What Could Be

"Come with me, forget your work, just take a day off, Alana." She lifted her head up from her laptop settled on her desk at the tempting sound of Leo's voice.

"This story isn't going to write itself," she protested quietly and without any ounce of sincerity.

Leo swept her hair to the side as he stood behind her seated position, and placed his lips to the back of her neck. "It can wait."

The sound of a dog barking and a tail thumping against the floor followed. "Isaac Johnson is embezzling funds and forcing his employees to work in unsafe conditions, and everybody's happy to eat out of his hand and beg his favor because he's rich and handsome and has political power. If I don't write this, it's going to continue." She needed to get this story out, she needed to break it to the world just what he was doing. She'd spent three weeks undercover as an employee in one of his manufacturing facilities and the conditions were that of a third world sweatshop.

"Two hours, babe. Just take two hours and come out with me. We'll go for a walk with the dog, get some ice cream, some fresh air. You know that you're gonna go crazy if you coop yourself up. Two hours isn't going to make or break you, I promise."

"You promise?" she repeated as she stood up and stepped into his embrace, wrapping her arms around his neck.

"I promise," he affirmed as he tipped his head down and placed a kiss on her nose.

"Fine," she agreed, sighing for show. The dog barked happily and ran to get her own leash with uncontainable excitement.

What Was

The searing sun hanging in the sky beat down with an unforgiving heat on the barren landscape of Australia. It had reverted to its penal colony status and was now one of the four main points used as a prison for those who would stand against the 3rd Society.

A group known as the Reapers had come into the power vaccuum that the Lost Continent presented and begun stripping it of its resources. To enter Australia was to put yourself at their mercy, and risk life and limb in the process.

Unfortunately for Alana and the rest of the resistance, there was an asset that they needed to collect and she made her home in Australia. In the initial waves of attack and unrest that had swept the world, Dr. Ali Hampstead had gone underground, utilizing survivalism skills that her parents had taught her from a young age.

She was one of the world's foremost minds in weapons technology when the population was nearing 8 billion. Now that they were below the 100,000 threshold, she was the undisputed expert. A contact from her along old communication lines had come into the resistance's main base 12 hours prior and they had begun mobilization immediately.

Alana rested her head against the glass window of their transport. The ship had been designed and built two years prior to the end of times, and it was cutting edge at that time. Currently, it was the finest ship within Earth's atmosphere. Capable of complete cloaking and loaded with weapons, it was the resistance's ace in the hole, and what they would be using to transport Dr. Hampstead out of Australia and back to their stable NYC base.

"Five minutes out, radar's clear," Maria affirmed. Maria Johnson has been one of the Air Force's rising star before the end of the world came about. These days she was functioning as the resistance's pilot and transportation procurer.

"Weapons armed and ready to go. O'Donohue, I want you on a ledge, a peak, anything with some height. Bird's eye view, ready to take out any approaches." Jack O'Donohue, a former Special Ops sniper nodded his assent.

"Murdock and Devereaux, I want one of you at the front and back entrances after scouting out all possible entrances and exits. Nobody gets through." The two had gravitated towards one another, and had skills that frequently complimented each other in the field, as well as a rock solid friendship outside of it. Rachel Murdock was an elite tracker and had previously been one of the world's best thieves...usually selling her services for good, but every now and then taking a healthy cut for herself. Rosalie Devereaux had been one of the Shadow Initiative's foremost assassins and at the age of 27, had a kill list longer than Alana liked to think about.

Which had put her in direct contention with the last two members of this particular team, Kyle Sanderson and James Tennant. Mercenaries working together as partners for the past 12 years, they had honed their skills in numerous wars and conflicts, and on more than one occasion had butted heads with Devereaux on jobs. "Sanderson, you're with me, Tennant, you're going in with camo hot." They had special suits that could reflect light, rendering them essentially invisible. It was an expenditure of resources that they could rarely afford, but which would be crucial here. "You keep that bird safe." The ship itself had shielding, and Murdock would remain strapped in and ready to go, but there was no way that they could be too careful with the craft.

---

Everything had gone smoothly, Alana thought as they exited the natural series of caves were Hampstead had made her home. Too smooth. Nothing in this world went right for her or her team. There was always some other foot prepared to drop on their heads and crush them into the ground.

A shiver ran up her spine as they approached the area where the ship was shielded in a formation surroudning Alana and Dr. Hampstead, who walked side by side.

Devereaux cursed vulgarly under her breath, something that was at odds with her petite blonde appearance, and immediately O'Donohue followed suit, as everybody else reached for their weapons. "Incoming Reapers," Murdock announced through the comms that every member of the team wore.

"They just upgraded their weapons," Dr. Hampstead whispered, fear dawning in her brown eyes even while determination carved itself into her elvin features.

"Murdock get me an ETA on those Reapers and fire up the engines, now!" Alana ordered as she drew her own sidearm. "Circle formation, tight on the doc," she commanded. They could hear the slight whirring that indicated a Reaper ship about to hit the immediate vicinity. "ETA, Murdock!" They were at least a three minute run from the cloaked ship and there was no cover in sight. They'd left the craggy cliffsides and caves and were now on open, scorched land.

"Just over three," she responded tersely.

Alana swore under her breath again as she placed a hand against the doctor's back, urging her faster as the group broke circle formation, slid into a v-formation with Alana and Hampstead at the point, and sprinted for the bird.

Shadow darkened the skies as the Reaper's ship approached, their weapons lowering into position. They were close, so close she could almost taste it. The Reapers were almost in range, and as soon as they were, they would open fire with no mercy.

"MURDOCK, GET THAT ASS IN GEAR, BRING THE BIRD IN NOW!" Alana screamed, as simultaneously the shields on the ship dropped as it hovered in the air and the hatch opened. Alana shoved the doctor in and turned back to make sure her team was hot on their heels.

That one second of vulnerability was enough for the Reapers to get a lock on the signature. "Let me take the weapons systems," Dr. Hampstead insisted as they all booked it for the bridge. The ship was two levels and larger than most houses with more than enough room on it. The plan was, should it ever become necessary, that the ship would become their mobile base of operations.

"Settle in," Murdock offered as she immediately began a quick systems check. "This system is a---"

"I know what system it is, I designed the pre-cursor to it," Ali said, already flipping switches and hitting buttons. The targeting systems screeched and Alana sent up a silent prayer to a god that she had never entirely believed in.

"We're keeping her around, right?" Jack stage-whispered to Alana. He had a thing for weapons and a thing for women...and then the two combined, he lost himself a little bit.

Alana narrowed her eyes, even as she focused her mental energy on casting a telekinetic shield around the bridge. The entirety of the ship was too big for her to encase, but if they got hit and went down, she could at least protect her people.

"O'Donohue, focus."

"Oh, I am focusing Callahan...I am."

"You know that I can hear everything you're saying, right?" Aly asked, even as she was angling the weapons systems. "Firing on my mark. 3...2...1...mark." Her thumb depressed the buttons on the trigger and immediately three missiles shot off from their ship. Specially designed to target the weapons systems of the Reavers, Aly shot off two spurts of them.

Alana swore that she could see literal hearts forming in Jack's eyes, and lightly shoved him, even as the rest of the team got to their own stations.

"Firing again, targeting engines. On my mark. 3...2...1...mark." A loud explosion could be heard as their artillery hit the vulnerable engine, causing it to combust, and the Reavers' ship to fall out of the sky.

"Marry me," Jack said to Aly, who now had a confirmed hit and had disabled the Reavers.

---

Alana snapped awake in bed to the sound of the emergency alarms blaring. Over the past year the resistance had taken over the shell of what had once been the Hellfire Club of New York City. It was ample room with the bonus of an underground computer system that Alana had been able to make improvements to.

Throughout the building were hardwired security measures, and the moment that somebody set foot on the property, approached their proximity, or brought weapons into their immediate vicinity - among other circumstances - the alarms would sound.

If they were going off now, there was a genuine problem. She had spent too much time finetuning and double checking them for her not to believe that there was a legitimate threat. The fact that they now had Dr. Ali Hampstead on base, and their earlier encounter with the Reapers in Australia had all of her internal alarms blaring.

She grabbed pants and a v-neck to throw on over her undergarments as she ran from her room and through the halls. It took her only moments to wrack her thoughts and figure out who was on the premises. The entire team from earlier had settled on, with the addition of Dr. Hampstead. She couldn't have asked for a better crew.

"Aria, get me in contact with the Knightfall's." Alana said in a clipped tone as she stopped off at one of the armories set throughout the building. Aria was the AI program that she had written, and one who continued to probe the world for ongoing events, allowing Alana to better strategize and keep track of who and what was going on, and where.

>Unable to complete communication at this time.<

"Fck," she muttered under her breath as she scooped her hair back into a ponytail. "Keep trying."

"Scout?"

As soon as she called the name, the one-year-old Caucasian Shepherd-wolf mix puppy rocketed through the door on her too-big paws. With a single bark, she sat at attention, and following Alana's hand commands, trotted over to her side and began moving with her through the building. "Good girl."

"Aria, arm the automatic weapons and offensive shields." She'd spent nearly four months completing the defense systems of the building, and this would be their first true trial.

>Armed.<

"Find me a location on O'Donohue, Murdock, Devereaux, Sanderson, Tennant, and Hampstead."

>All located at the front of the building. Amassing figures coming in. Energy weapons on hand. Forty strong at least. All signs indicate that Reavers have left Australia and pursued you here."

No. No, that couldn't be true. It was too soon, too early, for such an assault upon them. Alana poured on the speed and ran as quickly as she could through the halls and down the grand staircases, lit now only by the emergency lighting. It cast a stark glow upon her as she moved with all the speed and grace that was available to her.

She cringed as she jogged out the front doors. All six of those fearless idiots were in position, and an armed crew of no less than forty was incoming.

"Form up on me, now!" she yelled out. If they were able to get within a thirty foot diameter of her, she'd be able to use her tactile telekinesis to form a shield around them, which, as she'd discovered, would still allow things to exit it.

The incoming force was coming fast and hard. There was only so much time. "They're approaching the land mines," Murdock said as she approached Alana from the right, the others all following suit.

They were an elite fighting unit, one that had been forged together with strength born from the fires of the hell that they lived in. They were one of the world's last chances. With a population that was dwindling and turning against one another, and people peeling off to willfully help the 3rd Society, there was only so much left to salvage of the world. But they were doing their damned best.

That was a question that Alana had been contemplating a lot lately. Was this world worth saving? Sometimes she wasn't so sure, and thought that their best bet would be to ditch out.

That was what they had been trying to figure out for the last six months - just how to do that.

They had come in as a ground force believing that that would give them their best shot at a quiet infiltration into the building. They had been very, very wrong, thought Alana.

A fiery ball of flame lit up the clear midnight sky like macabre fireworks as they hit the first of the landmines. Sometimes the simplest solution was the best.

With no regard for their fellow man, the Reapers continued pressing forward through the front lawn, beginning to fan out.

"O'Donohue, start sniping the flanks. Bring them in tight and give the rest of us a solid target. Devereaux, join him in the endeavor. Everybody else, you're with me. Large-spread weapons, take out as many as you can."

It was almost an hour of shots, counter-shots, tactics and warfare. They had finally thinned them down, all while maintaining their slightly covered position, and with no loss of life. They all had burns of some sort, there had been some near misses as there always was with a group such as this. But there were only fifteen remaining, and hope felt close.

Alana was breathing heavily, the adrenaline rushing through her system. She slipped an additional gun from where she'd tucked it in the back waist band of her pants and began taking shots, aiming for the weak point in the battlesuits - the hitch where the arm connected to the shoulder, conveniently close to the jugular.

White stars were starting to come in on the sides of her vision, and exhaustion was starting to set in with the absence of fresh adrenaline coursing through her system. This was something she had experienced only once before, and then also after extended use of her telekinesis.

"Boss, you okay?" She turned to look into Rachel Murdock's eyes, and shook her head, not in a negative answer, but to shake some sense back into her own head.

"I'm fine," she answered, blinking rapidly.

But she had answered too soon. Even as they picked off the last of the ground soldiers, that unmistkable whirring sound could be heard.

"Son of a bitch," Tennant muttered as he checked his ammo supply.

Silence fell over them as the ship that was moving into airspace blocked out the stars. It was a giant behemoth of a ship, ten times larger than their own.

Alana looked to Ali, knowing that of all of them, she would have the best gauge on what this was.

"It's so beautiful," she whispered in awe. Her eyes were wide, focused on the ship, her mouth slightly agape. "I've never seen anything like it."

"Doctor!" Alana snapped, shoving her shoulder gently in order to shake her out of her reverie.

Ali shook her head, eyes still wide. "It's got layer upon layer of shielding, and even more weapons. There's nothing we have here that can contend, and it will melt through the titanium shields you have set to drop around the building as protection within seconds."

"Everybody in close to me, now," Alana whispered, even as Maria and Kyle shook their heads in tandem.

"You can't be thinking about doing this, Alana," Maria urged as she reached out to her friend.

"There's no other choice. Wouldn't you rather go out fighting?"

"I'd rather not go out at all, y'know?" James Tennant interjected, even as Sanderson elbowed him sharply in the ribs.

"I'm going to shield us, and we're going to run for the ship. You stay in tight or you get fried. Murdock, the second that we get into that ship, you get ready to punch us up out of the atmo. As soon as we reach non-Earth space, you hit the hyperdrive and you get us the hell out of here."

"What?" The echo of voices hit her like a migraine. "We're leaving. There are three other planets we've mapped out that have a population and are habitable for people coming from an Earth atmosphere. We regroup, we come back, and we annihilate the Reapers. But for now...for now, we have to regroup."

It took them three minutes with Scout trotting along beside them to navigate through. The Reapers appeared to be playing an incomprehensible game of cat and mouse. They had yet to fire on the group as they made their way through the building and down deeper into its underground.

"Murdock, pilot duties. Everybody else, weapons systems."

They piled in and immediately acclimated theirselves. Scout laid down behind the chair that Rachel Murdock was sitting in, and wagged her tail twice before settling her snout against her paws, quietly watching all of her people.

"We're a go," Murdock announced as she hit the switch to open the launch doors.

As soon as the craft came out, the Reapers were firing on them with everything they had. "Divert all extra energy equally between shielding and the thrusters. We need to get out of atmo and we need to do it now," Alana ordered, even as she formed a shield around everybody.

Red lights began to flare in the interior of the bridge. "We're taking hits," Devereaux yelled, even as the ship jerked hard to the side.

"Weapons systems are down."

"We're going down, I repeat, we are going down."

"Everybody hold!" Alana yelled, even as Scout whimpered and curled up close to her legs.

"Touching down as softly as I can, but everybody hold tight."

"Hold, hold, hold," Alana yelled again.

The ship jerked as it touched down, and surprisingly the Reapers ship disappeared into the night. There was a single moment of complete and utter silence, save for the blaring interior alarms.

"What the holy hell?" Johnson muttered softly in her slight southern drawl.

Alana looked around. They had wrecked in the middle of a barren field, having gained enough distance to actually make it outside of the city before their defeat was met.

"Where'd they go?" That eerie silence was continuing, setting everybody on edge as Scout began to growl and whimper at the same time.

"There," Doctor Hampstead said, her gaze focusing in on the edge of the field. Thirty of them, this time. And they were out of ammo and their ship was wrecked. Intact enough that they had all been able to get out of it with no injure and no struggle, but very much not in the condition that they so desperately required it.

"Pick them down, take them out. Conserve ammo, but do it, and do it right," she said quietly, pulling her own weapon out. She fired off five shots before it clicked empty, and they all did a quick weapon inventory. Not even the serum that Ashley Knightfall had injected into her, granting her elevated stats and strength, could save them now.

"Out," was the word of the night, as it echoed through the group.

The oncoming group of Reavers was beginning to fan out and circle them. They weren't close enough to trees or any other natural cover to even try and make a run for it.

Was this what it had come to, Alana wondered. Was this what their legacy was? To die in a field, by freaking Reapers? By humans, their own kind? Fury surged through her. This wasn't what they had worked for. They had worked to save the world, to bring themselves back from the brink, and in the end it wasn't even the goddamn 3rd Society that was to be their undoing?

It seemed like a cruel stroke of fate. Of course, fate had never been particularly kind to any of them. They had all grown up in the beginnings of a shadow war as the 3rd Society maneuvered things behind the scenes. None of them had truly had the chance to grow up in the world that they should have. And as the nature of things became blatantly obvious, even the semblance of normalcy had been stripped away like it was nothing more than a comforting aritifice.

Alana crouched to her knees, and wrapped her arms around Scout's neck, burying her cheek in the puppy's fur. Hot tears streamed quietly down her face as she focused her energy - all of that anger, that hatred, that sadness, that misery - into strengthening the shield."

"It was a pleasure," she whispered to her team.

And then the Reapers opened fire.

It was a deluge. Unending as the violet beams of energy hit her shield again and again. Never had anything broken through it, but never had it suffered damage such as thing, directed so precisely at it.

There was complete and utter silence within the bubble as Alana stood to her full height, one hand resting on Scout's head as the dog stood steadfast by her side.

Her energy was waning, her knees were weak, blood was dripping from her nose and ears, tracing trails across her skin. White stars were creeping into the edges of her vision, and she could feel her strength leaving her.

She fell to one knee, and Scout quickl shoved herself under Alana's arm to help steady her. The Reapers continued firing, and Alana could feel the shield weakening. Just as it was about to drop, everything went black...and then a bright, stark white.

What Is

Every inch of her body ached. It felt as if she'd gone several rounds with a heavyweight champ and come out understandably worse for the wear.

She blinked rapidly and tried to sit up, only to quickly rethink that particular endeavor.

Wasn't she supposed to be dead? The last thing that she remember was her vision going black and the Reapers opening fire on her and her team.

Slowly she opened her eyes and looked around. She was in the middle of a soft grassy field. It was night and from the positioning of the stars she gleamed that she was somewhere in Europe. But beyond that...nothing made sense.

As she went to sit up, a cold nose was shoved into her neck. Turning, Alana pushed her hand into the fur of Scout, bringing the puppy close to her as she nuzzled her. "Puppy," she whispered into her fur, holding her tightly for a minute.

"We're going to have a walk ahead of us."

She didn't know where she was, she didn't know when she was. But she knew that she had to find out, and quickly. And she had to try and locate her team.

Alana groaned audibly as she stood up. This was going to be rough.