There it was, the machine of death, staring him straight in the eyes. It shuddered, finally, but that was all it did, spiting him even further. All it did was spite him, time and time again. It was the complete evil, the absolute menace to the world. And it was about time he fought back.
Vulcan kicked the vending machine really, really hard. It still didn’t give him his soda.
“Burn in hell!” the rookie all but spat, finally abandoning the infernal contraption and heading back to the lounge. He was on lunch break, and had spent a full ten minutes of it wrestling futilely with Satan back there. For all their other technological advancements, the Hunters still couldn’t get the basics down pat.
Sitting at his table were Rykov and Krysta, two fellow rookies. Now that they were all well trained enough to enter a squad, all the rookies had been drafted into different Hunter Units. Vulcan had been fortunate enough to get into the same group as his friend and rival, Rykov. Krysta was also in their unit, Unit 5, and though he hadn’t known her well prior to now, Vulcan was deciding she wasn’t all that bad either.
“Excuse me,” Rykov said immediately, “I remember you saying you’d get me a soda?”
“Shut up,” Vulcan grumped as he sat down, “Just shut up.”
Rykov laughed. “Well, why do you think I sent YOU? I know how annoying those things are.”
“You’d have shot it,” Krysta pointed out, “You’re just slightly trigger happy.”
“I know,” Rykov replied simply, “But think how useful I’ll be when it comes down to toasting the Mavericks.”
“Provided you don’t shoot one of us down in the process,” Vulcan chided.
“Yeah, well, don’t tempt me.” Rykov looked back towards another table full of Reploids. Vulcan knew two of them, though not very well. Harrier was there, the cocky Reploid rookie who Vulcan never really liked, and then there was Scythe, the golden Reploid who had won the weapons match. Scythe didn’t talk much, and didn’t strike Vulcan as a bad guy, but Harrier was always around the gold rookie, as though hoping some of Scythe’s luck might rub off on him for the next Olympiad. If he lived that long, Vulcan corrected himself.
“You keep glancing back there,” Krysta was saying to Rykov, “Something wrong?”
“Nah,” he replied, letting a smirk onto his face, “I just keep waiting for Scythe to decapitate Harrier.” At the blank stares, he clarified his statement. “Harrier’s been sticking to that guy like glue. Now I don’t know about you, but if Harrier was around ME 24/7, I’d go stark raving Maverick and send him to the grinder.”
“Hm…” Vulcan mused, “I don’t see Scythe going insane any time soon, but I guess it is a welcome image.”
“So,” Rykov said as he spun back to face his friends, abruptly changing the subject, “I hear, Vulcan, that you’ve been hanging around with Delates in your spare time.”
“Yeah,” Vulcan shrugged, “Occasionally we spar in the training room.”
“So,” Rykov pressed, “How good ARE these Unit 0 troops?”
Vulcan frowned. “Delates is good…better than me, anyway. Sol came in one day and started throwing fire around at the training dummies, so he looks pretty tough…but that’s all I’ve really seen. And, I mean, we all know Commander Zero’s a god of the battlefield, so I imagine his unit is right up there with him.”
“That where you wanna end up?” Krysta asked.
“I dunno,” Vulcan replied, “Somewhere high up there, I guess…but maybe not exactly Unit 0 or Unit 17. Lots of responsibility, there.”
“But you’re also revered as gods!” Rykov pointed out.
“Yeah, till you die!” Krysta laughed, “You should listen to him, Rykov. I did a little research. The fatality rate among Hunter units is highest in Units 17 and 0, significantly higher than the other units.” She paused. “Of course, when war begins, they’re also bigger than the other units, and are used as the main fighting force, but still…”
“Huh, whatever,” Rykov said, smirking, “I wouldn’t mind, so long as they revered me first.”
“You sound like Harrier now,” Krysta said immediately. Rykov responded with choking noises.
“I’m gonna try the vending machine again,” Vulcan decided, while debating if he should bring his saber along just in case the machine still didn’t want to play nice.
“It’s days like these,” X said to Zero from within the confines of a private lounge, “That I wish I’d stayed in bed.”
Zero nodded agreement and sipped at his soft drink, which he’d obtained from the nicer of the two vending machines in the area, “You think he’s gonna make a move soon?”
“Nah. If he was going to do something now, he’d have done it when we had our competition thing going, when we had all our rookies present. Sigma loves to make an impression on the rookies.”
Zero shook his head slowly. “I just don’t get it…our escape pods had radars, so why didn’t we see his pod coming?”
“Who knows? But all the signs are there…large land purchase, fortress construction project…and even now we’re getting delayed reports that some factories that produce Reploids have been coming up short, meaning…”
“The Mavs are stealing Reploids to add to their numbers,” Zero finished, crumpling the empty can in his hands and tossing it into the wastebasket. “Even if it’s not Sigma, there is definitely some Maverick plan in the mix.”
“And the irony is, we can’t stop it yet.” X leaned back in his chair, focusing on the ceiling.
“There’s not enough hard evidence to confront Seraph with, and even if we did there’d be all this legal trouble and invasions of privacy, blah blah blah.”
Zero grinned. “For as much as they love us during wartime, those humans don’t seem to like us Hunters much when there’s no Maverick threat.”
X found himself agreeing, much to his surprise. Everyone knew that the humans sort of limited Reploid growth and freedom, giving them far less rights than the humans themselves had, but that was no excuse for the genocide Sigma and the Mavericks proposed. He, Zero, and the rest of the Hunter leaders tended to look the other way, but lately X was wishing that they’d stop treating his race like criminals until they had a reason to. “So, what now?”
“Now, I guess we beef up our units and learn as much about this as we can.” Zero let out a big yawn, tired already. “But it kind of worries me that he’s been so quiet.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well…Siggy’s always been fairly cunning. The fact that he’s been out there for around five months or so and hasn’t done a damn thing except rebuild a fortress indicates to me that he’s planning something, and planning it very carefully. You remember what happened last time he was biding his time like this?”
“Yeah…Repliforce went berserk. So again, what should we be doing?”
Zero shrugged. “I’m going to train my troops a little harder, as well as look for some new additions to my Unit. I guess you should do the same. Also, Signas tells me that Intelligence has all their spies working around the city. If something comes up, Cain or Signas will know about it.”
X wasn’t so sure. “Let’s just hope so…”
Storm Eagle stared hopelessly at the machines around him, having had no idea that building warships was such a complex matter. The Maverick bird had once owned and maintained his own ship, though it was destroyed-and he with it-in the very first war. Still, he knew something about ship construction, and so Sigma had sent him to be his eyes and ears in the construction yard.
The warship under construction had been conceived and designed by a capable Maverick named Revolver, who was also overseeing the construction. Revolver had at one time been an assistant in the human aviation industry before joining the Mavericks, and so he knew far more than Storm did as far as this project.
The humanoid in question was now laughing at the bird’s overwhelmed expression, all the while
wiping grease off of his shining orange armor. “I thought you were supposed to know about this stuff.”
“Eheh…” Storm responded simply, “I once owned one of my own ships, but I never actually built one.”
“Hmm…” Revolver looked over to where his grunts were laying the groundwork for the Maverick’s latest project. “Yeah, I guess I’m not surprised. Birds aren’t good at the technical stuff.”
“Excuse me…?”
“Heh heh, ever hear the phrase? ‘Eagles may soar, but weasels don’t get sucked into jet engines’.”
“Very funny…”
“It is, if you happen to be a weasel.” Revolver looked down to the member of his construction unit that actually resembled the said animal, but he was in fact a Reploid woodchuck. No one knew why someone had bothered to make a woodchuck robot, but then, humans were a strange race. “Hey, Chuck! Call a lunch break! I’m gonna show Siggy’s ambassador our digs!”
Chuck just nodded and went about his new task, and Revolver led Storm Eagle down a staircase and into a large control room that operated a lot of the heavy machinery. Reploids could do a lot harder work than humans could, but even they preferred to use mindless machines to do some of the grunt work, too.
“This is the throne room of our palace,” Revolver stated, waving his hands over the computers and accidentally slapping upside the head the only one working them at the time. “Sorry, Greenback.”
“Augh!” the Maverick toad moaned as he leapt out of the chair and hopped out of the room, “I get no respect!”
“Never mind him. Anyway,” Revolver continued, typing a few lines of code and bringing up a diagram of the ship they planned to build, “Here it is, ‘Gallagher’. It meets all of the Boss’s specifications, and once completed it should be our most advanced weapon yet, excluding Final Weapon, and that wasn’t really our weapon in the first place…”
“When will it be finished?” Storm broke in.
“The way we’re working, gimme a month and it’ll be in the finishing stages. Gimme another week and we can fly it. It’s not that hard to build stuff any more, it’s just dreaming the stuff up that’s the hard part. But, luckily for you, I am a genius, so there won’t be any problems.”
“I’m not sure Sigma will like waiting another month…but all right.”
“Eh, well, actually, Siggy boy approved my deadline.”
“What?”
“Yeah. He said he wasn’t in no hurry.” Revolver wiped a bead of sweat away from his now-greasy black hair, “He’s really taking care of every angle this time. Think he’ll pull it off?”
“Of course he will,” Storm replied automatically, “The Hunters can’t get lucky every time. One day or another, Sigma will come out on top. And with this plan, it’s likely to be now.”
“So what IS this mysterious plan?”
“Well,” Storm grinned, masking the fact that he didn’t know either and hated the fact, “It doesn’t really concern you. You’ve got a job to do, so do it.”
Revolver absorbed that, and nodded, looking back towards the diagram. “Siggy never told the grunts much, eh? Just follow the leader, he’ll know where to go.” His eyes narrowed. “Hasn’t worked the past few times, Stormy. Watch your flanks this time, eh?”
“Of course,” Storm nodded, exiting the control room, “I’ll relay your concern to the Boss himself.”
Revolver frowned as the eagle left. He didn’t like those birds, mainly because birds had a habit of emptying their bowels whenever he was in striking range. But, he thought as he turned to face his growing project, those birds he liked, the birds he built, and this one would be his greatest achievement. He would personally throttle Storm if he crashed it.
The hacker’s fingers danced over the keyboards, opening file after file and closing them immediately when he was done with them. He’d spent the last many hours memorizing the way the Hunter computer systems worked, and now knew ways around most of their security systems. There was, of course, the chance he’d get caught, and that would be the end of his free life, but this was his duty as a Maverick, and all Mavericks faced risks.
He had no idea what exactly he was looking for, but he did have a description of the file. He was looking for information on an extinct program, one that was supposedly blacker than black. The Mavericks who wanted it seemed especially anxious to have it, and though he didn’t know why, he knew he had better not keep them waiting.
All of a sudden, he had it. It was a file marked “TN RRP”, and it was filed under “Top Secret”. He was playing with serious fire, here. He inserted his disk and copied the file, winding up with a simple word processing document and some graphics. Frowning, he closed the programs, having expected something more. When he was satisfied that he’d covered his tracks well, he copied the disk onto another, just to be safe, and rebooted the system to totally erase some of his past maneuvers. He shut everything down and left it as it was when he’d arrived, departing the room silently. He didn’t have to deliver the file until tomorrow, but at least he had the hard part out of the way. Within him was the burning desire to know, why was this document so important to the Mavericks?
Oh well. He supposed he’d find out shortly enough.