AVENGING ANGELS

PROLOGUE

Rain drummed loudly on the roof of the Forbidden City warehouse, its steady fall echoing loudly off the concrete. Light slipped through the broken windows, like a slinking, thieving wraith, stealing territory from the darkness in dingy patches. Still, the light was enough to reflect off the wet, concrete floor, empty except for a couple of old wooden crates and the remains of old cooking fires from those who could not afford to make a living in the real city away from the radiation and toxic contamination.

From the back of the building, footsteps could be heard wetly, lightly. The intruder, however, remained well-hidden in the shadows. Suddenly, light flashed off cold steel and a well-balanced throwing knife slammed into a rotting wooden crate. Its impact stirred up a whisper of dust. It was quickly followed by another lethal whisper as another knife imbedded itself into the crate from another angle.

Yet another knife slammed into the wood quickly and buried itself hilt-deep in the wood. Like the other two, it was aimed directly at their target and jutted from a different angle. A heavy, slithery scratching could be heard, as the rats ran from the warehouse, driven by fear. There was a dark presence here, a predatory thing, something . . . dangerous.

Another two knives flashed in quick succession to cluster themselves with the first three, before a husky voice cursed from the darkness.

“Damn, Ah hate when that happens. Shoulda known five was never gonna be enough.”

Footsteps echoed in the darkness, and a tall woman stepped out of the shadows moving with an easy, deadly grace. She was clothed in black leather, which fit her body like a second skin. He long, rich, chestnut hair was tied back in a ponytail, the light glowing dully off the silver-white stripe which ran straight down the middle.

She moved lightly towards the crate, crouching there, rocking back on her heels, with her hands loosely hanging between her knees. The knives jutted out from the crate like the needles of an angry porcupine, their fury taken out on the woman’s target - a picture of a man, held in place by two rusty pushpins. The women regarded the picture with a cold anger, her face an icy mask.

The man in the picture looked to be in his late forties, his hair close cropped and a non-descript blond, but there was no mistaking the cold calculation in his shaded eyes, conveyed even by the picture. Even expressionless, his face conveyed discipline, hardness, steely resolve.

The woman saluted mockingly, her hand held limply to her bow. When she spoke, her voice was a snarl and her green eyes smouldered.

“X 8301 reportin’ fer duty, Sir!”

She reached out a leather-clad hand and slowly, methodically, started yanking her knives free, but her eyes never left the picture.

“The mission has been completed, Sir! Target X 6203 has been terminated, Sir!” she snarled, her voice furious. With a vicious jab, she stuck a knife into the right eye of the picture, dearly wishing that it was the eye of the man who had ordered her to kill family. He had called it a test of her ‘efficiency’.

“Reporting for duty, Sir! Targets X7223 and X7224 have been terminated, Sir!” she snarled again, slamming a second knife into the left eye, burying it up to its hilt. She tore a jagged hole in what remained of Donovan Lydecker’s face. Those two murders had been another test of her efficiency.

“The newest and best of the Manticore GE program,” she mocked, her voice light and singsong. Killing the two X7’s had been the last of her ‘tests’ before Manticore was attacked froom the outside. By then, however, Lydecker had been AWOL for a couple of weeks. The blonde bitch who had been his replacement had said his employment had been terminated when she had asked where he was. Then, she had confined her to two weeks or solitary and some good, ol’ ST - shock treatment.

“Don’t question command again,” the bitch had told her, when her stretch had been done.

And that was as far as command had been willing to go on the subject, but even Manticore had its grapevine and the word was that the Deck had indeed gone AWOL during his search for some of the rogue X5’s from twelve years previous. Rumour also had it that he had found one - X5452, codenamed Max.

The woman frowned slightly at that. Max didn’t sound like a codename to her. It sounded more like a name, which was more than any of them had ever had. She herself was simply X8301, codenamed Rogue. Her frown deepened. Max. It sounded so free, so . . . not Manticore. It was better than Rogue. She shook her head. There was no use puzzling over it now. It was all she had, and she didn’t need more to do her job.

She had heard that this Max was involved in a raid on the genetic’s lab. The lab had been destroyed, but two of the X5 intruders had been KIA and X 5452 had been captured. Rogue had never gotten to talk to her, or to any of the Transgenics. She had always been kept in seclusion, her training and her tests separate from the rest.

“In which Ah had to kill family,” she thought bitterly.

Had she only been allowed to talk to Max, she would have maybe been able to pin down where Lydecker was, since it had been her he had gone after in the first place. Unfortunately, two days ago, all hell had broken lose.Somehow, someone had hit Manticore and had hit it hard.

Rogue had no idea who could have been responsible. What she did know was that she had been forcibly locked down. The compound had been compromised and command had ordered it destroyed, along with her and whatever else Manticore was trying to hide in it. So much for Command’s ‘undivided loyalty’; she smirked at the thought. Be loyal to someone who tried to kill you? Like hell she would.

Then, someone had pulled the plug or done something. Her paralysis collar and magnetic boots had been disengaged, along with all the locks on the security doors. She had escaped the compound, but not without snatches of material from the case files. Being trained as an espionage expert did have its uses, and Manticore’s systems were no exception. It was all about cracking the security algorithms, and, since she had held back on all her tests, they had had no idea just how good she was.

Rogue was irritated at the fact that she had not been able to take all the case information with her. All she knew was what she had been able to speedread before the fire took out the system. And her file had been so heavily encrypted that she could never have cracked it in the short time she had had available.

But she knew enough.

And she also knew Lydecker had ordered her to kill family, and the son of a bitch was going to pay.

Rogue pulled out the last of her knives and made them disappear into hidden pockets in her jumpsuit, like magic. Rising slowly from her haunches, she turned to face the picture, snapping her hand to her forehead in a smart salute.

“X 8301 reporting for duty, Sir! New mission parameters, Sir! To make you goddamned pay for what you did to me!”

Her boot crashing down in salute, Rogue turned around and disappeared into the shadows, the torn picture of Donovan Lydecker the only thing to mark her passing.

*