Breakpoint - Part 5 (Patreon)

Part Five

Rin

“It's a big fucking thing, innit?” Rin asked Len. “They aren't supposed to be this big, are they?”

“I'm not an etymologist, but–”

“Entomologist,” she corrected.

That seemed to throw him, because he paused for a long moment before he turned to look at her. “Wait, what?”

“Entomology is the study of insects, chief,” she said. “Etymology is the study of origin of words.”

“Well shit, Rin, if you can tell me the difference between those,” he chuckled. “You should know way better than I do.”

“I don't study bugs, boss. Just people.” She was trying to read the expression on his face, but Len had always had a great knack for being impossible to read. That had always frustrated her, but she'd learned that you just had to follow up with him and if he was in a particularly giving mood he'd shade in some of the details that his expression had been hinting towards. “So again I ask, they aren't supposed to be this big, are they?”

“No, Rin,” he said as he crouched down to take a closer look at the giant insect below them. “They are not supposed to be this goddamn big.” His hand reached down and tapped a snarl of machinery jutting from one of its sides. “Nor are they supposed to have electronics grafted onto them, but lo and behold, so it is written, so let it be done.”

“You know what it's for?”

“No,” he sighed. “I've never been the engineer of our lot, and we don't have any sign of Mick showing up yet.” Len tapped at the metal with his fingertip twice, the scrap giving a little ping-ping in response – before sighing deeply. “But I can tell you that in twenty some years of military, paramilitary, semi-military and completely off-the-books military work, I've never seen anything fucking like this damn thing, and if that doesn't scare the crap out of you, well, I'm not sure what will.”

“So we've got an impossibly big bug with a bunch of technology we don't recognize on the outside of it...”

“And it's dead,” Len added.

“And it's dead,” she agreed. “But at least we know what did that. I shot it with a fucking arrow and it died. Now what do we do with it?”

“I'd love to try and pick it apart, but I don't think we'd learn anything,” he said, sitting down alongside it. “And if we leave it here, they'll know we found it. Burn it, maybe?”

“You sure it'll burn?” She didn't know a whole lot about bugs, but she at least remembered they had exoskeletons, and she wasn't sure exactly how flammable those were. It had never really been a concern to her before now.

He sighed then shook his head. Rin didn't like seeing the chief uncertain. It wasn't an expression he wore often, and it didn't suit him well. “You're right. We don't know that it would burn. How far to the water?”

She glanced over at the hill. As with all things involving navigation on the island, whatever estimate she gave him was probably just hoping for the best, although it seemed like most of the changes happened sometime at night, and during any given day things remained mostly the same. Mostly. “We can probably haul it there in just four or five minutes. You think that'll do?”

“It'll have to,” he said.

She nodded her agreement, and while the two of them could've talked about it for a while longer, instead they just got on with it. It wasn't anywhere near as heavy as it looked, so once they each grabbed a piece of it, it wasn't that hard to drag the giant insect away from where it had died and through the trees until they reached a clifftop overlook. Once there she gave it a stern shove with one of her boots and the thing tumbled off, crashing along the rocky sides of the cliff while it fell before making a loud splash tinged with a bit of a crunch as well. It was … satisfying.

“Never seen anything like it anywhere else on the island,” she said as they started walking along the edge of the cliff parallel to the water, the sounds of waves a hundred feet or so below them. “But then again, the amount of freaky shit I've already seen on this island will blow your fucking mind.”

“Like what?”

“Boss,” she sighed. “Trust me when I tell you that you're just gonna have to see most of it for yourself, otherwise you're gonna think I'm going out of my fucking skull. None of it makes any sense, and half the time I have to remind myself that this is all what I'm really seeing. Distances that shrink and grow whenever the fuck they want, buildings that are only there some of the time...”

She saw that caught his attention as he turned to look carefully at her, narrowing his eyes a bit suspiciously. “Buildings that disappear? Really?” He stopped and crouched down for a moment, looking through a handful of stones that were of various shapes and sizes before picking one up. He narrowed his eyes, shifted his arm and then winged it as hard as he could off towards the ocean. He looked almost disappointed when it splashed into the water a good distance away.

“You weren't hoping for some sort of invisible forcefield or something to briefly pop into view, were you?”

He smirked before giving off a slightly guilty chuckle. “Maybe.”

“Little too optimistic, maybe?”

“Yeah, maybe,” he agreed. “But at this point, I'm not going to take anything as a fucking given. Next thing we know, gravity's going to take five and we're going to be flying off towards the skies.”

“God, I hope not. I've gotten rather used to having gravity around. It makes my tits look great.”

“I forgot to ask earlier, Rin, but what the hell were you doing when you shot that damn thing with an arrow?”

“Out hunting for wild pigs,” she told him. “Somebody's gotta get the meat for them to be cooking up in the kitchen and it gives me an excuse to be mobile and constantly exploring the island without anybody asking me too many questions.”

“Pigs are the most common thing you get?”

“Yes and no,” she told him with a shrug. “Sometimes it's weird and exotic shit like bears or mountain lions. That kind of thing.”

“This is not the kind of environment that should naturally have bears or mountain lions on it, Rin,” he told her.

“So that much I did know, boss, but I'm telling you, there's all sorts of wild shit roaming around on this island,” she said. “I'm pretty sure I've stumbled across what used to be a zoo or an animal research facility at some points, but the damn thing isn't reliably in the same location on any given day, so more or less you're just going to have to stumble onto the fucking thing if you want to go exploring any of it. Maybe the lions and bears came from there.”

“Great. Just fucking great. And here I was hoping we could have a map of the place drawn out long before Mick showed up, just so I could put to rest his bitching and moaning about how hard this job was going to be.”

“Forget it, chief. We're never gonna map this place out in anything other than vague terms, and even then, it's never going to be all that reliable,” she said as they started walking downhill while the land sloped back down towards the water. “I could tell you wanted to try, but you weren't gonna believe me until you saw it with your own two eyes.” She crouched down and picked up a large stick, standing back up, using it as a walking stick. “I also saw you found Mira. How's that going?”

“I'm glad she's okay,” Len said, his voice keeping all of his emotion played closely to the vest. “And she seems like she's mostly who she used to be.”

“Mostly?” Rin said with a scowl. “I can't say I'm a fan of that word, and you didn't used to be either, boss.”

He nodded in agreement. “I'm still not. But there's only so much ourselves any of us can be when we're missing half our memories or more. I'm still trying to decide if that's what has me most concerned about her or if it's the other thing.”

“What's 'the other thing?'”

“She's... something about this place makes her uneasy.”

“Well, shit, boss, it's doing that to all of us.”

“Yeah, except Mira doesn't get uneasy. It was one of the things about her that always blew my mind the most,” he said with a tiny blip of laughter. “I've always been playing the part of the hard-ass, but that girl puts me to shame. Nothing rattles her cage.” He glanced back towards the center of the island, towards the mountain or volcano that seemed to be the only constant in the island's landscape, in seemingly grim admiration. “Least nothing used to. But this place sure does.”

“It rattles everybody, boss. No need to be ashamed of that.”

“It wouldn't have rattled Mira in her old life. That means she isn't entirely my Mira, and I can't trust her like she was.”

“Everybody here's a little different than they used to be, boss,” Rin said to him. “Even I don't feel exactly... what the hell is that?” She stopped in her tracks and pointed down deeper into the valley at a concrete structure in the middle of a field, no high trees anywhere near it, partially covered in heavy vines and salt weathering, a pair of giant painted-green steel doors partially open at one end of it, a small hole in part of the roof, although the size of it was difficult to gauge from the distance. “I've never seen that place before.”

That brought a smile to Len's face, something she was glad to see. She preferred him being smiling and invincible rather than dragging the weight of his expectations around behind him like he had since his arrival on the island. “That sounds like an invitation for us to go and have a look at it,” he said. “Don't you think?”

“Shit, we'd better not look away, otherwise who the hell knows if it'll still be there?” she laughed. The two of them quickly made their way down the hill towards the open field, heading over towards the building before Rin suddenly raised her fist sharply, sending the silent 'hold in place' signal, which made Len stop in his tracks.

“What's up?”

She pointed to a sign and though he didn't recognize the language or what it said, there was an icon he very much did recognize – that of a disc with a small explosion drawn over it. “Looks like a minefield.”

“Shit. Think it goes all the way around the building?”

“Probably,” she said, crouching down to examine the earth a little bit.

Neither of them spoke for a minute or two, considering their situation, but eventually Len ventured forth with an opinion. “Think we should just go see the building anyway?”

She chuckled, looking back over her shoulder at him with a nod. “Read my mind, chief. We just need to take it slow.”

“Or we could try something else instead,” he said as he waved a finger off to the side, where a number of heavy oil drum barrels were busy with the very important job of gathering rust. She immediately caught on to his idea.

The two of them spent half an hour putting together an impromptu system with them rolling barrels out into the field, watching them roll quite some distance before occasionally popping off an old landmine. The explosions weren't especially large, and after a few hours, they'd made enough of a path to get to the building safely.

As they approached the structure, Rin noticed it was relatively undamaged, although there were very old bullet holes in parts of the concrete, peeking out through the heavy foliage around the outside of it. “Whatever happened here, it didn't happen recently,” she said to him.

“And we know the island hasn't always been gun free.”

“Oh, I knew that almost the minute I got here,” she said. “I found spent shell casings littering all over the island. In fact, I'd say the island's probably been under siege at least a couple of times, and from multiple different countries, although nothing in the past twenty or thirty years, maybe a lot longer. Last time this place was being attacked was probably around the time the Berlin Wall fell.”

“Makes sense,” he replied. “If this place had been on anybody's radar recently, it'd look a lot differently. What're you thinking? Armory of some kind? Troop bunker?”

She frowned a little bit as they moved over towards the doorway. “Not sure. Can't imagine it would be something you'd want people coming near a lot if there's a minefield around most of it. Looks like there might have been a roadway here at one point, but even still, this looks like the kind of place you hole up in and don't want to come out of, not the kind of place you need to be in and out of all the time, y'know?”

“Maybe,” he agreed. “No real external markings either, so whoever was here, they weren't going out of their way to advertise which team they were playing for.”

“Might be covered entirely by the foliage, chief.”

“Yeah, suppose that's possible too.”

“There is literally a metric fuckton of it.”

“Glad you clarified,” he said as he started to peek his head around the corner into the building. “There's a shitload of difference between a metric fuckton and an imperial fuckt– Holy Jesus.” He had leaned in enough to get a peek inside the building and as soon as she could get around the corner behind him, she completely respected why.

The inside of the building looked like it had been some sort of laboratory with a number of open and empty large steel cages scattered around the interior. There were many kinds of heavy machinery also strewn around the place, but as they moved inside of the building it became clear that at least some of them were antiquated computer parts, the kind from maybe the 1970s at best. Certainly nothing with a modern circuit board on it. No, these were all vacuum tubes and punch cards, although she also saw some magnetic tape strewn around the place, no doubt rendered completely useless by exposure to the elements not to mention all the time that had surely passed since it was last safely encased in its spool housing. Several of the cages had shackles and chains in them with manacles either far too big or far too small for human usage, all of which lay open regardless, some pried open, some ripped open and some, it seemed, opened by the key still resting within them.

That wasn't to say that the place was deserted. Oh no, there were skeletons all over the damn place, most still in parts or pieces of their uniforms. And it looked like after their fight in which, at first glance anyway, Rin had to assume there were no survivors, their bodies had been left to rot here. And yet even the most daring of scavenger animals had not been bold enough to come here to feast upon their bodies. Which made the whole puzzle even that more complex.

The uniforms were the hardest thing to figure out. Because based on what they could see even at just a first glance, there were at least four kinds of uniforms here, none of which made any sense at all. The first ones she spotted were Nazi uniforms from the 40s, which made some degree of sense considering what she'd suspected about some of the island's history, but the next ones she could identify were North Korean uniforms from the 50s. After that were a couple of American G.I. outfits, but they looked like late 70s or maybe even early 80s. And then there was the last one, colorful and decorative, and so utterly out of place. There was only one corpse in the contrasting attire, but that single one stood out like a spotlight because it so didn't belong with all the others. Rin crouched down to look at it with wonder, the three colors bright and brilliant, almost as if daring dirt and grime to contaminate their presence. The skeleton within was still clenching onto a pistol with one hand and a knife in the other, a black beret still resting atop the skull, a bullet hole penetrating through part of both.

“What the fuck is a member of the Papal Swiss Guard doing here in the middle of fucking nowhere?” Rin asked out loud, probably not loud enough for Len to hear her, but she was mostly just thinking verbally. “There's, like, a barely more than a hundred of them in the whole goddamn world.”

“Rin, I think you better come take a look at this so I'm sure I'm not losing my fucking mind,” he called over from behind one of the cages.

“Is it crazier than a member of the Swiss Guard?” she yelled back at him, both of them unable to see the other's position from their obscured locations behind wreckage. “Because I've got one of those over here, and that's pretty fucking weird! So I ask again... crazier than that?”

He paused for a second, as if giving her question genuine consideration before he answered the only way she wasn't expecting him to. “Yes. Yes, I'm pretty sure it is.”

That made Rin frown. They were meant to be exploring the building, not playing a fucking game of Top This. She pulled the part of the uniform with the emblem off, the body beneath her apparently a Major at the time of his death, walking over towards where she could see the top of Len's head peeking out from behind some cages. “Okay, what beats a member of his Holiness's private security detail?”

“Cowboy?” Len said, pointing to the body in front of him, a weird grin on his face.

Rin closed her eyes before turning her head to look where he'd been pointing, trying to convince herself that whatever she saw when she opened it would be easily explained and dismissed, somebody wearing attire similar to what Len thought he saw, but not actually that.

Then she opened her goddamned eyes.

When she opened them, the body was almost exactly what she feared it would be. The clothing was thick and heavy, totally unlike a costume of a cowboy, but in fact like the sort of thing a real cowboy would've been wearing. There was a Stetson hat just off to one side, and the body had on thick leather boots that had clearly seen more than their fair share of use, with tiny metal spurs jutting from the backs of them. There was also a bullwhip hanging from the belt. Like all the bodies, however, the actual firearms were missing. Even the individual bullets from the cowboy's bandoleer had been removed and absconded with. The skull also had a clear bullet hole through it. It seemed like a lot of these bodies did.

“Fucking hell, chief,” she sighed, crouching down to inspect the corpse a little further. “I'm all proud of myself because I find a member of the Pope's Fucking Honor Guard and you gotta go find Billy The Fucking Kid.”

“The actual–?”

“No, not the actual Billy the Kid, you twit,” she scoffed. “But everything about this guy screams late 1800s to me. No labels on any of the outfits, everything feels handmade. Good odds he was what he looks like he was.” She paused to inspect the damage done to him. In addition to the bullet hole in the skull, parts of the jacket had additional holes, stained with dried blood that had seeped into the leather and cotton itself. “Of course, these bullet holes look like they were made something a bit more modern than an old Colt Peacemaker.”

“We thinking all these people were in some kind of shoot-out... together?”

“I mean,” she said, standing up to glance over the room. “Maybe? I can't imagine that if it wasn't at the same point that somebody would've come and cleared away these bodies.”

“But all of the guns are missing, so somebody's been in here since then.”

“Not just the guns either,” she said. “Grenades, bullets, explosives, even combat knives are missing off the bodies.”

“Left the whip, though.”

“You know how to use a whip?” she asked him sarcastically.

“Only in my dreams,” he sighed. “I dressed up as Indiana Jones for Halloween, like, five different times.”

“You can take his whip and start practicing,” she told him. “I don't think he's gonna mind.”

Len seemed to be considering for the moment then crouched down and took the belt with the whip off the corpse, sliding it and fastening it around his own waist. “Who the hell knows if we're gonna get back here,” he said. “Might be now or never.”

“You're right. Who knows when we'll be able to get back here,” she agreed. “That means we should give this area a pretty thorough search before we head out.”

“Can't be here too much longer,” he said, gesturing to the fading sun they could see through the doorway. “Anything more than an hour or two and we're going to be trekking back to the city through pitch blackness. Assuming we can still fucking find the place anyway. So let's be quick about it.”

“You got it, chief.”

The two of them spent a bit looking through the machinery, trying to discern what purposes any of it served, but there was so much damage and the parts all thrown together so badly that all they could be sure of was that some sort of testing had been happening here. They also noticed a surprising lack of handwritten notes or paperwork, though. None of the soldiers had any forms of identification on them – no dogtags, no wallets, not even pictures of their loved ones well concealed in some pocket. There were no nameplates or ranks on most of them – it seemed like the member of the Swiss Guard had been an exception – and nothing seemed to give any real indication of who was here first, who had been attacking, how they had gotten here, what they'd been looking for or who'd taken all the guns.

There was also no clear indication what had caused the hole in the roof, which looked larger than it had from the distance, although still no bigger than maybe the size of a car. It had looked like it might have been mortar fire at first. They'd grown more concerned after a few minutes inspection when both of them had reached the same conclusion – it had been broken outward from the inside and neither of them could find a blast point of origin, nor explosives residue.

Each minute they spent inside the bunker made Rin feel even less comfortable than she already was with the place, and they'd barely explored the front quarter of it. There was a lot more real estate going back into the darkness that they hadn't set foot on, because neither of them had a flashlight with them. She preferred staying closer to the light seeping into the building, even surrounded by the dead as she was.

“Ho-lee shiiiiiiit,” she heard Len say from over her shoulder while she was giving one of the corpses a very thorough search, looking for anything identifiable at all. “You better come over and take a look at this. And if you see a backpack or a bag of some kind, bring it with you.”

She stood up and looked to find him just on the edge of the light towards the middle of the bunker, standing next to a giant pallet with a heavy tarp over it. She knew one of the American soldiers had a satchel bag along side him, so she headed over to that body, scooped it up then started making her way back towards the palate. “I don't know what you want to haul back, boss. Remember we can't lock anything up anyway.”

“I think just hiding a few of these or, y'know, keeping them with us at all times wouldn't be too much of a bad thing, especially considering we don't know how to get back here easily,” he said, as he lifted up the tarp.

The sudden reflection of light caught her off guard and she had to raise one of her hands to block the glare before stepping forward to prevent the light from behind her casting down into it so she could see clearly, although once she could, she wasn't entirely convinced she wasn't hallucinating. “No fucking way,” she muttered beneath her breath.

Beneath the tarp, stacked nearly shoulder high, in a square shape about eight feet to a side, were hundreds and hundreds of gold bricks. Len picked one up of the top and it had clear weight to it as he turned to show her inscribed on top of the brick a pontiff's hat flanked by an upside key crossed beneath it to form an x shape. “The Holy See,” he told her. “It's the Pope's insignia. I guess we know why there was a member of the Swiss Guard here. This is Vatican gold.”

“Vatican gold? Cowboys? Nazis? Giant mecha bugs? What the unholy fuck have you gotten us into, chief?” she sighed, although she was reaching to pull a couple of gold bricks to slide into the bag as she said it.

“Believe me, Rin, if I had any clue, I would absolutely tell you. But I think it's safe to say that whatever the fuck we expected to be on this place, all of this,” he said, gesturing the bunker around them. “This was definitely not it.”

With six bricks slung into a bag, they made their way back out the way they came in, and when they were about half way up the hill, they both looked back to see that not only the building but the entire clearing behind them had disappeared and been replaced by a sloping incline covered in dense palm trees.

Rin was certain she heard Len grumbling about fucking quantum relocation the entire eventless hike back the rest of the way to the village.

Harry

The sun was starting to go down on his second day on the island, and Harry was no closer to a decision now than he was when he'd woken up that morning. He'd been looking forward to getting out and exploring the island a bit by himself, but the minute he was up and out of bed, it became clear that neither Calisto nor Stella wanted to let him out of their sights.

They talked to him while he was on the toilet taking his morning shit, one of them sitting on the countertop, the other using the shower. While he was in the shower, one of them joined him while the other was waiting taking her turn on the counter top.

When the three of them had headed out to get some breakfast, he found that one of them was always walking in front of him and the other was always walking behind him, and neither of them were all that talkative when they were moving between places.

At the canteen, at least, they were willing to be a bit more chatty. The two women had apparently decided that to get a little from Harry, they were going to need to give a little. “Fine, since everybody's dancing around it, I'll go first,” Calisto said. “Calisto obviously isn't my real name, but it's all I'm going to give anyone here. I'm SIED. You two?”

“I was with South Korea's National Intelligence Service for five years, but I left them three years ago to go private sector,” Stella told them. “Stella's my real first name. At least... I think it is? I can't remember my last name, nor can I remember who in the private sector I was working for for the last few years. I was with Wildneedle Securities for a year or so, but their quartermaster was a dick who wouldn't stop hitting on me, so I bailed with them and went... shit, where did I go?”

Harry smiled softly. “I wouldn't worry too much about it. You're going to find giant holes in your memory no matter how you slice your bread. We all are. Somehow we got sent to The Retreat.”

“What the hell is The Retreat?” Calisto asked.

“Consider it the spy equivalent of sending your pet upstate to live on a farm,” Harry laughed. “It's supposed to be a myth, a place where any spy who's gone missing has been taken to. But it's not real. At least, I didn't think it was up until we got here. Because it pretty closely matches all the stories I've ever heard about The Retreat.”

“Which were?”

“Just little bits and bobs here and there. Deserted island somewhere remote. No real weapons to speak of. No visible martial forces. Just a weekly supply drop from the sky and fuck all else.”

“So we shared some, limey,” Stella said. “Your turn. Spill.”

“Harry isn't my real name, but it's all you're going to get, because I can't remember any other names,” he sighed. “I used to be with Five...”

“Five?” Calisto said.

“MI-5,” Stella filled in.

“Ah.”

“Anyway,” Harry continued. “I was with MI-5 for about three years before we had something of a severe falling out.”

“What over?” Stella prodded.

“You know, I don't remember? Anyway, after that, I went out on my own and started selling the best skill I had.”

“Being evasive?” Calisto grumbled.

“In a way,” Harry said with a grin. “Evasive transportation. Smuggling and security, getting things and people from one point to another without being noticed and/or caught. If it's got wheels, I can drive it. If it's got wings, I can fly it.”

“Boats?”

“Speedboats, sail boats, submarines, shipping vessels... don't know there's a craft out there I wouldn't at least have the fundamentals down on.”

“You're a very arrogant man, you know that?” Calisto said to him.

“Doubtful,” Harry chuckled. “Because while I'm very good at transportation and I'm not a half-bad shot, I'm pretty crap at just about everything else. Never was much good at disguises or cover identities. Maddeningly, never picked up those skills needed to spot tells and detect when folks are lying,” he blatantly lied to them. “So yeah, can get you and your stuff from A to B and keep you safe while I'm doing it, but rely on me for anything beyond that and you're going to be in a spot of bother.”

The food at the cantina wasn't exactly amazing, but it was certainly better than he'd had in a lot of other places. It seemed like there were generally three or four things on offer at any rough point in the day, so there were always options. The kitchen area was also open to anyone, so if nothing was on offer that appealed, the option of going back and making something was also available.

“Is there enough money to be had in smuggling?” Stella asked him with a gentle smile. It seemed like Stella was going for the softer approach while Calisto was trying to treat him with harder caution.

“Loads,” he said. “But it's all reliant on you actually getting the gigs, which is where the real trick comes into play. I've got a contact for that, but they don't always come through.”

“So what do you think we did to get sentenced here?” Calisto asked, suddenly pivoting subjects on them. “And who the hell do you think Oversight is?”

“Bunch of lunatics if you ask me.”

“That's not helpful,” Calisto snapped, reaching up to slap her hand against the back of his head. When he leaned forward in sharp pain, he noticed that both Stella and Calisto had done the same thing. “Fucking hell! What the hell happened?”

“You hit me,” Harry grumbled.

“And me!” Stella chimed in.

“I didn't lay a finger on you, Stella!” Calisto countered. “And you hit me back!”

“I did no such thing!”

The two began to bicker back and forth and while Harry could hear them shouting at one another, his mind was already racing onto a different path, replaying the moment and the timing in his head. There wasn't any possible way Calisto could've hit Stella or that Stella could've hit Calisto in return. In fact, there was only one thing Harry could think of that made any sense. So he'd have to do something truly stupid to prove it.

He placed his left hand on top of the table, closed his right hand into a fist and brought it down hard on top of his left hand. He may have known the pain was coming, but neither Calisto nor Stella had any idea what was about to happen.

As soon as the pain bloomed in his left hand, he saw Calisto and Stella each clutch at their own left hand, as if they'd been struck themselves. “Fuckin' hell!” Stella said. “What was that?”

“Ladies, I think we're a bit more linked than originally expected,” he sighed. “Let's go back to our room, and I can demonstrate a bit further.”