Tales From the Wheel

Desperate Times and the End of the Line

Spring, Earth Year 2391- Charon, Dackon Museveni’s Secret Research Center

Explosions sounded from above and the hallway shook as a rust-colored mechanical fist struck the bolt on the locked side door once, bending it and then slammed into it one more time, breaking it completely. Hiroshito Adachi pushed the now crumbling door aside and faced another small hallway with another door at the end. According to the details and rough map Observation had provided this would lead to the large chamber he was looking for.

 Another series of distant booms shook the underground facility and reminded Adachi that ironically enough, even for a temporal agent actions needed to be taken within specific windows of opportunity. Or so the Hub and Directors have always claimed. As far as the variant of Hiroshito Adachi, a scion of the Adachi clan and Yakuza royalty of the Belts during the 29^th century was concerned, it was just ritualized behavior similar to organizations like his Gangster family. Couching the mundanity of their actions to provide a sense of importance or grandeur. When the Adachi clan wanted something, they always found a way to take it one way or another, regardless of ceremonial trappings. When the Wheel wanted something, they always found a way to take it, one way or another, despite many of their own bureaucratic, almost quasi mystical protocols. Hiroshito had proven himself to be very effective at implementing the “or another” portion of that equation for the Wheel and as a result probably knew a bit more about which skeletons where in which closet than an Agent of his rank should.

He stepped into the hallway as yet another blast from somewhere above shook everything. Raised in a completely cutthroat environment and an experienced agent of the Wheel at this stage, the ruckus above did not mask the subtle shift in tension he felt. He was not alone here. Pausing again for a second, he took quick stock. In less than 7 hours Dackon, the “King of the Kuiper Belt” was going to go down in a foolish last stand. “Fucking morons and their blazes of glory.” Hiroshito thought with a sneer. Fools died for so called honor. Better to live and then later revenge. That was considered “honorable” as well and you didn’t need to catch a bullet or bolt in the head. In less than 12 hours, Consortia sweep teams will find what he was seeking as well in the next room. He needed to trace the thread of its final location for Coldfire and remove any evidence of his presence well before then.

Pushing carefully onward, Adachi’s flesh hand rested on the hilt of his sword as he moved down the hall, {Not my family’s sword of course, like the ‘real’ me wields. No, Variants should be thankful when we are allowed to breathe. No fucking legacy allowed for time’s castoffs. Shadows, glitches in the cosmic system, a Variance in reality. Second sons and daughters that no one wants and apparently should not even exist.} As he approached the midway point of the Hall, he wasn’t sure if he heard or felt the slight shifting of approaching feet. “Cloaked,” He realized quickly. Not good. Personal cloaking tech was rare and expensive in his own time {or my ‘prime’ self’s fucking time anyway} and shouldn’t even exist currently. This likely meant other time travelers.

Adachi’s true feelings concerning his Cyborg arm, nicknamed ‘Rust’, had always been a mixed bag. On one hand, it had been the result of a tough lesson learned by a much younger and cockier man. One the other hand, as the presence he had been sensing suddenly materialized behind him, in a last-minute reaction that only those with true combat experience can pull off, it blocked the blow from a large vibro knife that would have severed a regular human appendage in half.

Not one to dwell on whether something was lucky or not, Hiroshito willed his mechanical arm to push back immediately after absorbing the sneak attack. The resulting backhand sent the attacking figure flying into the wall on the left side of the hallway, slamming into it with enough force to break several bones if a person was not properly armored. This individual had some armor at least. Dazed, but not completely stunned, they activated a com link attached to a large purple ear and started shouting into it in a language Adachi did not understand. Drawing his sword, he cut their throat open in one quick motion. “To late,” He thought. Likely someone nearby received the message.

Taking a quick look at his would-be ambusher, Adachi realized the figure was not human. Humanoid in shape, the creature also had purplish skin with multicolored locks of hair, like dreadlocks and five small sized eyes, two each located in places similar to humans and one more where our chins would be. Each of these eyes resembled an Owl’s slits more than anything human as well. The chin eye looked up at Adachi and the creature tried to gurgle something as blue tinted blood spilt out of its slashed throat. Two seconds later its head slumped and every eye closed.

“Escarians?” Hiroshito thought, “Are these the Withered’s fake-ass ones or some of those crazy bastard survivors from the Replacement Wars?” He wasn’t sure it was either. He grabbed his fallen foe’s ear com so Listening could analyze the source and timeline of any signals. Moving quickly towards his destination now, Adachi noticed the door lock was already broken, confirming where his would-be attacker’s allies were. The message he managed to fire off before bleeding out meant stealth was likely pretty useless at this stage. So, Hiroshito unholstered his plasma pistol and activated an energy “Quick Shield” that was built into Rust. Extending the energy field to a length and width that provided cover to most of his body would mean it would only last about 20 seconds before needing to recharge, but Adachi figured that was long enough.

Raising it in front of him like some spectral battering ram, he charged the door with a loud bellow, smashing through it completely while firing off two random blasts from his pistol, more to provide additional cover than to actually hit anything. The quick shield shuttered but held as two energy beams ricocheted off it. Hiroshito spotted two figures before one quickly cloaked and another ducked behind a large metal table with some nasty looking medical equipment on it. Oh, and also the corpse of a recently vivisected human male. That too.

Dashing swiftly to the cover of a nearby workstation he angled the quick shield just in time to block another laser bolt.   As he ducked for cover in the cubical, he spotted another body on the ground near the table. This one was in scrubs and intact, other than the small still smoking hole in the back of its head. “Clean, professional.” His mind registered, “The stiff never saw it coming.” As he deactivated the quick shield {10 seconds of juice left}, he heard a deep voice shout something in Escarian to his cloaked companion. Dam! It would have been nice to have a translation pad, but you can only bring so much with you when you jump.

He did recall that according to the schematics Observation provided that this room was two levels with the lab stuff up here and a very short flight of stairs leading to data storage and what he was looking for. He’d bet a pack of Johnny Scars that’s where the cloaker was. “Human!” The deep voice atoned suddenly in broken Japanese, {Well, it looks like someone decided to pack a translator}. “Human, you are a traveler as well, yes? Are you Wheel? We are the Resistance! You must listen…”

“Sorry,” Adachi interrupted with a shout, “But I don’t have time for this shit!” He leapt over the cubicle wall with a burst of ferocious speed, activating the quick shield again as he did. The Escarian stood back from the table as this human torpedo sped towards it while dropping his rifle and pulling a pistol and firing directly from the hip in one skilled motion. If it hadn’t been for the quick shield that blast would have gutted Adachi before he cleared the table. Landing he doused the shield with a thought {6 seconds left} and delivered a vicious backhand. It was expertly blocked, but the power of old Rust could not be fully denied and the Escarian stumbled back a little. That quick opening gave Hiroshito more than enough time to pull his own pistol and plant two squarely in his opponent’s guts at nearly point-blank range, dropping him instantly.

  “The Cloaker.” He thought, barely pausing as the alien fell over. Grabbing the gruesome operation table with Rust, he upended all its contents and sent gore splatter everywhere. Directly to his right near the stairwell bits of nasty splattered up against something invisible. “Quick shield!” his mind screamed as two quick energy bolts flew from a distortion that was quickly becoming a visible Escarian fighter. “Female.” Hiroshito’s unconscious mind filed away for his after-action report. Unlike humanity and many other species where there are distinct differences in physical size and strength between the sexes, this was not so with Escarian biology. However, the differences in the shape of the male and female hip structures were even more pronounced than in humans.

Managing to block the two shots {3 seconds left}, he ducked just in time to avoid the but end of his opponent’s rifle as it nearly caved his skull in. She had borrowed a page from his book and surged forward while he was blocking her second shot, wielding her rifle like a club. He whipped his sword out as he went low, hoping to catch her in the abdomen. But she managed to pull the but end of her long gun rapidly down in front of her body after her missed swing and parried his blade at the last second. She then countered with a wicked shove, using the rifle as a cross bar and sending him staggering back a couple feet. Whipping the rifle up with the intent of ending this by putting a hole in his chest, Adachi lept forward and thrust Rust out in a desperate grab, snapping the rifle barrel in half before she could pull the trigger. He jerked the rest of the weapon out of her hand while thrusting his sword upward and deep with his other arm, cleanly severing several arteries in the Escarian’s neck, killing her almost instantly. “You and your buddies have turned this into a bad day for me.” Hiroshito muttered, “But I’ll grant that it’s still a worse one for you.”

Searching the female quickly he found what appeared to be a data pad of some sort. Likely downloaded from below while her companion was buying time. He tucked it way for the Wheel analysts and then pulled a Johnny Scar out and lit it {hmmm… maybe I should bring a translator next time instead of the pack. No, fuck that. Diplomacy was never my strong suite anyway.}. Whatever they were looking for didn’t matter much anymore, at least to these three. Now that the fight was over, and the adrenaline was settling Adachi was just tired, sore and pissed with the extra amount of work it would now take to ‘scrub’ these bastards’ presence from this time and location as well. He hated getting stuck cleaning up messes started by others.

“First things, first.” He mused, as the rumbling of explosions from above from another bombing run reminded him again that time was still a factor. He set a couple trip wire type devices up at the entrance in case  any more unexpected company, local or otherwise, decided to drop by. Then he headed down the stairwell, absently trying to clean some of the gore off his face and arms at least and he approached the research center’s main database. Pulling out a small device not to dissimilar to an A-WALL, he pressed two buttons and then stated into it. “Attention- Observation. Agent Adachi working on case file #SM-2876. Priority status Alpha. Begin data review and mission thread extrapolation.” He then set that small device on the computer terminal and after about 30 seconds it lit up and remote interfaced with the terminal.

While he was waiting, he assessed the situation in the lab. As part of this facility’s bio research wing, he was counting on finding ways of ‘disposing’ of access biological material and wasn’t disappointed. After a quick search he found a mostly intact cabinet near the busted workstation he initially used for cover. I contained the necessary chemicals and reagents to not only scrub the Escarian’s bodies, but their clothing and most of their gear as well. Hiroshito did keep the pieces of female’s long rifle for himself. He was never above taking a little trophy from time to time, and once it was reconstructed he had a nice spot on his wall for it.

It took about an hour and twenty minutes for the chemicals to do their work. The stench was course, nearly overwhelming, but would dissipate in plenty of time. Cleaning up the tell-tale scorch marks from the deflected energy bolts was a little trickier. But Hiroshito was satisfied enough with his efforts. Somone would need to be actively looking for signs of a fight to have a chance at spotting anything. As he waited for Observation’s results, He pondered what he had noticed not only in this section, but in the facility as a whole. If Museveni and his forces had been able to hold on for just another year, perhaps even six months, they could have been the ones to write history instead of the Three Realms of Humanity. “But that’s the thing about history I guess.” He chuckled dryly to himself, “You either become part of it or end up it its dustbin.” Even events or individuals like Dackon Museveni, stuff that can’t be completely swept aside still end up with the short shaft when they fall on the ‘wrong side’ of history. They may be remembered but never get to tell their own story. Once in the dustbin, the only legacies were false ones. {Just like a Variant’s} 

About 30 minutes later the device on the terminal chirped sharply twice and then produced a small print out.

Attn: Agent Adachi, Hiroshito

Casefile #SM-2876. Priority Alpha

 Mission Update

Data adjustments finished per mission specifications. Calculated timeline waiver negligible. Next Thread location projected. Linear location, Winter, 2902.

Agent Retrieval Standing by.

“2902!” Adachi couldn’t help but exclaim out loud. Within his own {I mean the fucking “prime” me’s} lifeline. He’d be 25 years old. He would have just recently earned the right to wield the family blade… it would be still two years from the accident that ‘created’ him. The Wheel’s top egg heads always maintain that Linear theories on time are mostly correct, and time travelers’ actions are largely accounted for by the timeline, minus small adjustments of course. A few things could cause cascading paradoxes. Using Precognition to drastically alter the outcomes seen in advance was the big one. A variant meeting themselves within their own lifeline was thought to be potentially almost as dangerous. It was largely theory, but Adachi had seen enough sci-fi shows and movies over the years to categorically state he was not going to be the one to test it anytime soon. A lot could be said about the Wheel’s bureaucracy, but this was definitely one safety protocol that made sense.

“Flag Retrieval for a pickup jump.” Hiroshito said quickly before retrieving the device and burning the printout. He also lit another smoke, figuring he had at least another 15 minutes before Retrieval’s calculations were complete. “Coldfire and the Eye are going to be pissed.” He mused, “But I’m not risking vanishing or exploding from the inside out or whatever for their little schemes.” A new secondary would need to be called in to assist with pulling the final threads. “Well Mr. Museveni.” He looked upwards with a quick laugh and mocking salute as the facility shook again, “It looks like in different ways, this is the end of the line for both of us.”