Original Flavor (anime influenced)

Rated: R

RULES OF ENGAGEMENT (Part V:  There Is No Such Thing As Sufficient 
Preparation)

	V.

	THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS SUFFICIENT PREPARATION



	It's funny how fast your life can change.  Two years ago I was one of 
the most valuable, highest paid, least troubled operatives the Network 
had ever had, arguably their most powerful psi-talent, most proficient 
killer, most ruthless tactician, the least likely of a virtual army of 
loyal cyborg assassins to turn traitor.  At this time last year I was in 
the midst of a crisis of conflicted loyalties, split straight up the 
middle between the Network--which had built me, genes to cyborg grafts, 
from the stolen lives of at least two other people, and made me all that 
I both was and was not--and Hunter Cormier, the son of a Darkworlder 
corporate magnate and a member of the Internal Affairs Tactical 
strikeforce codenamed WildStrike, whose face had invaded my mind and 
dreams and soul and made me wish, and curse, and beg for the chance to be 
more than the sum of all my second-hand parts.  Hunter won, hands down, 
the night I risked my own somewhat paltry existence to save him from the 
Majestix Warlord we had all known as the Enforcer...but whom I finally 
came to know as Robert Cormier, Hunt's father, whose dirty deals with the 
Majestix had made his own continued survival, and their cross time 
invasion of our reality, possible.  Hunt killed his own father rather 
than let him destroy me--and condemn hundreds of millions of others to 
mass annihilation at his hands.  I never thought he'd forgive me for 
putting him into that position, for forcing him to choose between his 
father and the cyborg hitman who, as far as I knew, meant absolutely 
nothing to him....and I was pleasantly surprised, a few months later, 
when a mission that took him deep into the heart of Network territory 
allowed our paths to cross again and I found out what I did mean to him.  
Everything.  The same as he meant to me.  And that forced me back out of 
his life, because the one thing I couldn't stand was the idea that he 
might die for me...because of me.  So I ran to my old friend Elyena 
Demerath...and, if you've been paying attention, the rest you know.
	I was sitting in my breakfast nook, in the same room that I'd woken up 
in three weeks previously, my skull still swimming from the after-effects 
of a near-lethal neuro-disruptor hit, screaming in anguish because my 
telepathic link to Hunter had been so completely severed I couldn't even 
sense an echo of his psychic resonance, wishing Elyena had succeeded in 
killing me rather than simply rendering me sort of useless for the nonce. 
 On the table in front of me was a sketchpad and colored pencil set I'd 
had the replicator make for me in a moment of total homesickness but 
which I hadn't used yet, staring at a clean white sheet as though willing 
some image to cohere enough in my head for me to draw it.  That's right, 
I like to draw--it's a talent I developed quite independently of any 
genetic/cybernetic proclivities plugged in while I was gestating and 
later while I was training in the creche with Hitman.  At least, I think 
it is.  Jordan told me he couldn't draw a straight line (though why 
anyone would want to draw a straight line is really beyond me) and while 
Hitman has an artistic flair with landscaping, he's not much in the 
one-dimensional arena.  And, as far as I've been able to determine, the 
mercenary/assassin whose stolen memories provided the basis of my 
professional experience was an artist at combat only.  I started drawing 
almost without even thinking about it--a face that had been carved by the 
hands of a master sculptor doing an image of one of Darkworld's pantheon 
of Ascendant Deities, a face almost too beautiful to be really masculine 
but indescribably male just the same, quizzically tilted as though asking 
a question that you, and only you, can answer.  A pair of almond-shaped 
eyes so vividly green they just seem to draw you in and never plan on 
letting you go, framed in long, thick lashes that, when lowered, turn 
those eyes so sultry you never want to be let go.  Longish, dark red hair 
streaked with gold highlights, falling loosely over his forehead and to 
his shoulders, thick and soft, especially when it's wound around your 
fingers and being used to hold him in place for a long, deep, hungry 
kiss.  Pale skin that used to freckle when he was younger but just 
succeeds in burning all the time now, warm and soft and rich with his 
scent and taste--musky and spicy and salty, especially when it's damp 
with sweat after a night of slow, passionate....
	Gods, Hunter, I miss you.  Was the first thought to crawl out of the 
misery that was twisting my heart so tight I thought it would break, 
wishing I could get it all out in a good, long, thoroughly self-indulgent 
cry.  But I couldn't--no tear ducts, they'd been replaced by a 
significantly more efficient optic repair system that didn't call for the 
need to produce tears--so I had to settle for letting my shoulders shake 
with quiet sobs and resting my head in my hands.  I'd been burying this 
for almost a month and now, with the training period that I'd had to whip 
myself and my new team into some sort of functional unit coming to an 
end, the emotional bill had come due for collection.  I couldn't fool 
myself any longer.  I'd lost him.  When the telepathic connection that 
had bound our two minds together had been cut, the last impression I'd 
gotten from him was of terrible grief and anguish and rage--he thought I 
was dead, that the Network had caught up to me and killed me, and the 
cover story that had been used to disguise my abduction into the ranks of 
NekroTech was deliberately designed to foster that impression.  "My body" 
was taken from the ruins of a hotel on the pleasure planet of Luxura, 
along with the corpses of the Network cleaner unit that had been 
dispatched to liquidate me.  It had been confirmed not only by Luxura's 
resident security forces but the Network themselves and the head of 
Darkworld's Internal Affairs Tactical Division--my "brother," Jordan 
Odessa, who has cause to know me almost as well as I know myself.  To the 
universe at large, the Network assassin whose only known name was 
Manslaughter had come to a fast, bad end, richly deserved.
	I hadn't been able to reestablish contact with Hunter.  I'd tried, 
harder than I've ever tried anything in this life, so hard that I nearly 
gave myself a brain hemorrhage straining for it, trying to bridge the gap 
between us through sheer force of will, pounding against whatever barrier 
that was holding us apart.  And I couldn't do it.  I wasn't strong 
enough, I wasn't powerful enough, the distance between us was too great, 
our connection severed too thoroughly, for me to find my psionic way back 
to him.  It was as though it hadn't just been cut but gouged out--as 
though someone had taken a telepathic shovel and dug everything that had 
been Hunter out of my head and left and empty, aching void where he 
should have been.  Not even the slightest trace of his presence to give 
me any comfort, only the memories of our entirely too short time together 
to last me for the rest of my life...or until I dared go back to him.  If 
one of us had really died, it would have been easier--the loss would have 
been complete and final--and while there would be "what could have 
beens," eventually the pain might lessen with time.  But we were both 
still alive...and so completely lost to each other.
	And if I ever stopped hurting, it was because I really had died.
	The thing that sucks the hardest about having no tear ducts is that, 
even when you feel like it, you really can't have a good hard crying jag, 
and just gasping for air like a beached fish eventually doesn't cut it.  
With an almost physical effort I pushed my head back out of my hands and 
looked blearily around to make certain no one had seen me at it, thinking 
earnest, commanderly thoughts about maintaining the morale of my troops. 
Elyena was standing in the door, more pity in her eyes than I ever wanted 
to see from her.  I met her eyes, unfortunately, and got a good long look 
at it before I let my own eyes drop away, my scaneye finding the 
airbrushed pattern of the floor strangely intoxicating for some reason.  
She stepped forward, her stride so quiet my audio receptors barely 
acknowledged the sound she made, and her hand rested comfortingly on my 
shoulder.  "You really do miss him, don't you, brat?"
	"Yeah, I really do miss him."  I hated the way that came out; my voice 
sounded all tight and squeaky, and all I could think of was every whiny 
thirteen-year-old voice I ever heard in the creche when I would peek in 
to watch the kids being kids.  "With all my heart and most of my 
s...silicon."
	Elyena was quiet then for a space as I pulled my somewhat rebellious 
emotions back under control so that, by the time I could bring myself to 
look up at her, the majority of the pity had gone out of her and she was 
regarding me with a wry little half-smile.  "Someone told me once that 
love is nature's way of tricking us into reproduction."
	I bit my tongue on what I was about to say, and I could feel my reaction 
welling up inside me; it was out before I could stop it, a snicker, which 
turned into a chuckle, which transmuted into  a snort, and from there 
turned into a full body laugh.  "Who the hell told you that?  And how 
does it apply to Hunter and me, I mean, reproduction's not a part of our 
future unless we decide to take some radical measures?"
	"Well, now at least you're saying that you two are going to have a 
future together," she pointed out with a prim little smile, her eyebrow 
quirking up suggestively.
	"Cow.  You're only saying this to cheer me up.  Don't think you're 
fooling anybody."  My scowl was three-quarters facetious and she knew it, 
her own smirk broadening in response.
	"You're not that hard to fool, brat."
	"Probably not," I agreed amiably, enormously cheered just by her 
presence.  I'd gotten over being mad at her for this whole mess shortly 
after we'd started training, when it became obvious to me that a.)  she 
hadn't had much choice in the matter to begin with and, b.)  was pretty 
dedicated to the idea of helping me through it as best she could.  It 
hadn't been Nathan MacLeod's idea to assign her to this little 
strikeforce, but her own, and I'd found an anonymous ScanCom video of the 
throw down she'd had with her boss over it.  The image of Elyena ripping 
His Highness a new one was one that kept me smiling for days let me 
assure you.  "What brings you here this fine and soggy morning?"
	"I have the last status reports on Dansyr and Turalev, and my evaluation 
of their last performance in the combat simulator."  She tossed the disk 
onto the breakfast table and settled down, punching her breakfast 
selection into the matter replicator control pad.  "As well as the flight 
manager's report on the Raptor's last shakedown flight."
	As I said earlier, the four of us--myself, Elyena, Dansyr, and Turalev 
Beigh--had been together for three weeks now, doing pretty much what I 
always did just before going into a major engagement  more or less blind: 
training.  Lots of training, of the red-hot intensive variety.  My first 
officer, Khasamar Seyt-Enkidu, had taught me that there are three 
constant tactical factors in every possible engagement: nothing will be 
exactly as your intelligence (and Intelligence) predicts it to be, a 
surprise attack will only be a surprise for as long as it takes for your 
target to see you, and there is no such thing as sufficient preparation.  
With those three things in mind, and with copious amounts of advise from 
Elyena as well, I began hammering us into a reasonably functional unit.
	I must admit, I had expected to be impressed by Elyena's dossier.  My 
expectations had in no way prepared me for the reality of precisely how 
impressive her professional career to date had been.  Elyena Demerath, as 
it turned out, was her real name--she had simply used such a wide variety 
of aliases before it that, once she finally lapsed back into it, no one 
connected any of her other identities together--not that there were very 
many living who could have.  Lifetime member of the Darkworlder 
Mercenary's Guild, the largest association of freelance spacers, soldiers 
of fortune, and unattached muscle for hire in Known Space.  Former 
commander of the DeathsHead Squadron, Darkworld's premier deep space 
combat unit, attached to their starfleet and made up primarily of  the 
Empire's naturalized citizens with military experience on other worlds.  
Former chief of security of StarCor's ill-fated Orion deep space 
outpost--lost through the structural instability of the station itself, 
and one of the handful of survivors from that particular vacuum disaster, 
following which that particular identity had retired from the public 
sector.  Things got sketchy in her resume then, references to border wars 
on the fringes of the Darkworld Empire, of colonial struggles in the 
Terran Confederacy, gun-running between the various factions in the 
on-going religious strife among the  Dy'killians.  She eventually took 
the job with NekroTech after what seemed to be a long stretch of bad 
luck--a ship and a partner shot out from under her by a roving band of 
vacuum raiders when her sole attempt at legitimate business in a while, 
asteroid prospecting, was claim-jumped.
	She was, in short, just about the best and most experienced person I 
could have wanted to have as my second in command on a risky deep space 
operation that could go sour at a moment's notice.  I knew it, she knew 
it, and we stopped talking about it almost instantly and just took it for 
what it was: a given.
	Turalev Beigh's list of credentials were only slightly less impressive 
than Elyena's own.  Like her, he was a combat veteran--the Dy'killians 
had been at war with each other for as long as their various races had 
possessed space-capable technology and the ability to argue about 
politics and religion, and their habit of settling their differences 
pyroclastically showed no visible signs of tapering off.  Into this 
situation, Turalev Beigh was born, of the warrior caste of the saurian 
Dy'killians and, true to the dictates of his culture (and the unenviable 
genetic quirk that made him born with bronze scales), he went into the 
Dy'killian military.  He worked his way up from the basic  "grunt" stage, 
through field actions too numerous to list here, and eventually into a 
slot in the Dy'killian Special Forces, specializing in space assault and 
planetary drop actions into enemy held territory.  He was one of 
Dy'kill's most highly decorated officers by the time of the accident that 
cost him his eye--while on patrol on the disputed border between the 
demesnes of the various warring Dy'killian Queen Mothers, his ship was 
struck by a gravmine that crippled its engines, life-support, and 
communications systems, killed half the ship's complement, and nearly its 
entire load of SubDec personnel, including most of Turalev's unit.  He 
survived, but there was nothing the doctors could do to save his eye or 
certain chunks of his brain except add chips to make up for what he lost 
in organic functions.  He was given one last medal and cashiered off to 
wherever the Dy'killians send their old soldiers to die, an option which 
didn't set well with him, so he promptly hied himself to Darkworld, 
joined the Mercenary Guild, and was hired by NekroTech as a security 
consultant by our own Elyena Demerath, with whom he had worked during a 
particularly hairy operation during his active service.
	After reading his dossier, I was firmly convinced that, had Elyena not 
hired Turalev when she did, he would have quickly pined away and died of 
the sheer boredom.  The one big problem with the Dy'killian warrior caste 
is this: their cultural condition is no more natural than the one the 
Network imposed on the Corellians all those years ago.  Back in the not 
so primordial past, say, less than five hundred years ago, Galactic 
Standard, the Dy'killians were a nice, pleasant, peace-loving race that 
enjoyed exactly three things: nice, hot weather, the occasional insect, 
and basking on rocks.  Unfortunately, at some point in there, they found 
religion, and that's when they went from the bunch that would 
occasionally greet the odd traveler that bumped into their planets with 
some nice reptile leather and an odd meal to their current state of 
social unrest.  A case of the bad habits of other races rubbing off on 
them, I guess, but once they assimilated the notions of mother-worship, 
racial consciousness, and class structure, they took them to the most 
unhealthy of possible extremes.  Females are venerated in Dy'killian 
society as the repository of all life--the Queen Mothers, females born 
with golden scaling and, sometimes, vestigial wings, are the highest 
caste, the ones closest to the Great Mother, from whose cosmic egg the 
Dy'killians see themselves as hatching.  Beneath them are the Consort 
caste--golden scaled males, sometimes with vestigial wings, who are the 
only ones allowed to mate with the Queen Mothers, and who occupy most of 
the positions of power in their various creche-cities and in the loose 
webwork of alliances that constitutes their planetary body politick.  
Beneath them, in descending order, are the Warrior (bronze scales), 
Artisan (blue scales), Merchant (green scales), and Worker (brown scales) 
castes--all of whom are expected to know their place in Dy'killian 
society and dealing with it whether they like it or not.  The entire 
concept of upward mobility, or, hell, even sideways mobility, eluded them 
as a species.  Of course, being a former member of a corporation that had 
roughly the same ideal when it came to their own little subcastes, I'm 
not really in a position to pass judgment about anybody else's 
culture--but still.  It made me wonder what the Dy'killians would do to 
each other if they ever managed to convince the Network that selling them 
something other than guns and ammo would turn a bigger profit.
	I have to admit, I opened Dansyr's dossier with the sort of trepidation 
I usually only get before I stick my hand down on a pressure plate that 
will either open a sealed hatch or unleash a few hundred rounds of 
armor-piercing autofire, depending on who I'm mixing it up with.  I 
didn't want to know more about her than I already did--I didn't want to 
know how she'd been made, or why, or what had gone into her construction. 
 It wasn't logical, it wasn't rational--but then, for the first couple 
days after I woke up, I had little enough of that going around, anyway.  
It was against my better judgment that I finally did it.
	Dansyr was, I admit, a piece of work on a rough parallel with myself.  
In order to create me, the Network had gone to the trouble and expense of 
kidnaping Jordan Odessa, then the top man on the totem pole at 
Darkworld's highly elite Internal Affairs CovertOps Division, extracting 
his genetic material, and tinkering with it until the genetic 
recombination finally produced the traits they wanted, slapped it into 
the ex vitro gestation environment, and cooked up me.  The cybernetic 
bits were added later to further fine tune a body that was as close to 
flawless as genetic drift would allow and to amp a psionic brain that was 
already climbing towards the high end of the Herbert Psi Scale.  In order 
to produce Dansyr, the GenTech division was given leave to tinker with no 
less than ten generations of Corellian genetic material, splicing and 
recombining and chromosome pairing and allele matching, until they 
produced, literally, the perfect example of her race.  She was not only 
fully telempathic, but she possessed complete control of her pheromone 
production and nearly complete control of her own central nervous system. 
 They then handed her over to Cybernetics, who used their next generation 
of cybernetic wetware to further hardwire her brain and body, giving her 
strength, stamina, reaction time, and mental capacity to match anything 
they had on their combat cyborg line, only without all the bulky, 
occasionally very ugly hydraulic limb replacement that plagues those of 
us of early cybernetic generations.
	I knew from the minute I started reading that she, unlike I, was not 
meant to be a production model.  I had cost the Network a pretty penny in 
resources and materiel--but I was also the experimental unit, the first 
of the line, and subsequent generations of the Manslaughter-class 
psionic-capable cybernetic organism had improved on my original design.  
Dansyr, on the other hand, was a work of art, a one-of-a-kind custom 
piece, made specifically for one owner, never to be duplicated.   
Obviously, that owner was Nathan MacLeod, and when I read the summary of 
her career to date, I understood what he had wanted her for, and why.
	Pleasure unit and assassin.
	It figured.
	My only remaining question was: why send her on a mission this 
hazardous?  Particularly when he had already hired, in his words, one of 
the most resourceful and capable assassins currently active in Known 
Space?  I didn't know.  I didn't want to ask MacLeod, primarily because I 
knew I wouldn't get a real answer.  And I didn't want to ask Dansyr, 
because, again, that would take me places I didn't want to go just then.  
I filed it away for future reference, and got on with the business of 
making it all work, dubious motives to the contrary, simply because I 
couldn't do anything else.  	From the start, Dansyr and Turalev fought 
like they had been made to fight together--I actually went back and 
checked both of their files to make certain they hadn't been made that 
way.  Turalev's style was as subtle as a particle beam in the teeth--he 
could take, and dish out, tremendous  punishment, and did so on a regular 
basis both in the simulator and in active training against the  security 
forces we had on loan from NekroTech.  Dansyr was more subtle, in each 
and every way, her style complementing Turalev's gleeful hack and slash 
and blast and blow-up way of handling nearly every combat situation that 
came at him.  He proved to be the sort of ideal distraction that allowed 
both Dansyr and myself to get in close and hit just about any target, 
while Elyena's expertise in extraction got us all away safely time and 
time again.  Before too long, I found myself falling into the patterns 
that had been etched into me by two full lifetimes of knowledge and 
experience: even if you don't like the person at your back you trust 
them, and they trust you, and together you accomplish what one of you 
couldn't handle alone.  It worried me--I worried me, I could feel myself 
sliding back into it all, and I tried telling myself it was just for this 
one mission, to get that little boy back, and then I could let it all go.
	Liar, a little voice in the back of my head whispered, every time I said 
that to myself.  Eventually I managed to ignore that one too.
	Elyena turned out to be an even worse slave-driver than Hitman ever was, 
and between her and the simulator programs I wrote, I felt reasonably 
confident that the four of us would, in theory anyway, be ready to face 
just about anything that we found on the Majestix floating fortress.  The 
look on Dansyr's face the first time she saw a battalion of Devastator 
and Annihilator-class warmecha and a unit of Huntre-class mechawarrior 
shock-troopers coming at her was a sight to behold, let me assure you.
	"How did they do?"  I set down the colored pencil I was fiddling with, 
glaring at the sketch taking form next to Hunter's face--another redhead, 
and I couldn't decide if it was the woman from my dream, or Dansyr.
	"They've brought the kill quota on the Huntre scenario up to 99% 
percent, and at least the Annihilators aren't killing them as quickly as 
they used to."  Elyena's tone was dry.  "But, as you know, simulation can 
be deceiving.  Ultimately, we won't have any idea how they'll really do 
until we're live in the field, smelling the plasma burn and the spilling 
coolant."
	"I know."  I had a bad feeling deep in my guts that no amount of 
jollying around could shake--I hadn't believed that the Huntre units 
could be that bad until one nearly tore my face off, either, and I could 
tell from the way Dansyr carried herself that she probably wouldn't 
either.  "And the Raptor?"
	The Raptor was the transportation that I had requested for this little 
jaunt--a warp-capable, fully stealth-moded extremely light destroyer 
built by the Darkworld shipyards for lightning-quick strikes and equally 
quick withdrawals.  Heavily armored and highly overpowered, it was 
currently out of favor with the brass of the Darkworlder starfleet due to 
its unfortunate habit of losing its warp core with a single direct hit to 
the engines, and the subsequent detonation of the weapons stockpile.  It 
was a problem easily solved provided you were willing to rebuild the 
engines somewhat, which is what I had had the techies assigned to us 
working on for the last three weeks.
	"The new engine assembly passed the last stress-tests, as did the 
airframe and power shunts--they say they're reading green lights across 
their board, in simulation and on live tests."  She dropped another disk 
on top of the first and took her breakfast out of the replicator.
	I slotted the disks and glanced at the screen, scrolling up slowly and 
scanning them into my own data network.  She was right.
	We were ready.
	"We leave in three days."