Centauri Ch. 03

"There's a med-kit in my backpack. Hang on," he said.

With a determined effort to fight through the pain, he removed the backpack strap from his injured left shoulder, being forced to lift his arm to some degree, which caused hot jets of agony to shoot from his arm to his brain. He'd been shot before, but it wasn't exactly like shrugging off a punch or even the cut of a blade. His entire arm throbbed and even the slightest motion of his arm pushed the bullet into his clavicle. It took some care not to bite his tongue in response to the pain.

Once he had the pack off, he rummaged inside of it for a few moments, and produced a small red box with a white "+" symbol on it. Opening the box, he pulled out a hypodermic needle and syringe, and a small glass vial filled with a clear liquid.

"Here," he said, passing the first-aid supplies to Michelle. "Use this first for the pain."

She took the medicine from him gratefully and used her teeth to remove the protective cover from the needle, then pierced the top of the vial and sucked up enough liquid to fill the syringe. Without hesitation she jabbed it into her thigh just above the wound, injecting about half of the medicine, then removed it and stuck it into Darius' arm to inject the rest. Immediately he felt the pain in his arm dulling, and he became slightly light headed.

"Did the bullet pass through your leg?" his voice waivered slightly.

"Yea it feels like it. What about you?"

"It's still in there -- I can feel it pressing against my bone. We'll have to remove it once we've stopped. For now let's just get the bleeding stemmed. Here's a clot-packet."

He passed her a thin square shaped sheet of spongy green material wrapped in clear plastic. After tearing it open, she began to squeeze and crumple the material in one hand, which caused it to warm slightly and become more malleable, like a piece of clay. She placed the greenish substance on her right thigh over the injury, spreading it out to completely cover the gash, and held it in place for several moments. As she pushed it onto the torn skin and muscle, she felt a tinge of pain that would have been much sharper if not for the numbing agent pumping through her veins. Eventually, the clotting material adhered to her leg on its own, and the blood seeping out of the wound stopped. In a few more seconds, the greenish blob would catalyze her blood into coagulation and help form the blood platelets needed to seal the wound, as well as keep it disinfected.

Looking up, she saw that Darius had torn open a clot-packet of his own, and was applying it to his injury. She also noticed some blood oozing down the side of his neck.

"Your head, Darius," she said with more than a note of concern.

"It's my ear. Not sure how that one missed the mark -- the universe must still want me alive for something," he surmised.

Tearing off a small piece of the clotting material from his shoulder, he placed it on his ear. The green stuff seemed to mold itself onto the jagged tare along his cartilage, and the bleeding rapidly stopped.

"Well I guess that is that. We'll deal with the rest later," breathed Darius, finally allowing himself a sigh of relief. "Where is this thing taking us, do you think? To Strafe?"

"Yes, probably. There's an underground facility on the outskirts of the city -- I'm sure that is where it is taking us. We should be there in a few minutes." She relaxed her head on the headrest behind her, and pulled her good leg up beside her on the seat, bent at the knee, making a partial fetal position. "We were pretty stupid back there, you know. Or at least I was..."

"What do you mean?" he asked as he tried to find a comfortable position for himself. She was sitting on his left, so he could not quite turn comfortably on his wounded shoulder to look at her as she spoke. Finally he settled on turning 90 degrees counter-clockwise and lean his back against the door of the fly-car, cradling his left arm with his right, and was able to face Michelle.

"I got so caught up in the moment of finally being with you again, I forgot that removing the neural inhibitor would attract the Bureau's attention. We should have been out of there long before they ever got there. We should have left the moment I removed it." She sighed, feeling a pang of guilt, and Darius noticed some wetness developing in her crisp emerald eyes. She was a strong woman, so Darius knew she must be feeling something intense right then.

Indeed she was.

The past hour played itself out in her head, and she couldn't help but feel an upwelling of guilt. While she was busy playing with Darius and giving herself sexual pleasure, the Bureau was scrambling men with the utmost speed in order to detain or kill them. Her blind lust for giving the man she loved pleasure was also the same blindness that almost ended both their lives It was the same kind of feeling you get when you have made a terrible mistake, with the potential to affect not only yourself but others too, and fortunately someone else bails you without any harm being done. Everything turns out just fine. And no matter how you think about it, no matter who you try to put it in the best light, you know you are at fault; that it could just have easily worked out the other way, and you can't help but feel an overwhelming sense of failure. That is the feeling Michelle was experiencing at that exact moment.

"Hey," Darius said, and nudged her arm gently with the toe of his boot, "Don't worry 'bout that, ok? It's not your fault. If anything it's my fault. I'm the one who got all hot and huffy after I remembered you and threw myself onto you like a drunken teenage boy on a prom date. Besides, you wouldn't have been able to get a word in edge wise with my tongue and cock all down your throat. So ease up, ok? We made it out alive, you know?"

"Yea right," she scoffed. "You nearly got a bullet through your head, and if I hadn't landed like I did with my leg flying all about, I probably would have been hit in the chest and we wouldn't be having this conversation right now." She paused and wiped the moisture away from her eyes with a blood stained hand.

Darius watched her silently.

"Whatever," she continued. "It doesn't matter. When we make it to Cnidus, everything will be better."

"Cnidus?" Darius inquired curiously.

"That is the name of Stafe's underground facility. It's nothing flashy, but it will be safe." Her voice trailed off. She felt as if her strength had been sapped by the blood loss, or more likely just by everything that had transpired in the past couple of hours. But fighting through the pain, she moved herself closer to Darius, scooting on the smooth leather interior so she could rest her head on his lap. He calmly laid a hand on her hair and stroked it slowly, then turned his eyes to look out the window.

At some point the fly-car must have maneuvered itself underground, as they appeared to be flying through some sort of tunnel. The only illumination came from the forward facing beams of the fly-car's headlights. The tunnel was narrow, only slightly larger than the width of the vehicle. Condensation dripped down the walls, which were covered in many places by a thick layer of moss.

Darius was unsure as to the purpose of the tunnel, or who had constructed it. There was nothing here but the walls, the moss and them. Occasionally the tunnel would intersect with another, and the fly-car would make a 90 degree turn to the left or right, and sometimes even up or down. It was a confusing lair of concrete duct work. Darius quickly became disoriented.

After many minutes, they eventually came to a hovering stop before a barricade of orange rusted metal. A red light at the top of the barricade began to flash, and soon he could hear the grinding of gears. Slowly, the thick metal door was retracted upwards to reveal what looked at first like another tunnel. This one had neon yellow lights along the floor and walls that streamed inward in pulses. The fly-car glided slowly inward for several dozen feet before finally coming to a halt, and disengaging its engines. They had arrived at their destination it seemed.

"Looks like we made it," Darius said to Michelle. Her eyes had been closed for most of the journey.

He pressed a button on the door, and the side slide open. Getting out, he walked quickly to the other side to assist Michelle. She was able to stand on her own, but still leaned on Darius for support.

"So this is Cnidus?" he asked her, taking a look at his surroundings.

"Yes, we will be safe here," she reassured him.

They stood in a tunnel about a hundred feet long by thirty feet wide. It appeared to be a small vehicle hanger, as a few other hover-cars and fly-cars were positioned along its length. The wide corridor was lit overhead by an icy blue fluorescent light, which was being emitted from panels some twenty feet above their heads. Beneath their feet, a narrow strip of yellow light flowed as if it were a liquid embedded in the metal floor, away from where they were standing and toward a door at the other end of the hanger, as if guiding them to it.

"Glad to see he pulled out the welcoming party," Darius commented.

Michelle hadn't been to this particular part of the Cnidus facility before, but she knew they were probably on one of the upper levels. "Believe it or not, but not too many people actually run this place. Strafe's man power is small, but his technological fingers run deep into every part of the Centauri government."

"Is that a fact? And these 'technological fingers' you speak of, he must be very skilled with them. Shall we walk?" He started taking footsteps in the direction of the flowing yellow floor-light, allowing Michelle to lean slightly on his uninjured shoulder as she limped along with him.

"Oh yes, very skilled." She tilted her head to look up at him, "And with more than just his fingers," she added. She watched his expression out of the corner of his eyes to gauge his response to her teasing banter.

Darius stopped walking and looked down at her. "I'm going to assume the pain meds are making you silly."

She laughed at this. That was one thing she had always loved about him. He was never afraid to be direct, and he had a sense of jovial confidence about him that showed he could never truly be flustered by anything.

"Maybe," she said, smiling at him. The two resumed walking towards the door at the end of the hanger.

Darius was desperately in need of a drink of water. The strain of his memories returning, coupled with the boozed up sex he'd had with Michelle (...amazing sex, he thought), not to mention two bullet wounds, were starting to take their toll on his body. When he was younger and fighting in Terran Special Forces (a.k.a. T-Spec), which was a privately owned military organization, he would go longer than 48 hours without even a single droplet of water as part of his training for Martian surface raids.

The enemies of the Global Alliance of Earth frequently took refuge on Mars for safety, often underground, forcing any would-be invaders to survive for long periods of time in a completely barren environment. All men and women of T-Spec were trained to be physically capable of handling severe lack of food and water, extremely low oxygen, and low gravity.

But it had been more than 10 year since he'd been on Mars, and one tends to lose those sorts of physical tolerances when not practiced regularly. Right now, his mouth felt like it was filled with starch. His lips must have looked like ancient parchment. Why hadn't Michelle sad anything? He licked his lips and wiped his mouth with the side of hand, and a streak of whitish saliva rubbed off on his skin.

"Jesus," he said, "Can you walk any faster?"

Michelle nodded and picked up her pace a little. She wasn't feeling too dissimilar from Darius.

Eventually the two reached the door to which the yellow floor-light had been guiding them. The light took a right turn immediately before the entrance, and then disappeared under the door. Just to the left, a red LED flashed above a narrow slit in the wall. Michelle inserted her two longest fingers into the smooth hole for a few seconds. After a few moments, nothing occurred.

"Damn it, I hate these things," Michelle muttered.

Sliding her fingers in and out of the slit several times, at first fast, and when that did nothing, slow, and finally the LED turned green. The door opened by splitting down the middle and retracting. Once open, it could be seen that the floor-light continued into the next hallway and down a set of steps.

Darius spat, or tried to, and said, "What the heck is this, follow the yellow brick road?" Getting frustrated, he began to walk forward without Michelle. "I swear, when we finally meet up with Strafe, I'm going to..." Suddenly his voice ended and the space was silent.

Michelle stood in complete shock as she watched his entire body begin to darken, and the edges of him begin to fade. The disincorporating man seemed to sense what was going on, and he had just a single moment to turn his head and look back at Michelle before the space he occupied dimmed to a shadow, and then eventually reverted back to a pocket of empty air. A wave of coldness, coming from where Darius had been standing, washed over Michelle as she remained motionless in disbelief.

A few seconds later, a man walked up the steps at the opposite end of the hall. He noticed Michelle standing in the doorway with a blank expression on her face. Stepping up his stride a few paces, he approached her.

"Michelle, glad to see you made it," said a deep voice. Looking around her and into the hanger, he quickly added, "Where is Darius?"

She didn't respond at first, but continued to stare down the hallway. The man was Strafe, whom she recognized immediately. When she didn't answer, he quickly ran over to the fly-car that had retrieved them and looked inside. Finding nothing, he returned to the doorway, where Michelle turned to him and said in a slow, steady voice, "They took him."

"Who took him? The Bureau?" asked Strafe.

"The Coulari. They took him, just now. Teleported him right out of the hallway."

"What!" he said in surprise, "That wasn't supposed to happen again for another three days!" His expression was sour at best, and he turned to face the wall.

"Fuck!" he exclaimed, and bashed a curled fist into the cold metal. "We'll have to find him before the Bureau does."

Michelle remained collected, but inside she felt a pang of frustration and loss. Finding him would be hard, as the Coulari never returned him to the same place twice, and she knew he had no way of finding the Cnidus facility. Strafe always contacted Darius, never the other way around; so Darius would not be able to reach them remotely. His apartment would be overrun by the Bureau, and she knew he would be too smart to return there anyway. That left only the whole city of New Paris, which spanned dozens of miles.

Strafe turned and looked at her. "Hey," he said, grabbing her shoulder, "We'll find him. Let's get that leg of yours looked at. Come on down to the infirmary." He wrapped an arm around her waist and led her, limping, down the hallway and down the steps in the direction of the yellow floor-light.

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Hope you all enjoyed this chapter, I really had a fun time writing it! I will try to write the next chapter soon so we can all find out what has happened to Darius! Until next time. --Love, Amoronaut