SmackDown: MadMike's Revenge!

Round 8: Shadowhunter - @bloodsword (WINNING STORY!)

Shadowhunter

by bloodsword

The strand of DNA danced above the holo-emitter for a moment before a wave dismissed it.

"Target confirmed," she said in a low voice as she brought up several holo-displays. "The payment?"

"32 billion, as per the contract," a quiet voice announced in her ear. "Termination by any means possible."

Her expression tightened.

"I don't like political assassinations, Dante," she tautly noted. "They're messy. I don't like messy."

"The entire population of Nuranis doesn't like their human overlords, Imrulan," the quiet voice retorted. "They've emptied the bank to buy the only option to get the boot off their necks."

Imrulan's expression tightened even further. Humans. Ever since they came into the sector, they had been gobbling up assets at prodigious pace.

Nobody had believed that the upstart species was as violent and warmongering as some of the First Contact ambassadors were saying. That is, until their fleets began hammering their way past border emplacements and taking vast slices of territory away from their previous owners. The consolidation invasions of the occupied planets within that territory were even more brutal, the humans following something they called 'scorched earth' to defeat their opponents.

Millions of sentients on dozens of planets had perished in the devastating campaign. A campaign that saw the water planet of Nuranis conquered after a fiery five days. Now, nearly eight years later, they finally wanted to do something about it.

She just wished they had found somebody else to do it, is all.

Sighing with resignation, Imrulan brought up Nuranis on her navigation screen.

"Prepping to jump to slipstream, Dante," she reported as she began setting her vessel up to create an artificial wormhole that would take her from her current location to near-Nuranis space. "Catch you on the other side."

Normally most sentients would brace their rather frail flesh for the rough ride that was a wormhole transition in a small starship. Imrulan, however, wasn't most sentients. She was a Niski, a species that possessed bodies made up of discrete energy fields holding together a particulate flux instead of flesh and bone. While such bodies presented certain challenges when interacting with the universe, it also presented certain advantages. One of which she was about to use to facilitate this contract.

A dance of wraith-like fingers over her holographic interface activated the cloning tank she had buried in her vessel's belly. Once it signaled it was ready to operate, she fed it the DNA sequence she had examined a moment ago. Another signal indicated the tank had received and processed the DNA and was now ready to build her a flesh and blood body from the double-helical blueprint.

A smile of satisfaction touched Imrulan's wispy face then she was activating the tank. Time to build the suit she would use to get her close enough to her human target to effect her task: eliminate the highest ranking human official on Nuranis.

For the body she was building Imrulan could, as an energy being, inhabit as if it were a suit of clothing, or armor, using her body's particulate flux to give it life. It was better than a shapeshifter's moldable form, which, though it looked like the target, still inherently belonged to the shapeshifter's species.