Welcome to Our Life -- Chapter 20: Rena (X5-120)
Disclaimer: The TV show Dark Angel, all of the characters that appeared on it (Max, Zack, Jondy, etc.), and everything else that has to do with the show belong to their respective owners, not to me. No money is being made off of this fic. I only own the original characters (Elle/X5-164, etc.).
"Do you think that they'll actually be back in time to finish their lunch?" I asked, looking towards the cafeteria doors. A few minutes ago, Zack and Becky had been asked to report to Lydecker's office. I played with my roll for a few moments before I picked it up and took a bite out of it. "If this takes much longer, it can't be good."
"It can't be that bad, either," Jack said. "We've been behaving ourselves."
"Are we the only units here that are as present as they can be?" Brin said. "I think almost every other unit has at least a few people that are out on missions."
"Must be a busy barely-Spring," Max deadpanned. We laughed.
"And a few more weeks and I'll be celebrating the big two-one," Reese said, grinning. "I wish I knew the exact date."
"It'd be pretty funny if you were born on April Fool's Day," Ben said.
Reese rolled his eyes. "You wish, dipshit."
Max calmly reached to either side of her and smacked Reese and Ben in the backs of their heads while the rest of us laughed. "I wish that the two of you would shut the f--heck up. And Reese, for crying out loud, is it too much to ask for you to watch your language in front of the younger guys? We don't want to corrupt them quite yet."
"Hey, I don't give a rat's--" Kevin started to say, but Maggie smacked him in the back of his head. "What was that for, Maggie?"
"Do you see Becky here to do that?" she pointed out.
Kevin looked around and pointed towards the cafeteria entrance. "Yeah, I do. They're back."
Zack and Becky marched towards us and I felt slightly on edge. I could tell that something was up. Zack nodded towards us. "We're excused from our next classes. We need to meet in the library right now." We immediately stood up and put our trays away and formed lines and marched out of the cafeteria and towards the library. We found a table in the library big enough for all thirty-four of us and sat down around it and turned to face Zack and Becky.
"What's the good word?" I asked.
"We're being deployed in three days," Zack said. He opened the folder that he had been carrying when he'd returned to the cafeteria. "We're going to Poland."
"Finally," Wes said. He cracked his knuckles.
"What's the dealio?" Max asked.
"It's a foreign project," Zack said. "The operation is similar to Manticore. It's a joint effort by rogue members of the Polish, Lithuanian, and Slovakian governments and military forces. Officially, none of those countries have any genetic engineering projects, not even in the way that Manticore is a covert op for the U.S. government. These officials from those countries got together and decided that it would be beneficial to start up a project like this to protect their interests. The soldiers rotate between the location in Poland where they are currently based and two other bases, one in Lithuania and the other in Slovakia. The other two bases are currently unmanned other than a skeleton crew of staff and ordinary guards. Two X-series units from the facility in Syracuse will be responsible for taking out those two bases, one unit per base"
"Where does that leave us?" Ralph asked. "And what exactly are these guys made of?"
"They're human-animal hybrids, similar to if not exactly like us," Zack said. "The exact composition of their DNA is unknown at the present time, but they do function on a level equivalent to that of the top-rated X6s like Becky. That's all the information that she and I were given."
"Why is that?" Jace wondered.
Becky shook her head. "There was a mole for their group within Manticore, like Wes had told us. When he was brought into Psy Ops for interrogation, they used a combination of a telecoercion-specialist Psy Ops soldier and standard interrogation techniques assisted by psychoactives. Before any more information could have been gathered from the subject concerning the enemies, he died. According to the reports from the autopsy and the toxicology tests, the subject had taken a drug that when upon interacting with almost all known psychoactives that are used for interrogation causes a fatal reaction. The drug used by the subject usually causes this fatal reaction almost immediately after the psychoactive is administered and the only reason that it didn't take that quickly and the people in Psy Ops got as much intel as they did was because the subject took this drug improperly."
"So we have no idea on how many of these guys that are there?" Krit said. "How many did you run into, guys?"
"They matched our numbers," Wes recalled. "There were sixteen in our unit total. Layla stayed back at our camp ready to treat any soldiers that would return injured and Ralph was a few yards outside of the building just outside of the compound perimeter monitoring comms and surveillance. The other fourteen of us, including myself, went inside the building and that was how many enemy soldiers that we ran into. Three of them were confirmed kills, one by me, one by 252 and both of those by gunshot, and the third a hand-to-hand kill by 941. At least two others were injured but still alive when I got out of there." He snorted in disgust. "We were taught to fight even better in teams than as individuals and we couldn't save ourselves. I couldn't..."
Tinga put a hand on Wes' back. "You were caught completely off-guard, Wes. Any of us would react like that if we had been put in a similar situation. That can't and it definitely won't happen this time. We're going to go in there and get your other brothers and sister out. You're going to give everything back to those men and then some. Okay?"
"Okay," Wes said.
"What do we have to do?" I asked.
"Our job is to go inside, rescue the P.O.W.s, retrieve at least one of those bas--enemy soldiers so that Manticore can study them, get any and all of the intelligence that we can on their operation, and blow the place to bits," Zack said. I had to resist a smirk when I saw the look in Zack's eyes. He normally wouldn't wish anybody to be experimented on by the sadists that are known as most of the doctors here, but these assholes had messed with our family. Mess with us and you can kiss our collective asses, not to mention kissing your own ass good-bye.
"Because we're not sure of the exact numbers of the enemy, the strike team is going to be pretty large," Becky said. "Not only will all of us being going out on this mission, but another full unit of X5s from the Seattle facility will be accompanying us. They'll be arriving here tomorrow morning and the following day we have our final briefings and preparations and the day after that we move out." I nodded and then paused. For the first time this entire briefing, Becky's eyes had a hint of amusement in them. I noticed that Zack had a similar look.
"Okay, what gives?" I said.
"The X5s from Seattle that are also going on this mission is Unit 3," Zack said. Wes started to laugh outright and Ralph and Layla had giggling fits.
"That's just too funny," Layla said.
"Why is it too funny?" Eva asked.
Layla giggled again. "Because that's 494 and 121's unit."
My jaw dropped. I was actually going to be meeting my twin sister for the first time since we were newborns? Holy fuck! I looked across the table from me and sure enough, Ben looked about as stunned as I was.
"My twin and Rena's are going to be on the mission with us," he said slowly. "Whoa."
"494 will be co-commanding officer with me on this mission," Zack said. "Likewise, Max will share second-in-command duties with X5-511." He took some pieces of paper out of the folder and handed it to Zane, who was sitting next to him. "This is information on the members of Seattle X5 Unit 3. Pass it around."
I waited patiently for my turn and when it finally was, my eyes naturally went to the paragraph describing 121 and her specialties. I couldn't help smiling a little. She was one of the fastest members of her unit and excelled as a sniper and with other forms of weapons as well as in Escape and Evade, just like me. I quickly looked over the rest of the information and handed it to Jondy. "121 has the same strengths and weaknesses that I do. I guess we've got three good snipers on this mission."
Jondy nodded as she read over the stats and then handed them to Max. "Funny, if you and 121 have the same strengths and weaknesses, then how come I didn't see 'narcissistic smart ass' listed under 494?"
"Charming," Ben remarked.
"I always aim to please," Jondy said.
Max looked a little thoughtful as she passed the information onto Brin. "What about the people in charge of these guys? The ass--jerks, I mean. Do you have anything on specifically who they are? Who's in direct command of these people?"
"We don't have that information," Zack confessed. "The subject died before he could divulge that."
"If we're lucky, it won't be too hard to get that information from their computers," Parker said. "I haven't met a system that I haven't been able to hack into remotely yet and with Xavier and 714 from 494's unit, I don't see any reason why I won't be able to this time around. Plus, if all else fails, there's always Psy Ops for the lucky moron that we bring back from Poland. Speaking of which, are we going to be bringing somebody from Psy Ops for a field interrogation?"
"The answer to that one is actually yes," Becky said. "Her designation is P2-400 and she's also from the Seattle facility and according to the information that we were given by Lydecker, she's one of Seattle's top telecoercion specialists. Her stats are also included in the information that's being passed around right now."
"It seems like we're set up as well as we can be at this point," Wayne said.
"It looks that way," Zack said. "Let's go over this again to make sure that we're set up even better." We eagerly began going over all of the information piece by piece. Hey, I wanted these bastards to be getting one rude surprise in a few days. Wouldn't you?
TBC