Shadowhunter

by bloodsword

The strand of DNA danced above the holo-emitter for a moment before a wave dismissed it.

"Target confirmed," she said in a low voice as she brought up several holo-displays. "The payment?"

"32 billion, as per the contract," a quiet voice announced in her ear. "Termination by any means possible."

Her expression tightened.

"I don't like political assassinations, Dante," she tautly noted. "They're messy. I don't like messy."

"The entire population of Nuranis doesn't like their human overlords, Imrulan," the quiet voice retorted. "They've emptied the bank to buy the only option to get the boot off their necks."

Imrulan's expression tightened even further. Humans. Ever since they came into the sector, they had been gobbling up assets at prodigious pace.

Nobody had believed that the upstart species was as violent and warmongering as some of the First Contact ambassadors were saying. That is, until their fleets began hammering their way past border emplacements and taking vast slices of territory away from their previous owners. The consolidation invasions of the occupied planets within that territory were even more brutal, the humans following something they called 'scorched earth' to defeat their opponents.

Millions of sentients on dozens of planets had perished in the devastating campaign. A campaign that saw the water planet of Nuranis conquered after a fiery five days. Now, nearly eight years later, they finally wanted to do something about it.

She just wished they had found somebody else to do it, is all.

Sighing with resignation, Imrulan brought up Nuranis on her navigation screen.

"Prepping to jump to slipstream, Dante," she reported as she began setting her vessel up to create an artificial wormhole that would take her from her current location to near-Nuranis space. "Catch you on the other side."

Normally most sentients would brace their rather frail flesh for the rough ride that was a wormhole transition in a small starship. Imrulan, however, wasn't most sentients. She was a Niski, a species that possessed bodies made up of discrete energy fields holding together a particulate flux instead of flesh and bone. While such bodies presented certain challenges when interacting with the universe, it also presented certain advantages. One of which she was about to use to facilitate this contract.

A dance of wraith-like fingers over her holographic interface activated the cloning tank she had buried in her vessel's belly. Once it signaled it was ready to operate, she fed it the DNA sequence she had examined a moment ago. Another signal indicated the tank had received and processed the DNA and was now ready to build her a flesh and blood body from the double-helical blueprint.

A smile of satisfaction touched Imrulan's wispy face then she was activating the tank. Time to build the suit she would use to get her close enough to her human target to effect her task: eliminate the highest ranking human official on Nuranis.

For the body she was building Imrulan could, as an energy being, inhabit as if it were a suit of clothing, or armor, using her body's particulate flux to give it life. It was better than a shapeshifter's moldable form, which, though it looked like the target, still inherently belonged to the shapeshifter's species.

The body Imrulan would be wearing, however, was human, down to the finest detail. That was the first step in her disguise. The second would be penetrating the admittedly strong human defenses around their information network to create a persona that she would adopt to grant her access to the primary human facility on the planet, a vast, floating city called Atalan.

It was here, in Atalan, that the occupying government made its home. So it was to that floating city Imrulan would go, to find her quarry.

A soft chime from her navigational interface let Imrulan know that her ship was ready to slipstream. Another flutter of her fingers and her ship thrummed with the syncopation of her slipstream drive spinning up.

Looking up at her main viewscreen, the niski nodded in satisfaction as she watched the familiar twist of a wormhole forming directly in front of her vessel. 'Here we go!' she thought with the thrill of setting another operation into motion. Then she was guiding her vessel directly into the center of the twist's maw.

Alarms were chirping by the time awareness faded back in after the tumult of her wormhole transit made her senses drift. Focusing on them, Imrulan frowned as she let her fingers dance across her interfaces, specially designed to interact with her energy form.

Ah, it was the passive detection grid the humans had put into near Nuranis space to alert them to the approach of any ships that didn't belong to them. In full stealth mode, her own vessel had pulled up short just before crossing the grid's outer perimeter and let her know what was in front of them. Good; she was expecting the grid, mentioned by her intel brief. It meant she was right where she wanted to be.

Another dance across the interface extended her ship's sensors until another alarm let her know it had come into contact with the detection grid. Eyes narrowing, the niski leaned forward, intent on the readout that detailed the sensor's contact with the grid.

If the humans followed logic, and they often did, they would've set up the grid with field projectors at regular intervals around the planet. Those projectors, in turn, would link to some sort of control apparatus, perhaps a guard station, also in orbit. That station would then have a comms link with a ground station, and a tie-in to whatever network the conquerors had set up on the planet.

In other words, all she had to do was hack her way past the detection grid and she had a way into their network. Of course, as an energy being, she was no ordinary hacker. Imrulan would hack the network by interacting with the very energy fields that made up its parts!

As an image of the energy grid appeared on her sensor array's slave screen, the niski reached out with a gossamer hand and placed it directly on the screen's face. Instantly she could feel the dance of light and information that gave the screen life, the culmination of the sensor array's efforts to detail the detection grid.

Pushing past that, she found herself touching the grid itself, a vast web of excited particles reaching out from several projectors hanging in space nearby. Good. Again that was exactly where she expected them to be. Focusing her mind, she pushed her senses down along the closest particle beam line to the projector itself.

A moment's worth of work on the projector's relatively dumb control systems and it belonged to her. Another moment and the entire grid was hers. Tuning its resonance to let her stealthed craft slip through without causing as much as a ripple in the web, Imrulan then eased her ship closer to give her better access to the anticipated guard station.

Ah, there it was, hanging in geosynchronous orbit. Perfect! That should give her access to the more active detection grid in place around the planet as well as the commlink to the ground.

Again the niski reached out, her senses riding along the lines of energy that connected the passive grid to the control station and its more active scanners. Sliding through their security protocols and lockouts was child's play from there and she owned it within seconds of penetrating the firewall.

Once inside it was easy to find the commlink and down she went, intent on diving into the network the humans had set up for communication, security and military purposes.

There the human defenses again proved useless against the determined niski and her abilities within a network. Within moments of her first push past the passive grid and its projectors, Imrulan was deep inside the network with full access to protocols, personnel and systems.

Knowing that time was getting short, the niski quickly crafted a persona for the human body she was growing in the belly of her ship. The target with the highest value on the floating city the humans were using as an HQ was the garrison's governor. If she could drop him, the human command structure would shudder under the pressure.

That shuddering, and the hesitation it would create, would then give the people of Nuranis, aquatic reptiles that had evolved to take maximum advantage of a planet covered 99.1 percent by water, the opening they needed to storm Atalan and cripple the human garrison.

Whether the Nuranisians could actually topple the conquerors' oppressive government or not didn't matter to her. She wasn't paid to help them get their planet back. Just to kill somebody important enough to create the opening they needed to begin their attack. Beyond that, it was totally on the locals to get the job done. She'd jump offplanet, collect her pay and move to the next job. It was as simple as that.

Now, to do the most amount of damage possible in the shortest period of time, she needed to be somebody close to the governor. Perhaps somebody in his or her guard detail, tasked with keeping the locals from killing him before his time.

There! It was the roster for the governor's personal guard, a handful of highly trained warriors that accompanied the governor at all times. It was protected by several more levels of security protocols, tighter than anything she had encountered before on her inward journey through the human network.

Tighter, perhaps, but no less immune to her deft touch. Within seconds Imrulan had pushed by the protocols to insert her persona onto the roster, putting her in the next rotation of the guard. Which, according to her internal chronometer, was scheduled to change in the next ten minutes.

Cementing her persona on the roster, she quickly but carefully drew back. Now she was on the clock. She needed to get down onto the planet, spin up her human body and get onto Atalan within the next ten minutes or all the work she had just finished to hack the network would be for naught.

By the time Imrulan managed to withdraw out of the human network and pull her senses back into her body, that time had been trimmed by three minutes. Seeing that was enough to tighten her wispy features into nearly a solid mask. She knew it would be cutting it close to insert herself into the rotation at that particular point in time, but seven minutes to get her ship close enough for the insertion, spin up her human body and reach the ground in the right spot to make the guard change?

"There's always something," she grimly muttered. Then, with a sign of resignation, she was pushing herself out of her control cluster to slip down into her ship's belly. Might as well get her suit on first before she tried to do anything else. After all, the resonance process she used to innervate a somnolent body was the most time consuming of all the processes she now had to get exactly right, or risk failure.

The completed body, a combat-enhanced human female with relatively unremarkable features and build, hung unmoving in the fluid-filled grow tank, surrounded by feeding and maintenance tubes, monitors, and power supplies. A quick scan of the monitors confirmed that the body's maturation cycle was complete and that it was ready to go.

Nodding in satisfaction, Imrulan moved the monitors out of the way and stepped up to the tank itself. With a final look to make sure there was human-appropriate clothing nearby, the niski reached out to put a gossamer hand against the tank's outer surface.

Thanks to the bioelectric nature of the fluid in the tank, she could transfer herself into the body without needing direct contact. It saved a little time in the decanting and prep part of the resonance process. Hopefully enough that she'd be ready to go by the time she had control of the body.

Closing her eyes, Imrulan brought up the human energy resonance signature from memory into her mind's eye. Then, as quickly as she dared, she began to use the control she had over her particulate flux to make each particle resonate at the same frequency as the human body used to animate.

Imrulan felt the body respond as she hit the correct resonance, twitching and moving as bioenergy bled through the fluid and into its tissues. Using that pathway as a conduit, she then poured herself into the crafted body, feeling the heart begin to beat, blood flow, and neurons fire as her flux brought it to life.

The tank automatically began to decant as the body, now filled with Imrulan's energy, began to move in earnest. By the time she had finished pouring herself into her crafted human body and bringing it to full capability, the tank was empty and she was hanging by invisible grav-suspension beams.

Imrulan took a brief moment to stretch, both to warm up her new body's muscles and joints and to test how well her flux had synchronized to the body's functions. Satisfied that she was fully synchronized, a wave at a sensor directed the suspension beams to lift her out of the tank. Clambering down a built-in ladder, the niski quickly pulled on the set-aside clothes and made her way back up to the cockpit.

Since Imrulan already owned the human sensor grid, she quickly took her craft into the atmosphere without detection, spiraling down to where all the ground stations sent their communication feeds: the floating city of Atalan. And not a moment too soon: she had less than five minutes to make the guards' shift change or be forced to wait an entire cycle to make her move.

She spotted it as she sliced through the last layer of clouds to come into view of the planet-spanning ocean: the city of Atalan! It was an admittedly graceful structure, all curves and fluted edges, not quite what she expected from the warmongering humans. Still, she had a job to do and little time to get to it, so she pushed the titanic floating city out of mind and focused on getting close enough to the guard station set on the city's crown to transfer over.

Imrulan managed to make it to the station, sign in with her persona's biometrics and get into her uniform, armor and equipment just as the guard change was sounded through the station with a brassy chime. Glancing at the speaker that made the chime, the disguised niski finished buckling on her utility belt.

"Better hustle, Two Four," a hard voice said in the human tongue, something they called 'English' from the equipment area's entrance. "You've got 30 pips to hit your mark."

"Copy that, sergeant," Imrulan quickly fired back in the same language, silently congratulating herself for taking an English engram booster right after accepting the commission. She settled her firearm then followed the non-comm officer through the door to where the rest of her detail already waited.

Slotting herself into the spot the sergeant indicated with a taut gesture, the niski pulled on her helmet and brought her energy pulse rifle to the read. She then twisted to her right to march in line as the detail moved out, presumably heading to wherever the governor was currently ensconced.

As they marched, Imrulan took the opportunity to surreptitiously study her surroundings. As expected, the other guards in the detail were in largely ceremonial armor, upper-body, vital-zone coverage only, with helmet, gauntlets and boots in polished dark blue over dark grey uniforms. On a supposedly pacified planet, and in the heart of heavily-defended territory, there shouldn't be a need for combat armor and assault weapons.

What was unexpected was the continuing grace and beauty of every line of the city she was now marching through. Graceful, flowing curves seamlessly joined at every angle to make the city appear as it were a part of the sea it floated upon. Coupled with muted lighting enhanced by sub-surface light shimmer, and subnautica colors, it was a tasteful, and surprising addition to the martial holdings of the fledgling human empire.

She was still absorbing that incongruency when, as her detail stepped around a corner, the air seemed to thicken as everything slowed down. 'No!' Imrulan silently shouted as she felt her body pause as if caught in a thick gel. 'Time stop grenade!' Then the air around them was abruptly filled with deadly light.

The niski managed to twist around to aim her rifle in the direction of the killing light storm even as the rest of her detail was scythed down. Only to find the grim muzzle of a high-powered particle ram pistol pointed directly at her face as time returned to normal. She felt her expression tighten as she focused on that unwinking eye of doom.

There was only a handful of sentients that equipped such a weapon. And out of those, only one that used time-stop technology.

"Voska," she grated tautly.

"Imrulan," the armored figure behind the weapon replied. "Catch you at a bad time?"

"It's always a bad time when it comes to you, skin changer," Imrulan growled, her rifle not wavering a wit despite the pistol in her face. "What in the Cosmos are you doing here? This is a closed contract!"

"Which one? Oh, right. The one to take out the governor. I thought you hated political assassinations. Something about them being too messy."

"A girl's gotta eat," Imrulan retorted. "You still haven't explained why you're here, Voska. You're into taking trade guild bounties. Pretty sure there aren't any ConFed or Trade Web dirtbags swimming in this pool."

The armored figure shrugged.

"Open offworld bounty on high-ranking human military officers," the shapeshifter replied. "The monkeys are making enemies almost as fast as a drunk Rigellian in a vapor bar. I'm getting 10,000 per head. And since you were nice enough to open their front door with your hack on their security grid ..."

"Take as many heads as you want," Imrulan interrupted to growl, deliberately dropping her rifle and taking a half step back to appear non-threatening. "Just stay the hell out of my way. And don't trip any alarms until I get close enough to drop my mark."

"Or I could just shoot you in that human face of yours and make an easy 10k right here," Vodka countered, stepping close once more to keep Imrulan at point blank range. "The price for wearing the enemy."

"You can't kill me with that thing," Imrulan grimly pointed out.

"Yeah, yeah, I know. Niski energy bodies and all that bullshit. But I can force you to reset, which will give me plenty of time to wipe everything out in here and make me some serious bank before you can grow another meat sack and get back here."

Imrulan barely throttled the urge to grind her now-solid teeth in frustration.

"Why make me reset at all, Voska? I already said you can have as many heads as you want. This doesn't have to come to violence. I just want my contract mark."

"Because I want them all, niski," Voska retorted. "Yours and mine both."

"That greed is going to get you dead someday," Imrulan said, carefully switching the safety off her weapon as stealthily as possible.

"Maybe," the armored bounty hunter replied. "But not today." Then she was firing her hand cannon.

Already moving in anticipation, Imrulan felt the heat from the powerful blast warm her cheek before it slammed into the wall behind her. Then her own weapon, a serviceable pulse rifle, was back up and she was emptying the battery at her erstwhile colleague.

The first volley splashed futilely against Voska's shields, sending flares of bright energy cascading in fountains of light. The second volley, delivered between bursts from the particle ram, was more successful as a determined Imrulan focused on the center of Voska's chestplate. The energy slugs, coherent bundles of particle-enriched plasma, battered the beleaguered shield down to directly slam into the armor's reinforced metal in a dancing flower of sparks and vaporized alloy.

Testament to both the armor's resilience and the depth of Voska's greed, the bounty hunter actually stood there and took the pounding for a long moment. Finally, a heartbeat before Imrulan's greater skill and precision penetrated the failing armor, Voska fell back with a muttered oath.

"Have it your way, niski," she snarled as she scrambled behind a column. "You deny me and I'm going to deny you!" Then, with a shiver of distorted time, she was flickering out of sight.

Imrulan frowned as she swapped in a fresh battery from her utility belt. It didn't take a genius to figure out where Voska was headed. Straight for the governor's audience chamber.

"Two can play that game, skin changer," she muttered then thumbed open her helmet's comms to shout in English, shading her tone with urgency. "All assets, alert! An unknown, heavily armed and armored intruder has breached city security and ambushed my guard detail. After exchanging fire, it's on the move towards the governor's audience chamber. I repeat, this is a priority one alert to all assets. Please respond!"

"We copy your alert, Two Four!" a hard human voice replied. "We're already taking fire along the approach. Use the secondary access to reinforce the audience chamber with your detail."

"Copy that. Moving to secondary access now. Will advise when we're in position!"

Putting her head down, Imrulan charged along the secondary approach route that was now flashing in her helmet's HUD. If she could keep progressing like she was, she'd easily flank Voska, who, by all accounts, was getting bogged down by other defending units along the primary corridor to the audience chamber.

Then she was coming around a last corner and heading towards a door guarded by a full detail dressed just like she was.

"Two Four!" the detail's commander, a sergeant like the one she had left behind, called out. "Where's the rest of your detail?"

"Lost to the intruder," Imrulan grimly reported as she ran up. "They're using some sort of time-stop technology. They froze us in place and cut us to pieces. Our sergeant was pacing us and took the shot meant for me."

The sergeant shook her head as they could hear weapon fire nearby.

"Damn it. We could've used the firepower." She then made a gesture at the door behind her. "Update the governor. The garrison has been mobilized and is moving in to lock down the area. We just need to hold long enough for them to get here."

"Copy that," Imrulan said with a quick salute. Then she was stepping through the door, which another guard had opened a crack to let her in.

The governor was hunkered down behind portable blast shields as Imrulan closed the heavy door behind her, two full guard details clustered around them with weapons up and ready.

"It's Two Four," an officer said, identifying her from the transponder on her helmet. "She gave the alert after her detail was ambushed, governor."

"Nicely done, Two Four," the governor, a spare-looking fellow said without leaving cover. "What's the situation out there?"

Walking forward, Imrulan made her report.

"The intruder is using time-stop technology to cut our forces to ribbons, sir. But if we can hold until the garrison arrives, we should have them stopped."

"Very good," the governor said with no little relief. "Take your position."

"Yes, sir," Imrulan replied. She then drew her sidearm and shot him in the face before disappearing in a hail of light.

An eyeblink later she was solidifying on the bridge of her ship. Slipping into the pilot's chair, she began pulling away from the floating city.

"There you go, Voska," she said out loud with a chuckle. "All the heads you can handle!"