[Sur'kesh] Project Rainfall

The aircar fired it's maneuvering thrusters and swung itself parallel to the cave opening, hovering hundreds of feet above the roiling, steaming sea. This close the wounded man could see two things in crystal clarity.

The first being that the car was, in make, model, and coloring, identical to any one of the hundreds of emergency rescue craft swarming over the broken city.

The second being Lyi standing in the open hatchway, one hand gripping a ceiling hook, the other bracing the launcher against the frame.

Sorkin's comm crackled.

"Down."

After the bridge collapse, after doubling back to the now abandoned spaceport for their temporarily boxed exit strategy, after ducking and weaving and using his handful of chem shells to start several decidedly nasty ferrophilic fires to cover his tracks, he was down to two payloads.

Only two.

But these were some good ones.

The pair of canisters came in high, barely clearing the tunnel roof, bouncing and skittering over the rough rock floor before coming to a cold, silent stop halfway between Sorkin and the blue.

A pause.

Then a hiss as ocher colored gas began jetting from either end, filling the open spaces of the carved out tunnel. Billowing up and out until an artificial fog bank separated Spiza from the black armored man, completely ignoring the waves of hot air buffeting its mass as it began to ever so slowly spill towards the singularly unfortunate agent with all the implacability of a glacier. The walls of the tunnel crackled and groaned like splitting ice as the gas began to solidify in seconds, the edges already turning a translucent amber.

On the other side of the improvised barricade Lyi was maneuvering the craft closer, within an easy jump of the edge.

As Spiza’s eyes tracked the malevolent orange glacier, his eyes bugged as he realized he knew what it was.


Staring into the cloud of death as it solidified before him, Spiza remembered the documentation as it had stared at him from his omnitool - its material safety sheet emblazoned with a fiery three-pronged emerald cross that had sarcastically suggested a safe operating distance of “500 meters, assuming ventilation greater than 1000 cubic meters per minute.” He also remembered the notes a colleague of his wrote when he reviewed it:

”If you touch it, you will die.”

“If you breathe it, you will die.

If you ingest… well, Shrell help you, you poor, retarded moron.”

With the cloud before him and the inferno behind, Spiza was out of options. He took one last, terror-stricken look at Sorkin, took a running leap forward…and plunged into the sea.

---

The epoxy’s vapor trail caught the STG agent’s legs as he plunged through the air and immediately began to harden, though not before it could adhere to the great chemical glacier forming a cap on the tunnel wall. As he fell, an enormous tendril formed in the air, creating a great mycelium-like network of fibers that filled in, becoming facets of a great amber plume.

Another explosion rocked the entrance, but as the Amber formed it created a great seal around the rock, leaching into the structure through its porous membranes and acting as an enormous cork on the tunnel. With nowhere else to go, the explosion rocked itself in the other direction, funneling its force back into the other direction and creating an enormous plume of fire back in the building’s foundations.

As Lyi stood back, admiring his work, Sorkin kept his gun trained on the seas below.

---

As unprepared as Spiza had been for the first fall, he’d been prepared for one much further. His labcoat, burning, tattered and bulky as it was, billowed out behind him in the windy weather around him, arresting his terminal velocity by crucial meters per second as he plummeted to the seas below. Fanning his arms in front of him as best he could, his omnitool flashed crimson as a blast of material shot forward from its minifacturing sites, forming an interlocking cast around his arms and extending into a fluted, triangular airfoil.

University swim team attendance, don’t fail me now, he thought crazily.

---

”Keep an eye out for him, Sorkin muttered. ”I want to see his body dashed on the rocks before we go.”

---

Even with a slower fall, hitting the water head-on was still traumatic as hell. The tip of the fin, barely made before hitting water, chilled and shattered as he struck, leading a blast of cold surging around his broken arm, rendering it numb to everything. His other arm screamed in pain as he tried to compensate, and the exertion sprayed air from his lungs as his path arced from vertical to horizontal.

His escape method had exactly one advantage. With the force and salt content of the ocean, the Amber was blasted from his legs, shutting down his downward velocity as they exploded in size, tugged upward and tore from his outfit. As a result of all this, Spiza shot off from his entry point and rounded a corner before bursting from the water, gasping, out of sight from his attackers.

---

They remained there for two more minutes, watching the foam for any sign of the Agent. After that, Lyi nudged Sorkin and cleared his throat.

”We need to move.”

Sorkin sighed as he stood up from his crouching position, and tapped a finger to the side of his head again.

”Projects A and B at LZ,” he said into his mic. “One potential bogey here, likely ST. Please advise.”

A raspy voice, distorted past all possible species identification, crackled in his inner ear.

”Leave it,” it responded. “You’ll spend far…too many resources…to wrap up one loose end.”

Lyi and Sorkin exchanged looks.

”Account for this loose end…in the future. Understood?”

Sorkin’s expression glared as he signaled the aircar’s pilot, waving him forward. ”Understood. A and B, moving out.”
The ship shot off into the horizon.

---

Spiza pulled himself onto the shore ten minutes later, coughing, spluttering and aching all over. A dull throb had returned to his arm, making the world itself pulse with every beat of his heart, and the fore of it had swollen to the size of a softball. Crawling to the backside of a rock that had jutted out of the beach, he retched up the contents of his stomach before jabbing his omnitool with a finger, broadcasting a general distress beacon from his position on the shore – but judging from the smoke high in the sky, past the cliff face above him, it would be hours, perhaps a day before anyone responded to him.

Lying there, shivering in the dying sun in the distance, Spiza muttered, ”I hate my life.”

It was going to get a lot, lot worse.