Darkness. All around her. On her skin. Under her skin. Inside her. Everywhere.
How long she had lain in this small dark room, days, weeks or even months, she could not tell. Everything melded together into a single uniform blur only hardly differentiated by the change of bright and dark infront of the curtains. Bright grey for the day and black for the night. People casually passed by, bringing things in or looking after her. With her mind clouded by the drugs used to pacify her it was hard to decide who was who, if the visitors in her little world were friend or foe at all. She just lay there in a sedated stupor and drifted from moment to moment, gliding almost limitless from subconscious being awake to the sweet forgetness that is sleep.
The sleep brought strange images. Weird images. Images with no meaning at all. Just forms and colours without a connection to anything much less each other. When the images became to unsettling she wanted to move, throw herself around in her bed but the cuffs wouldn’t let her. From time to time that familiar darkness swallowed her whole and it was all good.
Seldomely she remembered another darkness in the back of her head. A darkness that submerged her, drowned her. That lay on her breast with tons of weight and denied her breathing. Impotent and weak she just lay there and felt how something warm constantly dripped on her face. This darkness was unlike any other she had ever experienced, it invaded her mind and body, crept down her throat and choked her, deprived her of air till she thought she would die. With all of her will she wanted to scream, expel that darkness in a ghastly spit all at once. This was usually the moment when she drove up from her bed and screamed into the emptiness of the room before she sank back into blessed oblivion.
With time came the rediscovery of herself and the tearing of the veil that the small pharmaceutical wonders had created. But that was not the only things that came. With them came self-loathing, despair and worst of all memory. Hour after hour she sat there fighting the pain and going over what had happened again and again.
It had been an easy job. A simple anti-terror-assignment in a corner of the world most people did not even know. Officially they had not even been there. Officially this place did not even exist. Inofficially it had been a terrorist training camp of some unnamed fundamentalistic organization. Easy prey. Maybe too easy. She should have had known it. But she had been too cocky, too self confident, too risky. For her it had all been a game where she could have sated her never ending craving for adrenalin and hunger for action. Now it seemed as if the game had ended forever. She had run out of luck finally. No games, no fun anymore. Now her life was serious business. Had she only shown the same intelligence back then.
Like god’s wrath they had came down on the terrorist trainees. Literally. Black Hawk helicopters had stood in mid air and spat out her and the government unit. The inmates of the camp, some of them children of not more that 14 or 15 years, had had no chance. Their resistance had been minimal. Bullet after bullet after bullet had found a new place lodged deep into flesh. The unit swept through the camp like a hot knife through the butter. And she had been the worst. Arrogantly she had danced over the battlefield, doing somersaults and backflips to dodge bullets and had dealt out death like free candy. Hyped up by adrenaline and the hateful cheering of WAR in her head she had lead the assault on the main building, kicking in the door and killing even more people. With horror she remembered now how the spilled blood had made the floor all slippy.
Enticed by their own power they had rushed through the building and had dragged more people out under the hot desert sun. Risky had taken it on herself to clear the last room. The memory already became hazy here. She remembered how she had destroyed the door with a single burst and had jumped into the room her MP ready to deal death in cold blood. She had witnessed the bearded man standing in the right corner of the room operating some mysterious device. The next moment everything had already became dark.
The next thing she was able to recall was that horrible scene that haunted her in her dreams. Helpless she had lain in the debris of the former bunker and had not known what to do. Had not even known what had happened. Now of course she knew with the wisdom of the temporarily displaced. The last man had set off the safety switch. The whole base had been consumed in a gigantic explosion. All had died but her. Her luck had saved her once more. A piece of the roof had crashed down on her and had saved her from most of the blast. Where everyone else had died she had been the only survivor once more. The guilt of the survivor. Her eternal fate.
For day se had been buried under that rocks until another unit had found her and had brought her to that military hospital where she currently resided in.
Instead of death she had only suffered serious burns. Nothing that her healing factor could not take care of without scars. It might not have been as strong as Hunter’s, Talon’s or, god beware, Ronin’s but it was sufficient. But there was something different, a souvenir from the battlefield that it could not take care of. She had lost more on the battlefield than just her exaggerated pride.
The strangest experience when waking up had been focusing on objects more than a few feet away. Somehow it would not work as well as she was used to. Distances were different, seemed to be smaller than before. At first she had ascribed that to the sedatives but in her first wake moments the doctors had rushed at her and had described her situation in cold clinical terms. For her it had been obvious.
She was a cripple now, useless. The explosion had her cost an eye and, even more important, an arm. The whole right side of her body had been crushed under the concrete but she was lucky that only her arm and eye had been destroyed without any hope. They had to be removed. Slowly, coldly, cruelly the knowledge of her new status infiltrated her mind and left her in shock. As soon as the doctor had done his work and left her alone with the horrible certainty of never being able to live a normal life again.
Three nights ad she brooded since then. The visits of great friends like Hunter, Hawk, Mistress Redhead, Kurrent and other had only been short lived due to her unwillingness to let anyone see her in her shame. No, she would sulk alone and try to cope with being a useless tool. If the government was merciful they would give her a desk job. If they were really merciful they would kill her. But somehow she doubted she would be so lucky.
It was the evening of the fourth day since her reawakening when the strange man stepped in. He was not remarkable of all, another suit working for the agency. A face easy to forget. Not bad in his chosen field of business. Brown hair, receding hairline, green eyes, no other feature in his face that was worth recalling. His suit was plain, black with a white shirt and black tie. Nothing cheap but nothing expensive either. His whole gestalt was intended to be as inconspicuous as possible. With slowly fading interest Risky watched him as he entered the room like he owned it, grabbed a chair, put it beside her bed and began to speak:
“Okay Captain Glassmann, you might have a lot of time on your hand but I have not. Excuse the unintentional pun. In about half an hour the night nurse will see after you and at that point I want to be gone already.
We know who you are and we have watched you for some time. And we have taken some interest in you. “We” are an organization whose name shall not be named at this point. You may know the old series of the six million dollar man. Yes, we can rebuild you stronger, faster, better. At this point you might want to know what we demand in return. Well, it is pretty easy.
We are an old organization, maybe more of an order. How old is unknown even to us, we have files predating the death of Christ but we know our order existed before that. Don’t wonder, you have probably never heard of us since we work in the shadow. A modus operandi that is not alien to you from what I know. We are not many and decade after decade we become less and less. Our credo is simple:
A single person can change the world.
We are not secret conspiration of the high and mighty, our approach is a different one. Our members come from all layers of society be they CEOs, judges, office workers, soldiers, cleaners or even beggars.
As you might have already noticed things go wrong in this world. Whenever we see one of our members in the position to change it we contact him or her and give him all the resources he or she needs to solve that problem no matter if it means toppling dictators, killing someone, redirecting the traffic or simply let a file disappear. We know you see the world as it is and do your part to change it. Well, you did. With our help you can do it again.
Why we chose you? It’s simple. By the old rules of our order membership is not only exclusive… It’s hereditary by bloodline. Only the eldest child of a member will be invited to join our cause and it is a once in a lifetime chance. When you decline I will walk away and you will never her of us again, you will even be unable to ever find us again, no matter how hard you try. In your eyes I see the question who of your family had been a part of our order. It was your father. Colonel Edmond Glasmann. He was an initiated member of our order and honestly he died in our service. When all of the military had withdrawn he had still stood there because he knew his responsibility. That monster could not have been allowed to destroy that city. So he delayed its progress till we were able to bombard the Hulk with a soundwave attack that would make him go away. We still pity his death. He was a good man…
So basically what we offer you is a chance to take up the legacy of your father, make the world a better place and be the person that you have been again. So how o you decide?”
For a moment she was speechless. Was this really happening? Was this really the truth? Had her father been one of them? Was this all real or just another drug-fed delirium? All that moved to fast for her to comprehend. Her mind and pulse raced with a thousand miles per hour. Given that was real, should she take this chance? All or nothing, all out in a one chance only game. Her choice would decide over the course of her still young life. But on the other hand… What was there to loose? With a smile she accepted.
For the first time since they had started their talk a smile like a mirror image of her own showed on his face. With a content look he stood up, grabbed her remaining hand and said:
“Welcome to the SENTINELS, sister Glassman!”
Six months later:
Still amazed how something like this was possible Risky flexed her new bionic arm and actually FELT the artificial muscles work under the fake skin. The data feed in her new eye showed her intriguing details about the working of the new limb, the temperature around her, her position on GPS and a lot of other things. An incoming string of endless data flooded in her head through the endlessly open gates of the infra red connection.
She was ready for the next task, ready to do her part as SENTINEL. The sword of her family, symbol of the SENTINELS, that had hung in her father’s office rested now firmly in a sheath. Harder than usual steel and able to deliver mighty electrical shocks like in T.S. Eliot’s famous poem it would not see a lot of action but always remind her what she had become now, more than ever before. For once she felt closer connected to her father than ever before through taking up his place. In this moment she knew he looked down on her and that he would be proud. The SENTINELS gave her more than just a new arm with a lot of gimmicks and a new eye, they made her complete. And the world would soon see what the new Risky could do.
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