Cold Fusion - A Sci-fi, Fantasy, and Fusion Short Story Anthology

Chapter 4: The Plan

Fletch's mind churned as he followed Chhon the rest of the way down the corridor. Lead a rebellion? Against the game masters and the Peacekeepers?? It was madness! How was he supposed to do that? He had no weapons, no plan, or even an objective. Not to mention, he seemed to be the only one involved in this crazy scheme. While it was true that he didn't love their masters or their heavy handed thugs, they were too much to defeat even with access to all of his unlocked abilities. Not by himself. So why would Chhon recruit him?

His eyes narrowed thoughtfully. Unless he wasn't alone.

"You sent the pridelord to contact me, didn't you," he accused in a quiet voice as they stepped through the far door and into the staging area.

"I was only instructed to recruit him," Chhon quickly replied, again touching the device at her wrist to get them through the heavy door standing between the staging area and the commons beyond. Leading the way out, she turned enough to let Fletch go past her. As he did, she went on.

"I told him you were the key to obtaining his, and all of the factions' freedom." Her eyes narrowed. "His impatience to see a plan put in place urged him into action."

"So he came looking for me," Fletch noted grimly as they stepped into the surging crowd filling the commons.

"Yes. And, in doing so, nearly destroyed a plan Trahd, myself, and a handful of trusted scientists and academics had worked on for nearly 10 years," she hissed, her frustration bubbling into her words, making it the second emotion Fletch had ever seen from a therapsid. "That fool!"

10 years? Was it coincidence that the purge of the cerebrates had ended in that time frame?

"Okay, two questions," he began as Chhon steered them towards the Ultraviolet Zone, a human enclave inhabited almost exclusively by blood ghost variants.

As their name suggested, the ghosts were stealth and speed specialists, their abilities triggered by drinking the blood of a victim. Stealth got them close enough to bite, and blood-fueled speed got them out of danger. They were effective against wolves, gators and cats, less so against birds, and useless against the echo-location the fish used with all of their variants.

The ghosts were also creepy as hell. Any creature that needed a blood meal to be effective triggered all sorts of self-preservation instincts, especially in their own species. Fletch remembered Galen saying he hid out with ghosts a couple years back and the experience haunted him to this day. And here they were, heading straight for their enclave.

He pushed aside the sensation of foreboding and refocused on his first question.

"If the central government initially saw us a threat capable of wiping out their species, why did they bother keeping us around?"

Guiding them around a resealing station, Chhon answered over her shoulder.

"In a word, Darmak," she said.

"Is that some sort of weapon they were going to use against us?" the human asked.

"Yes, and no," Chhon answered somewhat evasively. Then she was explaining: "Darmak was a rogue researcher that became the central government's most powerful science advisor. It was she that had the Academy of Science disbanded and Trahd arrested. She also convinced the government to initiate the Apex Project."

"The Apex Project?" Fletch asked. "But I thought ..."

Before he could finish his sentence, Chhon was pulling him with unexpected strength into the shadows clustered around the back of a storage shed. Just in time; as the human began rounding on the slender reptilian to demand a reason for the quick detour, he caught sight of a Peacekeeper patrol moving into the commons. They were going slow, the sensor pods on the shoulders of their power-assisted combat armor carefully scanning back and forth. They were obviously looking for something.