need immediate medical attention. And time. Which they did not have.
“Listen, Dr. Bat-Jered...there could be police coming down here any moment, and...I can't hide any more in this thing. We should leave him to the medicals.” Isra had no idea where they should go after this. Her connection to the voice in her head was effectively severed together with the helmet.
“There won't BE any medicals!” Shekinah cried out. “Topside is a riot! The students aren't letting anyone in, there's military everywhere.” She sounded pleading. “Please! We have to help him now!”
Isra considered their situation. They had been given instructions to save something they didn't understand, from some being they didn't understand, and for some reason Isra at least couldn't understand, she had followed those instructions. And now she had potentially killed many of her former friends and allies, including the one who had been most dear to her. She had shot him as he tried to talk her into returning to the fold. After all that sacrifice, should they risk all just to try to save one badly wounded man who would be nothing but a burden in their attempt at escape – wherever they should go, if they could go anywhere at all. She just didn't know.
So let the doctor speak.
“Alright, move aside. Go over to the Assassin, and dig in his belt – there should be hypos there with drugs that can be used if mine aren't enough. Just bring the whole bag. Hurry.” And so the doctor sat down to work, using skills practiced at college and perfected in the field, and the most advanced battlefield healing technology known to man. It'd take a little while, some luck, and some skill, but Joachim could yet be saved. For whatever purpose, she didn't know. They were damned lucky though she was the medic.

Things weren't looking very good for the Assassins. A second Core Group, the Sabbah, had been brought in as backup if things went pear-shaped. Which they had, of course. But the prospect of somehow blasting their way through military and police barricades and throngs of civilians wasn't very appealing. Of course, the CG members themselves didn't know: the less they knew the better. The case now was, however, that according to the readings, all members of the Hassanites CG were incapacitated. Including the rogue agent, who according to the last report had been shot just before the glitch in the system.
The glitch? The unconscious Said, who had been carried down into the tunnels away from prying eyes above (together with Salim, who however was in a slightly poorer shape) was the team leader. As far as they could tell, he was still unconscious when his system for some reason decided to send out excessive amounts of pain-stilling and relaxing drugs into every member of his team. They fell like bowling pins. And the worst part was, the Assassins had been sent to the wrong installation. Once again by some weird glitch, the message which relayed the orders to the remote-controlled P-73 Keres gunships and the team leaders had been corrupted in transit, the coordinates changed, the waypoints altered. They had risked themselves, risked exposure, and subsequently lost a whole gunship as well as potentially a whole CG pursuing the wrong target.
It goes without saying, the Assassins were not amused. And their situation was a true conundrum. Sadly, the leaders decided, this was a state of war. And those who had hired them expected results, not blunders like this. And although it was an evil decision, it was still the lesser evil of their options. Getting captured, their technology revealed, was not a real option.
So the second Keres got its orders, while the techs home in Dubai started working on remotely killing the surviving, but unconscious core group members. There was always a contingency plan.
The police barricades and the cordoned-off airspace did little to stop the black menacing stealth gunship, gliding in from the darkness over Lausanne. It had a very simple objective: entirely destroy the remains of the crashed Keres, then head off towards Geneva for the real targets. It was effective, if not very pretty. One moment Lausanne was filled only with the wails of sirens, the angry protester shouts in German, French and English, molotov cocktails and other glass breaking against riot shields, police loudspeakers attempting to bring some order into the chaos, and the ever-present sound of burning. The next, the rapid thudthudthud of a large helicopter rotor, the whoosh-whoosh-whoosh as dozens of projectiles are released from their pods – accurately – and a moment later the deafening sound of multiple explosions, tearing the black body of the Keres to shreds – as well as many innocent bystanders. Afterwards, all that had been reported was sporadic spotting of a black shape, flying low and fast over the plaza, before disappearing once again into the night, fruitlessly chased by too-slow police helicopters.
Fighter planes of the F-22 Raptor type (modified for Swiss army use) were mobilized soon thereafter, but there was no sight of any helicopter. Claiming foreign invasion, the Swiss Federal Council ordered a full-scale mobilization of the reserves, which was also needed to combat the riots springing up in their other cities. This night, the peaceful, brother-loving Switzerland was turning into a battle zone. And the rest of Europe didn't sleep either.

And at Geneva, deep underground in a sweaty CERN laboratory, the clock was slowly ticking towards zero while the four scientists within were trying to find the secret to life. And somewhere around, a second Core Group of Assassins were preparing their approach.