Authors: Max Feinstein
Rewinding the video once more, Xander zoomed in almost entirely on Elfonso and watched in slow motion as the man walked through the street. It was then that Xander witnessed the victims face tense up and his eyes
open wide and look in the direction of one of the approaching figures. Xander had seen that look before, it was surprise and recognition mixed with fear. Elfonso had recognized at least one of his murders. It was also from his point that his hand began to lift to what initially had seemed like his chest, but now under closer inspection could be seen as his neck. There, below his neck, hung an oddly shaped pendent on a thin necklace and it was this pendent that Elfonso clinched in his hand as the two assassins bumped into him. Not only was he holding the necklace ornament, but as Xander zoomed in even further he could see that Elfonso was turning it towards the direction of the approaching person, following him or her the entire time.
The realization of what had just transpired in the video hit Xander like a lightning bolt. He jolted back into his seat and looked up at the tiled ceiling with a grin on his face as he ran his hands through his thick hair. Everything rested with that necklace and that meant he could have to get his hands on it before anyone else.
The 450 meter ship hung motionless in the darkness of space between two distant star systems. In all respects the ship seemed to be floating dead in space, but appearances were so often deceiving, as was the case at this moment. Within the ship a fury of activity was still underway in preparation for another mission. Men and women ran to various storage rooms and armories stationed throughout the ship to collect their designated deployment gear before finally loading into six separate shuttle craft. Other crew personnel rushed towards the ship’s hanger to prepare a squadron of
Kaji
class fighters for launch. As the fighters were readied, a group of pilots emerged from a side hatch and proceeded to jog towards their individual craft. Each pilot did a once over of their ship before climbing into their respective cockpits. These lowered cockpits quickly rose off the armored hanger deck and retracted back into the bottom of the
Kaji.
“Sir, all stations report ready. Waiting on your order to launch
,” reported Srita Solvitali, the ship’s Executive Office and this mission’s second in command.
A sole man st
ood at the front of the bridge and acknowledged the report with a simple nod of his head. At over two meters tall and a rather muscular build Captain Damian Deisthauf was an imposing site by anyone’s standard. His short haircut and well groomed face was a testament to his lifelong service in the military, having been permanently instilled into him. He was also a man that partook in certain habits, what others might call superstitions, one of which was wearing a particular uniform during all of his raids. That uniform consisted of a black shirt with a light brown sleeveless leather jacket over it and a pair of dark pants. It was the type of outfit the military would have never approved of when on duty, which was part of the reason why he enjoyed it so much.
The Captain
stood there almost completely motionless with hands crossed behind his back while gazing out at the blackness just beyond the forward viewport. Anyone else would have instead taken in the beautiful view of the thousands of shimmering stars all around them and tried to find the single one they called home, but Captain Deisthauf was not just anyone. Unlike most of those normal people, Damian had never really had a planet to call home, nor did he want one. Since he could remember he had always preferred the vast expense of space to the confines of a planetary home. Damian always wondered if perhaps his feelings were the result of having been given birth to in space, instead of an actual colony world.
In fact it was this birth among the stars that had driven him to this profession, even if others would not call it so, and ha
d almost entirely consumed him with hatred all those years ago. It had taken much time, but Damian had finally learned to accept who he was and how he had come to be. Even so there would never be any forgiveness for those that had produced him into this galaxy and surrounded him in a web of deception.
Produced was actually
the most accurate term in his mind to describe the circumstances that culminated in his birth. Forty-eight years ago Damian, or D5 as they had coded him, had been extracted from a birthing chamber onboard the RSX-17 research station. Unbeknownst to most citizens of the UPF, the station had been part of a black program known as Project Eve to create genetically altered and enhanced human beings. Even though such programs had been outlawed within the borders of the Federation, the Premier of the time had secretly sanctioned the program. Like everyone within the human territories, he had probably been caught up in the state of panic which ensured after the attacks on Federation outposts within Uncharted Sector Six.
Damian later found out that fourteen other clones had been birthed from the same batch at him, with
Srita being one of them. From the time of their extraction each one of their lives had been controlled by the overseers on the station. They were all split up and placed with assigned families living on RSX-17 and nurtured according to each child’s imprinted abilities. Some children had been designed as perfect soldiers, while others were breed for command leadership or, like Damian, for covert operations such as intelligence gathering and interpretation. As such, from an early age, he had been subjected to specialized classes designed to hone those very genetic attributes.
It wasn’t until he and his family
had moved to an actual Federation Naval Station, under the guise of a transfer, that he started to suspect that something was different about him. His gifts of intelligence and situational awareness were not just limited to what the military wanted of him, but also allowed Damian to view the world around him from a different, more analytic, perspective. It quickly became apparent to the boy that his life was different from the rest of the children on the military station. The difference was not only in academic excellence and advancement, but also in the interaction of the other children with their families. This confirmed that there was something missing between himself and his parents. That was something, he quickly figured out, was the element of love. It was true that his parents provided him with everything he needed to survive, as well as a certain aspect of guidance, but there was no true expression of love, like that between a mother and father and son.
This realization confirmed Damian’s constant feeling that his parents were simply going through the motions of raising him, almost like it was their job. Watching the other children constant get love and affection from their families slowly drove the young Damian to resentment and rebellion. In an effort to get
at least some semblance of attention he started to act out in school and pick fights with the other kids. His parents had never been prepared to deal with such things and as such were happy when the time came for Damian to enroll in a youth military academy.
At the academy Damian actually found individuals similar to himself. Most came from difficult upbringings in which little or no love had been shared among members of the same family. Like him they had
all been sent away as if they had been the problem, when such couldn’t be further from the truth. Their similarities made for almost immediate strong attachments and it was during this time that Damian created his group of lifelong friends. Friends that stuck together no matter what and made the years at school that much more bearable. Even to this very day he still managed to keep in touch with many of them, some of whom had actually joined his organization upon his departure from the navy.
Though the academy proved to hold many hardships for him as a youth, it was also the best thing to ever happen to him. It was the only thing his
guardians had done right by him. In this place adults actually cared about him. All of his instructors were tough, but always fair, pushing him constantly in order to make him better and tougher, mentally as well as physically. Damian relished the challenges and opportunities presented to him. As in previous classes, he surpassed every student in almost all courses. Everything seemed to come naturally to him and as always intended he was placed into a program that helped develop intelligence officers for the Federation Naval Intelligence Corps.
This was also the time he received word that his parents had perished in some sort of accident while in transit to a new assignment. For reasons unknown, Damian had no real reaction to the news. It was almost as if he had been told that total strangers had died. This revelation further reinforced his feelings that his mother and father were not really his true parents. Years later, however, he discovered that those two had not really perished. It had simply been another fabrication by the research company after their contract had been canceled by the government,
allowing them to sever their connection to Damian.
It wasn’t until three years amazing years later, the best ones of his youth, that Damian was able to confirm the feelings he always had about his parents. He was conducting an assignment for one of his classes in which the objective was to properly analyze a specific genetic sample. Upon finishing early, like always, Damian decided to play around with the analyzer and subjected a sample of DNA from his own body to the machine. It quickly located him within the database and showed his parents’ names within the file. When he went to actually compare the genetic sequences to see which parts of him came from each parent the system responded with an error. It indicated that neither of their two samples compared to the one he had personally submitted. This meant that there was no way they could have been his biological parents.
Perplexed at this sudden realization, Damian cautiously asked the system to
search the military database for any matches to his genetic sequence. It took a while for the system to comb through the massive Federation Citizen Registry, but it finally spat out a single file. He was completely thrown aback as the file flashed on the screen with a big red
Classified
flag on it. At this time the entire search was automatically terminated with Damian being forcibly ejected from the Registry.
This was the moment that his journey to the here and now
had begun. Damian’s tireless search for the truth of his existence took many years in the making and finally culminated with his desertion from the Federation as a whole. He had been on an intel gathering mission as an operative for Naval Intelligence when his discovered the final piece of information in his quest. With the story of what happened on RSX-17 fully unraveled, Damian’s disdain for the Federation grew into a crescendo. That same day he slipped off into the night and off the Federation’s radar, forever to be branded as a deserter.
A sharp edged shape streak
ed across the viewport and caused Damian to cease his reminiscence of the past. Five more Vulture class assault shuttles immediately followed this first one and began to spread out into a line formation as they accelerated away from their mothership. Damian looked on with honor at the quickly disappearing craft in the viewport. This feeling stemmed from the fact that their design had been acquired through a heroic defection by Artis Stemco, one of the lead designers for Baneridge Dynamics. Artis, like most of the other Phoenix Legion members, believed in what the group stood for and acknowledged that its fight against the Federation government was part of a just cause. In order to help his new family he staged the faking of his own death, but not before compiling a large collection of research data from the company of his employment. Among that data were the plans for a number of prototype designs the defense contractor had been working on at the time, including ships and weapons systems.
One of those designs had been modified into the Vulture, while another had produced the
Kaji class heavy fighter, one of which sped past the viewport right after the last of the shuttles disappeared into the distance. Unlike other fighters, this one was designed to be heavily armed and armored in order to survive encounters with outnumbering enemy forces. What it lacked in acceleration and maneuverability, it more than made up for in its ability to absorb and dish out punishment. These abilities were necessary to a small organization like the Legion, since any such loss would be difficult to replace.
“Vultures and Lark squadron away. T minus twenty seconds until reversion
,” came the soft voice of Srita from behind him just as the rest of the Lark squadrons ten Kajis accelerated to catch up with the assault shuttles already underway.
Damian tried not to smile as his eyes traveled up to the glowing holographic clock projected within the forward viewport. As the blue numbers counted down to zero
he couldn’t help but notice the distant reflection of his second in command, standing hunched over behind a data console. His entire world paused and everything was right for just a split second as he studied her determined face, framed beautifully by a cascade of shoulder length maroon colored hair. It was the same feeling he had each time he looked at her. A feeling he could never control, no matter how hard he tried. Just looking at her made all of his problems dissolve and allowed him a quiet respite from the conflict raging within himself, even if for just a moment.
She must have felt his eyes lingering on her for a little longer than intended because her own bright green ones adjusted from their downward gaze to look in Damian’s direction. His heart instantly skipped a beat as
Srita’s piercing eyes connected with his and he quickly looked away back out the viewport, into the dark space outside. In that quick second, however, Damian was able to witness something he had not as of yet seen in the woman. The slight expression of a smirk was the closest thing to a smile he had seen from Srita since his rescue of her from a Federation Fugitive Retrieval Team almost two years prior.
It caught him off guard and he allowed himself another tiny smile, but this was not to time to explore the meaning of what had just transpir
ed. The timer projected within the transparent viewport finally hit zero and began to flash rapidly. At the very same time a number of wireframe images began to appear within the transparent composite material along with data on their estimated size and distance. These rudimentary formed images were in the shapes of freighters Damian could easily identify without the computer’s assistance, through his vastly acquired knowledge of past and current ship designs.