An Alien Entanglement Pt. 01

Gemini maintained her air of confidence notwithstanding the earful Ashe had just given her. "Do I look like an idiot to you? Of course we've accounted for all that. I can assure you that our plan to acquire our target is perfect! They will never even know we were there," she reassured Ashe.

"Yeah? Then show me," Ashe taunted. "I'll be the judge of that." Ashe had struck another nerve with Gemini.

Gemini relented once again and revealed her "master plan" to Ashe. For the next few minutes Ashe listened to Gemini babble about her plan. It involved a lot of sneaking around, which suited Ashe's skill set perfectly. Crucially, it involved jamming Coalition tech, but Gemini assured Ashe that her team included the perfect netrunner for the job. And the time they had selected to steal the goods seemed well thought out. The day of the heist fell on the national holiday celebrating the end of the Centaurus War, practically guaranteeing that security personnel would be dispersed all over the city to cover the celebrating crowds. Any Quick Reaction Force would be delayed in assembling and responding to any specific threat.

Ashe could admit that Gemini's plan appeared to be very well constructed, at least on superficial review. But the escape plan struck Ashe as kinda sketchy. It was overly dependent on this one "perfect" netrunner watching their backs, and on the getaway driver being in the right place with impeccable timing. If either of those critical elements fell through, everything else would fall apart.

"This plan might work," Ashe admitted. "But that exit plan of yours. You're just asking to get caught." Gemini looked vexed at Ashe's criticisms.

"Then why don't you enlighten me with your vast knowledge," Gemini said, with a tinge of sarcasm. A smile appeared on Ashe's face as she saw an opportunity to insert herself into the heart of the heist.

"I could..." Ashe trailed off. Gemini raised her brow. "But first you'd have to let me into this job." Gemini looked baffled at this proposition. But considering how much of the plan she had already revealed to Ashe, there really wasn't much downside to including her all the way.

"Fine, you're in," Gemini growled, finally relenting. Ashe smiled happily, trying to hold back her girlish excitement. "But on one condition. You're gonna get the smallest piece of the cut. It's only fair since I'm adding you in so late in the planning." Ashe nodded her head in agreement. She was more interested in the potential thrill than in the money, anyway.

Ashe used her tac pad to link to the hologram, swiftly making edits to the image of the facility. She pointed out various points of entry and exit they could use, but also cataloged the relative risks of each of the routes. The original escape plan Gemini had was certainly the quickest but, as Ashe succinctly delineated, it was also the most dangerous. So Ashe suggested that she would create a plan B as a fallback if anything went wrong. And something invariably went wrong: it was like a law of the galaxy, which had to always be taken into account.

Now Ashe took a mental step back, scanning the holographic image of the facility from a more holistic perspective. As she reviewed the image afresh, her eyes widened as she noted a small drainage line sited at the very bottom of the facility: it must be drainage for the water they used to cool their servers. Pointing it out to Gemini, she asked, "Do you know whether this drain connects to any of the city's sewer systems?" Gemini shrugged. Her plan hadn't required any familiarity with the sewers.

Checking back through all the data Gemini had gathered on the facility's security, Ashe concluded that the drainage line at the very base of the facility - furthest from all the obvious entrances and exits - was the least guarded area and might well represent their safest route out. The only problem was that Ashe didn't yet have any way of knowing whether the drain line actually linked up with the main city sewage system. The hologram failed to confirm any such linkage, but that could well be because the sewer lines ran through city property and were recorded in a different database than the Coalition's data farm. Looking through her tac pad, Ashe switched databases so she could skim through the blueprints of the sewage systems adjacent to the data farm. Her search turned up one particular network of lines that ran tantalizingly close to the target facility, but again no explicit connection was revealed. Possibly for the same reason in reverse: the coolant water drain line wasn't actually for waste disposal and it was buried in the minutia of the blueprints for the datafarm in the Coalition's separate jurisdiction. A connection of some kind almost had to be there: the coolant water had to drain somewhere. But where? Ashe sighed. The only way to find out for sure was to go see for herself.

Putting on her helmet, Ashe said, "I'm going to scout ahead if you don't mind. I need to find out if that drainage pipe could be our ticket out of there." Gemini nodded reluctantly, but deep down she had already accepted that Ashe, with her attention to seemingly irrelevant details and her out-of-the-box approach, had already wormed her way into the very crux of the plan.

"Alright, I'll be back," Ashe advised Gemini with nonchalant authority, already exiting the room.

Walking back into the bar she waved farewell to the tentacle armed bartender and then shoved her way out the front door of The Afterlife...

-

Nibbling on a ration bar in the corner of the alley outside of the bar, Glux's beady little eyes widened to see his walking fantasy emerge from the bar he had never once been allowed to enter. His eyes tracked up the tight black suit the sexy bounty hunter wore beneath her ebony armor bearing the distinctive cobalt flashes. Glux unconsciously stroked his beer gut with his second pair of forearms, an instinctive arousal response of his species. Sitting up, he skirted over behind a dumpster to get a closer look at the object of his obsession.

Ever since he had spotted this female bounty hunter in his wanderings about the city, he had fixated on her, finally following her to this alleyway. No matter where else her own treks through the city seemed to take her, Glux had determined that her route would invariably bring her back to this one location.

In his attempt to get a closer view, Glux accidentally knocked over a discarded can, which made an audible crackling sound. Like a hawk tracking its prey, the sexy human's head immediately zeroed in on the disturbance. Luckily for Glux, he managed to flinch back out of her view just in time. Lifting his floppy ears to extend his auditory senses, he listened closely. Hearing her footsteps fade away down the alley, the four-armed alien heaved a quiet sigh of relief.

Glux's vigil outside The Afterlife had once again been rewarded by the sight of the human female's sexy body, but it had been several days since her last appearance here. Days that had been torturous for Glux. Days that had seemed like weeks of subjective time. He had been left hungering for more time in her presence! Throwing his dirty cloak around him, he cautiously stalked out of the alleyway on the track of his maiden in black armor.

Poking his long snouted head cautiously around the corner of the alley, he urgently scanned the bustling crowd, afraid he might have already lost her. He relaxed momentarily as he spotted her familiar black tinted helmet amidst the crowd of bustling heads and hastily maneuvered after her through the mass of bodies. As he surreptitiously snaked his way through the pedestrian throng, he clutched his cloak around him, carefully concealing his unpleasant form.

Trying to keep his head down, Glux continued slithering through the crowd, but with growing concern as the black helmet drifted further and further away from his vision. So focused was he on catching up with her that he failed to monitor his immediate surroundings and bumped right into someone.

Glux tumbled on his ass, then looked up only to see that he hadn't just bumbled into any passing pedestrian; instead he had managed to get himself knocked down by a Coalition Peacekeeper. His two hearts stuttered in fear as he took in the soldier, who was intimidatingly clad in gray armor and adorned with an assortment of ammo pouches and sundry other weapons. The Peacekeeper's glowing blue visor was directed at Glux's hooded cloak. "Watch where you're going, citizen!" the soldier jibed in irritation.

"Sor- sorry, sir," Glux croaked, submissively.

The Peacekeeper shook his head and stepped over Glux like he was nothing more than a discarded wad of chewy edible, continuing his patrol of the city. Glux shrugged off this minor occurrence and resumed his tracking of his prize. Failing to find her black helmet anywhere within his sight, he panicked and rushed in the general direction of where she had gone.

After anxious minutes of wandering and searching, Glux was on the verge of giving up. But just as he was turning back, he caught a glimpse of the distinctive blue flashes on her black armor out of a corner of one of his beady eyes. He jerked his head around in her direction in time to see that she was exiting the landing pad station and was striding off to some other destination. He was elated to relocate her.

Not wanting to lose her again, Glux rushed to get closer, but he was conflicted by his need to also maintain a safe enough distance not to get picked up by her keen bounty hunter senses. As he kept following her around, Glux tried to figure out where she could be heading next. As they moved deeper into the city depths, Glux observed that Ashe was constantly checking a pad on her forearm, as if she was using it to navigate to some unfamiliar locale.

Glux maneuvered and skipped between various dumpsters and structures as he stalked her. There were a few close calls when she might have spotted him, but he managed to elude detection every time. He had to hide once again as the bounty hunter stopped at an intersection of corridors. Glux stuck his head out from behind an infrastructure support column just in time to see her look up from her wrist mounted nav-pad, if that's what it was. Double checking her surroundings, she then took a hurried left into one of the corridors.

"Where is she going?" Glux asked himself.

Still stalking carefully along behind her, Glux realized that she was heading into one of the portals to the city's sewer systems, territory he was highly familiar with. Walking down a series of stairs and ramps, the bounty hunter and her elusive stalker eventually found themselves at a gaping entrance to a drainage tunnel.

Scanning her surroundings one more time, the bounty hunter turned on her helmet's headlamp and strode on into the darkness. Glux rubbed his belly with his second pair of arms again, licked his lips with his long tongue, and followed her in... The friendly darkness of the sewer tunnels could provide Glux with a distinct advantage over his prey.

-

Ashe had been following her tac pad for almost an hour now and was growing increasingly annoyed. She had gone past where the blueprints ended near the facility, and now she was just trying to map out these unknown tunnels. "Ugh, where the heck is this place? It should be right here!" Ashe exclaimed in frustration.

Then, hearing a slight crackling sound, Ashe drew her pistol and spun her head in the direction of the sudden noise. Throughout her exploration of the sewer tunnels, she'd had the vague sense that someone had been following her. Part of that uneasy feeling was due to being so far from help in the depths of the sewer systems below the city. But Ashe was very capable, so she was more curious than fearful about who or what might be down here with her.

Cautiously taking a few steps towards the origin of the noise, she was fully prepared to flatline whatever caused the sudden commotion. At the edge of the illumination provided by her helmet lamp, Ashe's eyes widened as she saw that the noise had been produced by nothing more than a little Skitter: an alien analogue of a garbage-scavenging rat.

"Stupid Skitters," Ashe muttered, deciding not to holster her weapon on the off chance that the Skitter wasn't the only other inhabitant of the sewer tunnels..

After another couple hours of fruitless searching, Ashe's tac pad started to flicker on and off. "What?! No no no, not now!" she shouted, tapping the screen with the muzzle of her pistol. Then the screen went black. Ashe sighed in frustration and nervousness: she was utterly reliant on her tac pad to lead her back out of this complicated sewer system. Only moments later, her headlamp started to dim as well and a certain degree of panic began to set in.

"Shit shit shit!" Ashe exclaimed. "I could have sworn that these were fully charged!" Normally, Ashe's visor was equipped with night vision, but it had broken during one of her most recent missions and she hadn't had time to get the custom gear back to its specialty supplier for a fix.

She then lost all illumination from her helmet as the built-in lamp died completely. "Ugh, dammit!" Ashe shouted, her voice echoing through the empty tunnels of the sewers. Ashe grumbled with anger as she fumbled with her utility belt, searching for anything she could use to light up the darkness. After what was probably only seconds but that felt like hours, her desperately searching fingers located an object deep inside a utility pouch where she stored her emergency glow sticks. But unfortunately there was only one. Ashe wrote herself an angry mental memo about checking her illumination and navigation systems much more thoroughly in the future. She wasn't on her own most of the time in deep space, but that was no reason for carelessness with her survival gear.

"Well, better make this last," Ashe sighed, and snapped the glow stick to activate it. Ashe's pupils shrank within their green settings and then dilated again to take in every sliver of the light emitted by the glow stick.

Ashe ran her hand along the sewer wall as she searched for a way out. The glow stick provided her with vision, but sight alone wasn't sufficient to retrace her path. And, as time ticked by, her sole source of the green-tinged illumination slowly began to dim.

"There has to be a service ladder around here somewhere," Ashe muttered. Despite her every effort to suppress it, her panic was once again growing at the thought of getting trapped deep in the dark labyrinth of the sewers.

-

Glux had been assiduously trailing the sexy bounty hunter for this entire time. Under cover of the shadows pervading the unlit sewers, he had been able to reduce his following distance to the bare minimum. But he had yet another close call when he tripped on something, causing the black armored bounty hunter to clear her holster with her weapon. Glux had been shocked at the speed with which the bounty hunter had brought her gun into play. Even after she had apparently attributed the disturbance to the fortuitous presence of one of the ubiquitous Skitters, Ashe had remained at a higher state of alert.

But now her tac pad and her helmet's light had both malfunctioned. With her visibility even more impaired and her ability to navigate the sewer effectively shot, Glux took advantage of the opportunity to sneak even closer to her. Fortunately, his species was adapted for movement in the dark. Easing closely up behind her, his eyes could wander without risk up her long legs and onto those portions of her curvaceous ass that weren't hidden under the plates of her armor. What wouldn't Glux give to see all of her beneath that pesky covering. He rubbed his belly even harder and licked his lips. Glux's procreative organ began to swell the front of his tattered trousers.

After the bounty hunter wasted several more minutes of the life of her emergency glow stick aimlessly stumbling around in the sewer systems, Glux concluded that she was hopelessly lost. In the meantime, had been thoroughly enjoying his unprecedented proximity to the desirable human female who formed the object of his overwhelming obsession. His trousers were practically tented and he was drooling with hunger and desire. He was ever so tempted to just pounce on her and take what was his by all the laws of interspecies lust. They were alone together, deep in the sewers where no one would find them and far from any help from the authorities. Glux dabbled with the idea of getting the jump on her and seizing control of her body. But she still had her weapon drawn, and who knows what other dangerous gadgets she might have tucked away in her armor.

But a powerful intuition, combined with detailed knowledge of his target, persuaded Glux to constrain his lust. Weeks of observing his female heroine had taught him that the bounty hunter was exceptionally capable of extricating herself from the most threatening of circumstances. While familiarizing himself with Ashe from his observation post outside of The Afterlife, Glux had repeatedly witnessed her as she kicked the asses of groups of gang members or violently discouraged rival bounty hunters. Perhaps to avoid unwanted attention from the authorities, or just to flaunt her superiority, she rarely resorted to the use of her weapons. Glux had four arms, a maneuverable tail, and was quite strong for his shorter stature, but he had virtually no combat skills. It would be a death sentence if he tried to take the bounty hunter on physically, and failed. Nor did he want to damage her beauty or impair her sensual responses if he could figure out any means other than violence to convince her to yield to his lust. Bearing all this in mind, Glux decided to take a more cautious approach to getting what he wanted.

It was as he was pondering potential indirect courses to his desires that an idea popped into Glux's head. He could turn Ashe's current state of disorientation to his advantage. What he had in store entailed risk, but it was not nearly as sketchy as his earlier idea of just pouncing on her. Taking a deep breath, Glux made his approach.

-

Hearing the sound of footsteps coming behind her, Ashe quickly turned around, directing the light cast by her fast-faltering glow stick at the potential threat. Her eyes widened as she took in the sight of a short, stubby, four-armed alien.

"AHHHHH, WHAT THE FUCK?!" Ashe screamed in surprise, dropping the glow stick. She was forced to blindly fire her pistol at the gross looking alien by the even more reduced illumination. Her muzzle flash momentarily lit the pitch black sewer tunnel like a stroke of lightning. The loud banging of the gun and the sounds of trickling bullet casings echoed and vibrated in the close confines of the tunnels.

"AAUUGHH, DON'T SHOOT ME!" the alien pleaded, diving for the tunnel floor as the stream of bullets sliced the darkness mere millimeters above his flapping ears.

Regaining her footing and catching sight of the sprawled figure of the lurking thing at the very edge of the glow stick's sputtering light, Ashe quickly laid the sights of her pistol directly over the centerpoint between its beady eyes. "Wh- what do you want! Get away from me, you freak!" She was very unsettled at being suddenly set upon by this weird alien deep under the sewers.

"Glux mean you no harm!" the alien explained, burying his head behind all four of his arms. Ashe remained on guard, despite the alien's claimed innocuousness.

"Back away from me or I swear to god I will paint your brains all over the sewer walls," Ashe ordered. The alien obediently slithered still further from her.

Now that the ugly alien was at a safer distance, Ashe slowly began to relax. "What the hell are you and what do you want from me?" she cautiously asked.

"What? Never seen an Ulgoid before?" the stranger humorously asked. Ashe didn't even chuckle, she was too fixated on this weird looking being before her. "Er- Glux is this one's name," he said, again essaying a friendly greeting as he climbed slowly and carefully back to his feet.