Chapter 4: Mission Interrupted
The deep, bone-melting exhaustion of satiation held me under for hours. I surfaced from it slowly, my body recognizing an absence before my mind did. The warmth at my back was gone. The quiet purr had vanished.
I opened my eyes to grey dawn light filtering through the rain-streaked windows. Greer stood at the foot of the bed, a silhouette of contained purpose. She was fully dressed in her field uniform, the sleek, black athleisure suit hugging every curve, the reinforced panels over her shoulders and thighs giving her a deadly elegance. She was fastening her utility belt, her tail swishing in a slow, measured arc behind her.
Every movement was efficient, clinical. This wasn’t the playful, heat-maddened creature from the night. This was Officer Greer Grant Nelson.
“Trouble?” My voice was a gravelly rumble. I was already sitting up, the silk sheet pooling at my waist.
She didn’t look at me, her focus on a holographic display shimmering from her wrist gauntlet. “Nothing I can’t handle. Chatter on a secure band I shouldn’t have access to. Advanced weapons tech moving through the old storm drains under the finance district.”
“You’re recovering from a spinal contusion,” I said, swinging my legs out of bed. The phantom heat of her still clung to my skin.
“And you’re recovering from me,” she shot back, finally glancing over. A predatory grin touched her lips, but it didn’t reach her eyes, which were sharp, analytical. “It’s a tracking job. In and out. My specialty.”
I was already pulling on my plain, dark blue reinforced jumpsuit from a nearby chair. It was unadorned, lacking any emblem. “I’m coming.”
“Ron—”
“You’re fast. I’m durable. You’re a tracker. I’m a blunt instrument.” I zipped up the front. “It’s a good team. You said so yourself last night, right before you started begging.”
She hissed, but it was perfunctory, her ears flattening for only a second before pricking forward again. She assessed me, her gaze running over my shoulders, my hands. “Try to keep up, old man.”
The city’ underbelly breathed differently. The antiseptic chill of the penthouse was replaced by the thick, warm stench of stagnant water, decay, and industrial runoff. The storm drains were vast, cathedral-like tunnels of crumbling brick and modern concrete, lit by the occasional dripping utility light and the cool blue glow from Greer’s wrist projector.
She moved ahead of me, a phantom in the gloom. One moment she was a silhouette against a distant light, the next she was gone, having leapt fifteen feet up to a rusted pipe to examine a scuff mark invisible to me. She dropped back down without a sound.
“This way,” she murmured, her voice echoing strangely. “Three of them. Heavy boots. Dragging something on a hover-pallet. Recently.”
“How recently?”
She paused, crouching by a wet patch on the concrete. She dipped a single claw-tipped finger into it and brought it to her nose, her slit pupils widening. “Two hours. Maybe less. The ozone from the pallet’s motivator hasn’t fully dispersed.” She looked up at me, her green eyes luminous. “Told you you’d slow me down.”
I chuckled, following her as she loped forward. “I’m setting a pace your spine can handle. Gratitude would be appropriate.”
“I’ll show you gratitude later,” she purred, vanishing around a corner.
The banter was a thread of normalcy, a lifeline to the people we were outside these dripping tunnels. It was light, flirty, a game we played over the serious business of the hunt. We were, against all odds, having fun.
“See anything?” I called out as she scaled a sheer overflow ledge.
“Just your dim future if you keep shouting,” she called back, her tail flicking. “They’ve stopped dragging. Lifted the pallet. Carrying it now. Strong.”
Her agility was a humbling thing to witness. She flowed over obstacles I had to brute-force past or dismantle quietly. A chain-link fence blocked a side tunnel. I carefully peeled a seam open, the metal groaning. Greer, already on the other side, rolled her eyes.
“Such a caveman.”
“You love it,” I grunted, squeezing through.
Her answering grin was all fang. “The evidence is admittedly compelling.”
The tunnel widened into a vast, circular junction where several drains met. A century-old concrete platform held modern equipment: portable worklights, data-servers humming under tarps, and crates stamped with damaged logos I recognized—Stane International.
And the armor.
Six suits stood on rigging frames like silent, malevolent insects. They were bulkier than Stark’s classic design, less elegant, all grey matte plating and visible hydraulics. Guardsmen. Mass-produced tin soldiers for the highest bidder.
Greer dropped down beside me from a perch above, her landing silent. We crouched behind a mound of silt and debris. Her playful demeanor had evaporated. Her ears were flat against her skull, her tail held stiff and low.
“That’s a problem,” she whispered.
“Understatement. They’re prepping them. See the open access panels? Loading software.”
“Six against two is bad math.”
“For them,” I said, cracking my knuckles. The sound was obscenely loud in the space. “They’re in a tunnel. No flight clearance. Close quarters. That’s my office.”
She looked at me, her eyes calculating. The heat was still there, a banked fire beneath the professional ice. It flashed in her smile. “Alright, big man. You want to be the blunt instrument? Let’s give them a target they can’t ignore.”
She didn’t wait for a plan. She was the plan. She launched herself into the open space with a yowling battle-cry that rebounded off the walls, a sound designed to terrify. She landed atop a crate, shattering it with the impact, scattering components.
“Hey, tinheads! Delivery for you! Return to sender!”
Three figures in jumpsuits near the suits scrambled. One dove for an open helmet. Greer was a blur of black and orange. She ripped a power cable from its housing and whipped it across the platform, sending sparks showering over the other two.
“Suit up! Suit up!” one yelled.
This was her role. Chaos. Speed. A distraction so perfect it was art. I waited as the first two Guardsmen clanged their helmets sealed, jet boots igniting to lift them unsteadily off the platform. They rose maybe ten feet, their repulsor arrays in their palms whining as they charged, seeking a target.
They focused on the darting, impossible-to-hit feline below.
They never saw me coming from the side.
I came out of the shadows at a full sprint and leapt, not at the suits, but at the space between them. I caught the first one around the waist in mid-air, my momentum carrying us like a wrecking ball into the second. We crashed into the brick wall in a shriek of tearing metal and fracturing concrete. The impact would have pulverized every bone in a normal man. I felt it as a profound, satisfying thud.
The suit in my arms was crumpled, its occupant screaming inside. I dropped it. The other tried to right itself, its repulsor rising. I grabbed the arm, braced a foot against its chest, and pulled. The hydraulic assembly tore free with a shower of sparks and synthetic oil.
The close quarters were a melee of my design. The third suit powered up and fired. A repulsor blast caught me square in the back, hurling me forward into a support column. Concrete exploded. I turned, shook off the dust, and charged through the next blast. It burned away my jumpsuit’s shoulder, tingling against my skin.
I got inside its guard, grabbed the helmet in both hands, and twisted. The metal shrieked in protest, then gave with a loud crack. I tossed the helmet aside. The pale, terrified face inside gawped at me before I pushed the suit over backwards.
Greer was handling the remaining unprepared techs with contemptuous ease, disarming them with precise, non-lethal strikes, her claws sheathed. But two more Guardsmen had sealed up. They were smarter, staying on the platform, using the crates for cover, their twin repulsors laying down overlapping fields of fire.
I was a bulletproof tank, but Greer wasn’t. A near-miss scorched the concrete at her feet, forcing her into a desperate, scrambling dive behind the servers.
“Ron!” Her voice wasn’t scared. It was an order.
I vaulted over a crate, putting myself directly in their line of fire. The blasts hammered into my chest, bright and hot, driving me back an inch with each impact. I gritted my teeth and kept walking into it, a relentless, advancing wall.
“Hey!” I roared. The sound drowned out the repulsor whine. “Your toys tickle.”
They focused everything on me, the air crackling with ionized energy. It was exactly what Greer needed. While they were blinded by their own fire, she moved. A silent shadow. She came from above, having scaled the tunnel wall and sprung from a pipe.
She landed on the back of one suit, her claws finding the seam at the neck. She didn’t try to pierce the armor. She jammed her fingers in and ripped backwards. Wires and conduits snapped. The suit spasmed and went rigid, toppling over. The other swiveled, but I was already there. I grabbed its weapon arm, shoved it towards the ceiling, and drove my other fist into the chest plate once, twice. On the third punch, it cratered inward with a final, dying hydraulic sigh.
Silence rushed back in, broken only by the drip of water, the hiss of damaged electronics, and the moans of the downed techs.
Greer stood atop the slumped suit, breathing hard, a wild light in her eyes. The thrill of the fight was on her, mingling with the ever-present heat. She looked at me across the wreckage, my chest smoldering, her fur standing on end.
“Not bad,” she said, hopping down.
“For an old man?”
“I was talking about me.” She walked over, stopped just in front of me, and placed a hand on my seared chest. Her rough tongue darted out, licking a smear of grime from my chin. It tickled. “But you were adequate.”
I pulled out my secure SHIELD beacon, activated it, and tossed it onto a crate. “Cleanup on aisle five. Let’s go before they ask for paperwork.”
We left the groaning men and their broken toys in the damp gloom. As we navigated back toward the surface, the tension of the fight slowly bled away, replaced by the familiar, simmering awareness of each other. The hunt was over. The other hunt, the one in our blood, was already beginning anew.
She walked a step ahead, her tail curling playfully. “My place is closer,” she said, not looking back.
I didn’t argue.fit