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Description

Sticky, pungent steam hung in the air around her head as if she crouched in the center of a giant bowl of pea soup.  The constant, rhythmic drip of a leak in one of the hundreds of unidentifiable pipes crawling across the weathered ceiling above her head like so many rust-colored vines mixed with the step-splash of the dozens of Army-issued combat boots heading ever-determined toward her position.  With each plunging step that rang out through the would-be sewage and service tunnel the possibility that she was actually going to die this time—that they were actually going to win this round—pounded through her chest with the power of a heart-felt thunderclap.
That part always seemed to get to her; no matter how many times Captain Lyle reminded her, no matter how many times she felt the cold mercury fill her mind and shoot down her spine when jacked in.  No matter how much even she tried to convince herself that this entire thing was nothing more than an elaborate computer program, composed of billions upon billions of code lines, Nicole Holm never got over the fact that she could feel her own heart beating.  She had long since mastered the ability to bend—and sometimes break—the Program’s designed physics, she could willfully slow her breathing or make herself light enough to leap across otherwise impossible distances or fast enough to take out a handful of opponents with the same snapkick.  Yet, even after years of training in the Construct and all the accumulated hours she’d been jacked in, Nicole could never slow her heartbeat while plugged into the Matrix.
The soft sound of wet boots on chipped stone drifted up from behind her and, without thinking, Nicole spun on her heels and, in the same silently swift motion, brought both of her custom Walther P99 pistols to bear.  Standing at arm’s length, the twin red dots of her laser sights overlapping on the same bead of sweat in the center of her forehead, was Angela Hughes.  Nicole quickly lowered her weapons.
“You really need to stop doing that,” she whispered to the other woman as she lowered back into a crouch and strained to hear for the oncoming soldiers.
Angela silently moved in behind her, peaking around the pillar they stood behind.  “Sorry,” she replied, her own voice just loud enough to be heard over the echoes of plunging boots.  “There’s another group coming at us from up the tunnel; another five minutes and they’ll be right on top of us.”
“Shit.”  Nicole suddenly wished she’d decided to let Pinto come on this mission.  It had sounded easy enough when the captain outlined it, a quick scout-and-tag mission on some supposed über-hacker the captain’s friend was looking for, but it had quickly gone down hill when some Agents who had apparently been keeping tabs on him showed up.
She turned her head slightly to look up at her friend.  “Well, I’m guessing now’s as good a time as any to risk a call, don’t you?”
Angela rolled her eyes and, while pulling her phone from a pocket in her leather coat, sneered.  “Why’s it always gotta be me?”
Despite her half-hearted protest, Angela snapped the phone open and hit the right key.  Even from where she was crouching, Nicole could hear the rapid chirping of the telephone ring.  With a click the other line connected.  “Operator,” she heard the other voice say.
Their Operator was a skinny loud-mouth who went by Punk.  Obnoxious, overbearing, and relatively annoying, Punk had an almost irresistible charm about him; Nicole was hard pressed to determine if his charm was in spite of those traits or because of them.  Either way, Punk was one of their team’s greatest assets.  The only other Operator she’d worked with who might hold a candle to Punk’s talents with the keyboard was Link, but he’d quit the second he got married.
“Punk, Angela, we seem to be in a bit of a shitstorm here.”
“I can see that, Angie.  What the hell were you two thinkin’ going into the sewer with two squads of National Guard on you’re a—“
Angela cut him off.  “Call me Angie again, you skinny little shit, and I’ll arrange a nice longsparring session in the Construct with you.”
Nicole rolled her eyes in agitation; the splashing of boots was getting louder.  “Um, you think the two of you could quit flirting long enough to find a way out of here.  Y’know, before said soldiers star filling the tunnels with an unwarranted number of bullets?”
There was a pause while Angela shot her a vicious look and Punk did his thing.  Then, “Ummmm, I don’t know how to tell you this, girls, but, uh—“
Nicole looked down for a second, sighing as she knew what was coming next.  “We’re so screwed,” she said under her breath.
“—but I think you might be screwed,” Punk finished.
Angela, ever the persistent one, held the phone out and looked at it.  “What do you mean screwed?”
“I mean screwed,” he said again.  “As in, there’s absolutely no way out from your current position except through one of those groups of soldiers.”
Nicole nodded to herself and dropped the half-spent magazines from her pistols, each splashing into the thick water below with a distinct splunk.  “Are there any Agents with them?”
Angela stopped sarcastically praising Punk’s wonderful ability to make a bad situation even worse and stared blank-faced at her friend.  “What?”
Nicole slapped the masked switch on her gun belt’s buckle and, with an almost inaudible click, two fresh magazines swung out from the spring-loaded hidden compartments that ran along the strap from her belt to each of the thigh holsters; there was enough room on each side to hold three quick-loaders for each gun.  She looked back up at Angela.  “Ask him,” she said, a bit slower, “if there are any Agents with them.”
Another moment as Angela relayed the question and Punk gave the answer.  “There’s one with the group coming in from that direction,” she pointed toward the group Nicole had been listening for.
Nicole rose to her feet once more and slapped the butts of her pistols together, effectively locking the new magazines in place—having dropped the previous clips half-spent, there was no need to chamber a round—and smiled at her friend.  “Then we go this way.”
“You’re joking, right,” Angela asked, the look of disbelief extremely off-setting on her normally stoic features.
Nicole didn’t turn.  “We’re going to need to make this quick, hun,” she said.  “We’ll need to neutralize all targets before an Agent can jump into one.”
Angela didn’t move for a second and then, unslinging the Heckler and Kotch G36, spoke into the phone.  “Punk?”
“Yeah?”
“If I die, feed my dog.”
Without waiting for a reply, she snapped the phone shut, slid it back into her pocket and, pulling the charging handle on the G36, followed after Nicole.  “Aw, man, this is gonna suck. ”

Roughly twenty yards from where she had been crouching, the tunnel they were in ended in a drainage drop-off which was blocked by a massive rusty barred grate.  Just before the grate the tunnel branched off into a dry maintenance walkway; when she got to the branch, Nicole leaped into the walkway without breaking stride.  Her legs propelled her much faster and higher than anyone still grounded to the physics programs of the Matrix and she had to throw her left leg out in a quick push-kick to keep from slamming into the cinderblock wall of the tunnel; to this effect, she used the move to her advantage to change direction suddenly without having to slow down.
Behind her, Nicole could hear the slightly slower footfalls of Angela trying her best to keep up while, before her, the bobbing flashlights from the soldiers painted the dirty walls with the brilliant circles of halogen bulbs.  Somewhere in the back of her mind, Nicole hoped to whatever deity might actually exist that the sounds of their own boots on the cement floor was drowning out her own hurried footsteps and they weren’t ready for her when she bounded around the gentle curve of the walkway.  If they were, she and Angela were as dead; the thought of Captain Lyle and the rest of her friends on the Kryptonian unplugging and removing their lifeless bodies from the ship’s Broadcast Core were enough to make her trigger fingers twitch slightly.
The maintenance walkway was ten feet across and arched twelve feet over her head.  If the soldiers followed standard CQB protocol, they would be moving down the in an L-shaped line which would put the bottom of the L along the outside of the walkway’s curve.  If there weren’t enough men for a double-L—and she was able to pull off the miracle of surprise—Nicole should be able to make it up and over the line and drop a few before they realized what was happening.
The lights grew brighter and she could now hear the sound of random chatter coming from the soldiers.  With a final thought of determination and an unconscious double-check of her guns’ safeties, Nicole poured all the extra speed she could get and, within four steps, she was around the curve.  Time seemed to slow as she rounded the curve and saw the first of the soldiers and, in the next three steps, she was able to take in her surroundings and decide on a definite course of action.
First, she was right about the formation of the group but was too hopeful about their numbers; instead of the five-man team that had followed them into the sewers, she bounded for a team of at least eight—that would explain why this group didn’t have an Agent with them.
Sure, she thought, there’s only two of them.  And they’re girls after all!
That was the good news, however.  The bad news was the fact that she did not have the element of surprise and, by the time she made it completely around the curve, they had their guns ready and opened fire.
“Shit!”
Without the time to think, Nicole fell back on her “training” and just let go.  Before the first enemy bullet made it out of the end of its perspective barrel, Nicole had both her pistols up and opened fire.  It became rapidly apparent that the soldiers who fired on her were the type who were only soldiers part-time; every single one of them missed their mark.  Even if luck was a dominating program in her existence, at least one of the soldiers would have come close to hitting her if they had been training for more than one weekend a month and two weeks a year.  As it were, luck, it seemed, was on her side—again.  However, luck would not be on Angela’s side if she came around the curve and into a wall of bullets; even if they were missing Nicole, who was staying just ahead of their aim, the sheer number of rounds flying down the walkway would be more than enough to tear Angela apart.
Nicole would have to act, and act fast.
Closing the distance between herself and the wall of kneeling soldiers—three of which dropped as rounds from her pistols snapped their heads back hard enough to shatter their necks, even if the hollow-point rounds hadn’t splattered their brains—Nicole threw her weight to the right, toward the inside of the curve, and then kicked off her right foot, launching herself toward the left-hand wall.  Once again bending one of the Program’s “laws”, Nicole ran up the side of the left-hand wall, her boots spraying dust and grime in the wake of her vertical footsteps, and propelled herself up and over the heads of the line of soldiers.  As they tried their best to track her, the looks in their faces the same dumbfounded expression as always, Nicole’s pistols rang out two more times and two more soldiers dropped, their faces erased in a spray of blood and bone.
Too much time was passing.  At any second, an Agent could receive a signal from whatever controlled them and possess the body of one of the surprised soldiers.  No one had ever really figured out how they did it—how they knew when and where to jump—but one thing was abundantly clear and that was it always happened whenever people she was fighting made that stupid face.
There was no time to think about it as Nicole’s boots slapped back down onto the floor and she threw herself into a forward roll, twisting her shoulders enough to come up on her knees facing the opposite direction.  When she reached her knees—grimacing to herself as the filthy water soaked through her trademark woodland BDU’s; she never could figure out what everyone’s fascination with tight black leather was—Nicole’s pistols came back on target and plugged two more soldiers before they could completely turn around.  Before their bodies hit the ground, the third and final soldier dive-rolled into an access nook tucked into the inside wall and opened fire.  The only thing she could do now was throw herself into a similar roll and press her body against the inside wall, hoping she was far enough around the curve to hinder his shot; and think to herself that now would be a great time for Angela to catch up.
Sparks sprayed off the stone around her head and feet as the soldier’s hastily-aimed shots rapidly filled the walkway.  Then, as one would expect of a fully automatic weapon being fired nonstop, the soldier’s gun ran out of ammo and he had to stop to reload.  It was now that Nicole heard the oncoming footsteps and chanced a peek around the curve.
Just inside the nook, the soldier was nervously trying to fit a new magazine into the empty well that seemed to shake twice as much as the magazine within his hands.  Behind him Angela stopped running just long enough to take in the scene of carnage before her, shaking her head in disappointment only momentarily before turning her attention to the remaining soldier.  Quickly and silently—though, Nicole doubted the man could hear anything over the pounding of his own heart—Angela closed the short distance between her and the soldier just as he was able to slap the magazine into his weapon and lock a round into the chamber.  Without wasting any time, and a seemingly newfound surge of confidence, the soldier brought his gun back up on target and Nicole could swear her actually smiled to himself as he slid his finger back into the trigger guard and made to send another useless volley of ammo in her direction.
Too bad he wasn’t paying attention to what was happening behind him.
“Hey, bitch,” the soldier yelled, apparently trying to instill fear in the heart of the single woman who’d dropped his entire squad.  “I’m authorized to shoot to kill but if you don’t wanna die, just drop your weapons and come on out.  You hear me?!”
“I hear you, pal.”  The soldier froze as Angela whispered in his ear but for just a moment before he regained his composure and tried to spin his gun around to bear on her.  Nicole smiled to herself; there was no way in hell he was going to get a shot off and she almost felt bad for him.
The soldier spun on his heels to square off with Angela and she slapped the gun aside with the butt of her own.  Then, as the soldier’s gun clattered uselessly to the dirty floor—his front no completely exposed—Angela launched a vicious forward snapkick which connected solidly with the soldier’s genitals.  If she didn’t know any better, Nicole would have sworn that she heard the man’s testicals explode under the force of her kick; as it were, his eyes bulged and he leaned forward, choking back a mouthful of vomit as he doubled over and fell to the floor.
Angela looked down at him for a second, her lips fighting the desire to smile and then she shrugged and kicked him square in the face, throwing him back onto the floor and knocking him completely unconscious.  She then looked up at Nicole, who had watched the whole thing from behind cover and was now stepping back into the center of the walkway, and said, “You always have all the fun.”
Nicole dropped the used mags from her pistols and once again reloaded.  Slapping the butts together again she smiled and shrugged.  “You need to keep up, hun.”
“Cute,” Angela sneered and, reaching for her phone said, “I suppose you want me to call, Punk?”
“Well, if you insist.”
Angela rolled her eyes and leered but pulled out her phone and flipped it open.  A few seconds passed and then she said, “Punk, you skinny bitch, get us the hell out of here!”

Ten minutes later, PFC Michaels began to stir, the pain in his crotch sending him a rude awakening as he rolled over onto his stomach and tried to shake his head clear.  The fuzziness of regaining consciousness finally cleared and Michaels could finally see clearly.  And the first thing he saw was the black leather of a freshly polished dress shoe.  He lifted his head and his eyes climbed up the unbelievably clean and pressed pant leg of a gunmetal gray suit, across a black belt as shiny as the shoes, up a tie the same gray as the jacket and pants and finally coming to rest on a pair of sunglasses with black, reflective square lenses resting on as plain a face as he’d ever seen staring back down at him.
“Shit,” he mumbled to himself as the agent looked from Michaels to another man who, to the soldier, looked exactly the same as the man who stood before him.  Suddenly, the Private realized he was surrounded by another squad of fellow soldiers, all of which were collecting the bodies of the dead and policing their ammo and weapons.
“They got away,” the agent who stood before him said to the other in a dull, monotone voice.
“As expected,” the other replied in that same voice.
PFC Michaels finally made it to his feet, his thoughts drifting back and forth to the unbearable pain between his legs and the possibility that the bitch in leather did some serious damage to his balls.  Meanwhile the last words spoken by the second of the two agents; though the two had very few differences in appearance and the way they carried themselves, there was just something about the second guy Michaels really didn’t like.
“Listen,” he bit out toward the sunglass wearing government monkey, “Agent Whatever-the-hell-your-name-is—“
“Smith,” the agent said, pausing every few words as if trying to find a way of speaking so that those around him could understand him.  “My name is Agent Smith, Private.”
Michaels didn’t back down, but he did notice that when he spoke again the bitterness and defiance had somehow left his voice.  “Listen, Agent Smith,” he said, “I don’t know what the fuck those two bitches were on or what crazy government-funded Psycho-Kung Fu-Assassin Program they escaped from but the one in the fatigues took out seven of my squad without stopping and the second one snuck up me like some leather-clad ninja.  So, you standing there and making it sound like you knew they were going to kill my men as easy as if they were playing a fucking video game makes me wonder why you’re not hauling ass after them!”
Both Agents looked at PFC Michaels as if looking at a third-grader.  Then, suddenly, both met grabbed their white earpieces and listened for a second to words that only they could hear.  After a few seconds both men turned to each other and the first one said to Smith, “We’ve got her.”
“This one could finally lead us to Morpheus.”
Both men nodded to one another and then, without another word, turned and contined to walk away.
“Hey, where the fuck are you goin’?!”
Agent Smith stopped and half-turned toward Michaels.  “We’re no longer needed here.  We’ve…more important things to attend to now.”
Michaels couldn’t believe the way this man was nonchalantly treating the death of his men.  Anger was once again making its way into his voice.  “What’s more important than the death of seven soldiers?!”
Agent Smith didn’t stop this time and his condescending voice drifted back to PFC Michaels.  “A war, Private,” he said.  “A war older than you’d ever be capable of comprehending.”

Description

Sticky, pungent steam hung in the air around her head as if she crouched in the center of a giant bowl of pea soup.  The constant, rhythmic drip of a leak in one of the hundreds of unidentifiable pipes crawling across the weathered ceiling above her head like so many rust-colored vines mixed with the step-splash of the dozens of Army-issued combat boots heading ever-determined toward her position.  With each plunging step that rang out through the would-be sewage and service tunnel the possibility that she was actually going to die this time—that they were actually going to win this round—pounded through her chest with the power of a heart-felt thunderclap.
That part always seemed to get to her; no matter how many times Captain Lyle reminded her, no matter how many times she felt the cold mercury fill her mind and shoot down her spine when jacked in.  No matter how much even she tried to convince herself that this entire thing was nothing more than an elaborate computer program, composed of billions upon billions of code lines, Nicole Holm never got over the fact that she could feel her own heart beating.  She had long since mastered the ability to bend—and sometimes break—the Program’s designed physics, she could willfully slow her breathing or make herself light enough to leap across otherwise impossible distances or fast enough to take out a handful of opponents with the same snapkick.  Yet, even after years of training in the Construct and all the accumulated hours she’d been jacked in, Nicole could never slow her heartbeat while plugged into the Matrix.
The soft sound of wet boots on chipped stone drifted up from behind her and, without thinking, Nicole spun on her heels and, in the same silently swift motion, brought both of her custom Walther P99 pistols to bear.  Standing at arm’s length, the twin red dots of her laser sights overlapping on the same bead of sweat in the center of her forehead, was Angela Hughes.  Nicole quickly lowered her weapons.
“You really need to stop doing that,” she whispered to the other woman as she lowered back into a crouch and strained to hear for the oncoming soldiers.
Angela silently moved in behind her, peaking around the pillar they stood behind.  “Sorry,” she replied, her own voice just loud enough to be heard over the echoes of plunging boots.  “There’s another group coming at us from up the tunnel; another five minutes and they’ll be right on top of us.”
“Shit.”  Nicole suddenly wished she’d decided to let Pinto come on this mission.  It had sounded easy enough when the captain outlined it, a quick scout-and-tag mission on some supposed über-hacker the captain’s friend was looking for, but it had quickly gone down hill when some Agents who had apparently been keeping tabs on him showed up.
She turned her head slightly to look up at her friend.  “Well, I’m guessing now’s as good a time as any to risk a call, don’t you?”
Angela rolled her eyes and, while pulling her phone from a pocket in her leather coat, sneered.  “Why’s it always gotta be me?”
Despite her half-hearted protest, Angela snapped the phone open and hit the right key.  Even from where she was crouching, Nicole could hear the rapid chirping of the telephone ring.  With a click the other line connected.  “Operator,” she heard the other voice say.
Their Operator was a skinny loud-mouth who went by Punk.  Obnoxious, overbearing, and relatively annoying, Punk had an almost irresistible charm about him; Nicole was hard pressed to determine if his charm was in spite of those traits or because of them.  Either way, Punk was one of their team’s greatest assets.  The only other Operator she’d worked with who might hold a candle to Punk’s talents with the keyboard was Link, but he’d quit the second he got married.
“Punk, Angela, we seem to be in a bit of a shitstorm here.”
“I can see that, Angie.  What the hell were you two thinkin’ going into the sewer with two squads of National Guard on you’re a—“
Angela cut him off.  “Call me Angie again, you skinny little shit, and I’ll arrange a nice longsparring session in the Construct with you.”
Nicole rolled her eyes in agitation; the splashing of boots was getting louder.  “Um, you think the two of you could quit flirting long enough to find a way out of here.  Y’know, before said soldiers star filling the tunnels with an unwarranted number of bullets?”
There was a pause while Angela shot her a vicious look and Punk did his thing.  Then, “Ummmm, I don’t know how to tell you this, girls, but, uh—“
Nicole looked down for a second, sighing as she knew what was coming next.  “We’re so screwed,” she said under her breath.
“—but I think you might be screwed,” Punk finished.
Angela, ever the persistent one, held the phone out and looked at it.  “What do you mean screwed?”
“I mean screwed,” he said again.  “As in, there’s absolutely no way out from your current position except through one of those groups of soldiers.”
Nicole nodded to herself and dropped the half-spent magazines from her pistols, each splashing into the thick water below with a distinct splunk.  “Are there any Agents with them?”
Angela stopped sarcastically praising Punk’s wonderful ability to make a bad situation even worse and stared blank-faced at her friend.  “What?”
Nicole slapped the masked switch on her gun belt’s buckle and, with an almost inaudible click, two fresh magazines swung out from the spring-loaded hidden compartments that ran along the strap from her belt to each of the thigh holsters; there was enough room on each side to hold three quick-loaders for each gun.  She looked back up at Angela.  “Ask him,” she said, a bit slower, “if there are any Agents with them.”
Another moment as Angela relayed the question and Punk gave the answer.  “There’s one with the group coming in from that direction,” she pointed toward the group Nicole had been listening for.
Nicole rose to her feet once more and slapped the butts of her pistols together, effectively locking the new magazines in place—having dropped the previous clips half-spent, there was no need to chamber a round—and smiled at her friend.  “Then we go this way.”
“You’re joking, right,” Angela asked, the look of disbelief extremely off-setting on her normally stoic features.
Nicole didn’t turn.  “We’re going to need to make this quick, hun,” she said.  “We’ll need to neutralize all targets before an Agent can jump into one.”
Angela didn’t move for a second and then, unslinging the Heckler and Kotch G36, spoke into the phone.  “Punk?”
“Yeah?”
“If I die, feed my dog.”
Without waiting for a reply, she snapped the phone shut, slid it back into her pocket and, pulling the charging handle on the G36, followed after Nicole.  “Aw, man, this is gonna suck. ”

Roughly twenty yards from where she had been crouching, the tunnel they were in ended in a drainage drop-off which was blocked by a massive rusty barred grate.  Just before the grate the tunnel branched off into a dry maintenance walkway; when she got to the branch, Nicole leaped into the walkway without breaking stride.  Her legs propelled her much faster and higher than anyone still grounded to the physics programs of the Matrix and she had to throw her left leg out in a quick push-kick to keep from slamming into the cinderblock wall of the tunnel; to this effect, she used the move to her advantage to change direction suddenly without having to slow down.
Behind her, Nicole could hear the slightly slower footfalls of Angela trying her best to keep up while, before her, the bobbing flashlights from the soldiers painted the dirty walls with the brilliant circles of halogen bulbs.  Somewhere in the back of her mind, Nicole hoped to whatever deity might actually exist that the sounds of their own boots on the cement floor was drowning out her own hurried footsteps and they weren’t ready for her when she bounded around the gentle curve of the walkway.  If they were, she and Angela were as dead; the thought of Captain Lyle and the rest of her friends on the Kryptonian unplugging and removing their lifeless bodies from the ship’s Broadcast Core were enough to make her trigger fingers twitch slightly.
The maintenance walkway was ten feet across and arched twelve feet over her head.  If the soldiers followed standard CQB protocol, they would be moving down the in an L-shaped line which would put the bottom of the L along the outside of the walkway’s curve.  If there weren’t enough men for a double-L—and she was able to pull off the miracle of surprise—Nicole should be able to make it up and over the line and drop a few before they realized what was happening.
The lights grew brighter and she could now hear the sound of random chatter coming from the soldiers.  With a final thought of determination and an unconscious double-check of her guns’ safeties, Nicole poured all the extra speed she could get and, within four steps, she was around the curve.  Time seemed to slow as she rounded the curve and saw the first of the soldiers and, in the next three steps, she was able to take in her surroundings and decide on a definite course of action.
First, she was right about the formation of the group but was too hopeful about their numbers; instead of the five-man team that had followed them into the sewers, she bounded for a team of at least eight—that would explain why this group didn’t have an Agent with them.
Sure, she thought, there’s only two of them.  And they’re girls after all!
That was the good news, however.  The bad news was the fact that she did not have the element of surprise and, by the time she made it completely around the curve, they had their guns ready and opened fire.
“Shit!”
Without the time to think, Nicole fell back on her “training” and just let go.  Before the first enemy bullet made it out of the end of its perspective barrel, Nicole had both her pistols up and opened fire.  It became rapidly apparent that the soldiers who fired on her were the type who were only soldiers part-time; every single one of them missed their mark.  Even if luck was a dominating program in her existence, at least one of the soldiers would have come close to hitting her if they had been training for more than one weekend a month and two weeks a year.  As it were, luck, it seemed, was on her side—again.  However, luck would not be on Angela’s side if she came around the curve and into a wall of bullets; even if they were missing Nicole, who was staying just ahead of their aim, the sheer number of rounds flying down the walkway would be more than enough to tear Angela apart.
Nicole would have to act, and act fast.
Closing the distance between herself and the wall of kneeling soldiers—three of which dropped as rounds from her pistols snapped their heads back hard enough to shatter their necks, even if the hollow-point rounds hadn’t splattered their brains—Nicole threw her weight to the right, toward the inside of the curve, and then kicked off her right foot, launching herself toward the left-hand wall.  Once again bending one of the Program’s “laws”, Nicole ran up the side of the left-hand wall, her boots spraying dust and grime in the wake of her vertical footsteps, and propelled herself up and over the heads of the line of soldiers.  As they tried their best to track her, the looks in their faces the same dumbfounded expression as always, Nicole’s pistols rang out two more times and two more soldiers dropped, their faces erased in a spray of blood and bone.
Too much time was passing.  At any second, an Agent could receive a signal from whatever controlled them and possess the body of one of the surprised soldiers.  No one had ever really figured out how they did it—how they knew when and where to jump—but one thing was abundantly clear and that was it always happened whenever people she was fighting made that stupid face.
There was no time to think about it as Nicole’s boots slapped back down onto the floor and she threw herself into a forward roll, twisting her shoulders enough to come up on her knees facing the opposite direction.  When she reached her knees—grimacing to herself as the filthy water soaked through her trademark woodland BDU’s; she never could figure out what everyone’s fascination with tight black leather was—Nicole’s pistols came back on target and plugged two more soldiers before they could completely turn around.  Before their bodies hit the ground, the third and final soldier dive-rolled into an access nook tucked into the inside wall and opened fire.  The only thing she could do now was throw herself into a similar roll and press her body against the inside wall, hoping she was far enough around the curve to hinder his shot; and think to herself that now would be a great time for Angela to catch up.
Sparks sprayed off the stone around her head and feet as the soldier’s hastily-aimed shots rapidly filled the walkway.  Then, as one would expect of a fully automatic weapon being fired nonstop, the soldier’s gun ran out of ammo and he had to stop to reload.  It was now that Nicole heard the oncoming footsteps and chanced a peek around the curve.
Just inside the nook, the soldier was nervously trying to fit a new magazine into the empty well that seemed to shake twice as much as the magazine within his hands.  Behind him Angela stopped running just long enough to take in the scene of carnage before her, shaking her head in disappointment only momentarily before turning her attention to the remaining soldier.  Quickly and silently—though, Nicole doubted the man could hear anything over the pounding of his own heart—Angela closed the short distance between her and the soldier just as he was able to slap the magazine into his weapon and lock a round into the chamber.  Without wasting any time, and a seemingly newfound surge of confidence, the soldier brought his gun back up on target and Nicole could swear her actually smiled to himself as he slid his finger back into the trigger guard and made to send another useless volley of ammo in her direction.
Too bad he wasn’t paying attention to what was happening behind him.
“Hey, bitch,” the soldier yelled, apparently trying to instill fear in the heart of the single woman who’d dropped his entire squad.  “I’m authorized to shoot to kill but if you don’t wanna die, just drop your weapons and come on out.  You hear me?!”
“I hear you, pal.”  The soldier froze as Angela whispered in his ear but for just a moment before he regained his composure and tried to spin his gun around to bear on her.  Nicole smiled to herself; there was no way in hell he was going to get a shot off and she almost felt bad for him.
The soldier spun on his heels to square off with Angela and she slapped the gun aside with the butt of her own.  Then, as the soldier’s gun clattered uselessly to the dirty floor—his front no completely exposed—Angela launched a vicious forward snapkick which connected solidly with the soldier’s genitals.  If she didn’t know any better, Nicole would have sworn that she heard the man’s testicals explode under the force of her kick; as it were, his eyes bulged and he leaned forward, choking back a mouthful of vomit as he doubled over and fell to the floor.
Angela looked down at him for a second, her lips fighting the desire to smile and then she shrugged and kicked him square in the face, throwing him back onto the floor and knocking him completely unconscious.  She then looked up at Nicole, who had watched the whole thing from behind cover and was now stepping back into the center of the walkway, and said, “You always have all the fun.”
Nicole dropped the used mags from her pistols and once again reloaded.  Slapping the butts together again she smiled and shrugged.  “You need to keep up, hun.”
“Cute,” Angela sneered and, reaching for her phone said, “I suppose you want me to call, Punk?”
“Well, if you insist.”
Angela rolled her eyes and leered but pulled out her phone and flipped it open.  A few seconds passed and then she said, “Punk, you skinny bitch, get us the hell out of here!”

Ten minutes later, PFC Michaels began to stir, the pain in his crotch sending him a rude awakening as he rolled over onto his stomach and tried to shake his head clear.  The fuzziness of regaining consciousness finally cleared and Michaels could finally see clearly.  And the first thing he saw was the black leather of a freshly polished dress shoe.  He lifted his head and his eyes climbed up the unbelievably clean and pressed pant leg of a gunmetal gray suit, across a black belt as shiny as the shoes, up a tie the same gray as the jacket and pants and finally coming to rest on a pair of sunglasses with black, reflective square lenses resting on as plain a face as he’d ever seen staring back down at him.
“Shit,” he mumbled to himself as the agent looked from Michaels to another man who, to the soldier, looked exactly the same as the man who stood before him.  Suddenly, the Private realized he was surrounded by another squad of fellow soldiers, all of which were collecting the bodies of the dead and policing their ammo and weapons.
“They got away,” the agent who stood before him said to the other in a dull, monotone voice.
“As expected,” the other replied in that same voice.
PFC Michaels finally made it to his feet, his thoughts drifting back and forth to the unbearable pain between his legs and the possibility that the bitch in leather did some serious damage to his balls.  Meanwhile the last words spoken by the second of the two agents; though the two had very few differences in appearance and the way they carried themselves, there was just something about the second guy Michaels really didn’t like.
“Listen,” he bit out toward the sunglass wearing government monkey, “Agent Whatever-the-hell-your-name-is—“
“Smith,” the agent said, pausing every few words as if trying to find a way of speaking so that those around him could understand him.  “My name is Agent Smith, Private.”
Michaels didn’t back down, but he did notice that when he spoke again the bitterness and defiance had somehow left his voice.  “Listen, Agent Smith,” he said, “I don’t know what the fuck those two bitches were on or what crazy government-funded Psycho-Kung Fu-Assassin Program they escaped from but the one in the fatigues took out seven of my squad without stopping and the second one snuck up me like some leather-clad ninja.  So, you standing there and making it sound like you knew they were going to kill my men as easy as if they were playing a fucking video game makes me wonder why you’re not hauling ass after them!”
Both Agents looked at PFC Michaels as if looking at a third-grader.  Then, suddenly, both met grabbed their white earpieces and listened for a second to words that only they could hear.  After a few seconds both men turned to each other and the first one said to Smith, “We’ve got her.”
“This one could finally lead us to Morpheus.”
Both men nodded to one another and then, without another word, turned and contined to walk away.
“Hey, where the fuck are you goin’?!”
Agent Smith stopped and half-turned toward Michaels.  “We’re no longer needed here.  We’ve…more important things to attend to now.”
Michaels couldn’t believe the way this man was nonchalantly treating the death of his men.  Anger was once again making its way into his voice.  “What’s more important than the death of seven soldiers?!”
Agent Smith didn’t stop this time and his condescending voice drifted back to PFC Michaels.  “A war, Private,” he said.  “A war older than you’d ever be capable of comprehending.”