Deafened by the white noise of his diving gear and the clatter of hundreds of blades beneath him waved by an army of aquatic robots, Gerald Stevens struggled to ignite one of the three road flares he had left.

Earlier, robots from throughout the Sea of Chaos had taken an interest in dissecting him, and he kept them distracted only by the red light of road flares that his teammate in a small boat on the surface had been throwing overboard. When he'd reached the master control unit for all of the alien technology of the Sea, the flares, which the robots had dissected, were no longer needed. The machines were afraid to approach the unit, and instead formed a sphere of angry blades all around him. Stevens inflated the salvage balloons to raise the unit and himself to the surface, the first stage in his intricate plan to stop the techno-genius warlord Khanum.

Deprived of distracting red lights and unable to reach the diver, the robots selected another target: his teammate Lourdes Lucero, in the small aluminum boat above. In a frenzy, they punctured and slashed its hull, and would continue to puncture and slash the contents of the boat once they could reach it.

Moments earlier, in a fit of sentimental madness, Stevens had let go of the salvage balloons to send the master control unit to the surface faster, hopefully before the boat was destroyed and the woman torn apart. The choice astonished him even as he made it. His descent without the balloons would soon be met by the ascending blade-wielding machines.

This was not an immediately suicidal choice. Stevens had three flares on his person to distract the machines. In the time they would provide him, he would come up with a plan. Hopefully.

He struck the flare on its igniter cap again. Nothing.

Blade points pushed against the back of his plastic dive armor. How well and how long the armor would protect him from the robots, he did not know. He struck the flare on the igniter cap again.

A cone of red fire shot from the flare’s mouth. Stevens immediately threw it as far as he could, which was not far. Regardless, the pushing against his back ceased, and the thrashing wall of robots surrounding him suddenly ignored his sinking body to cluster around the red light, blocking it from his view. As he descended beneath the writhing mass of machines, he pulled out his second flare. They’d disassembled previous flares in minutes. He began to calm his mind to allow him to plot an escape.

The mass of robots stopped moving. The flare in the middle of their scrum had been sliced apart and extinguished already.

Stevens lit his second flare.

Stalnoivolk, still under Khanum's control due to the stamp-sized brainwashing device affixed to the back of his neck, surveyed the cave and its Sea of Chaos. Brightly colored lights from the water reflected off of the cave’s roof, bathing stalactites in pastel hues. Giant mechanical devices of alien manufacture towered from the middle of the sea. Satisfied by what he found, the Russian clicked a small device in his hand.

High above the site, a cylinder the size of a man detached from the underside of Khanum’s floating command platform and plunged towards the earth. Before impact, a pair of wings snapped out from the cylinder. Soldiers on the ground watched in confusion as the cylinder streaked towards the cave opening.

On the surface of the sea, in a torn up aluminum motorboat, Lourdes Lucero pulled a manhole-cover-sized steel doughnut from the water. The doughnut, lifted by large yellow salvage balloons, drove the robots away. It did not bring with it Gerald Stevens. The many blades and saws of the robots had torn at her boat only moments before. She tried not to imagine what those weapons must have done to him after he let go of the unit.

Repelled by the master control unit, the robots got as close as they could and formed a large bowl around and beneath her boat. She felt more alone than at any moment in her life.

A splash in the distance drew her attention.

Stalnoivolk, on the sea's shore, noticed in the distance a small boat, a woman sitting in its stern. How odd. No matter, he thought. Khanum’s winged bomb had entered the water as planned.

Stevens reached the sea floor and held his third flare, the igniter cap in his hand. He could hear the robots above clashing and clattering around the second flare.

The clash and clatter stopped.

He closed his eyes and lit the last flare.

Lucero looked in the direction of the splash, towards the cave's mouth. On that shore stood a familiar silhouette. “Oh no,” she whispered.

A whump came from beneath the sea.

The glow of the waters went dead.

Darkness was sudden and absolute on the sea floor, excepting for a small spot of red light clutched in a man’s hand. The incessant whirr and roar of machines had ceased, replaced by the dull clunks of inactive robots hitting the sea floor.

Gerald Stevens could not believe his luck. Every bit of electronic technology in the sea had shut down at once. His oxygen tanks, lacking electronics, continued to function. And so he survived.

He then wondered how he would make it out of the Sea of Chaos before running out of air. The tanks’ air gauge indicated he had well over an hour left, but an underwater trudge was a slow business. The dive armor was not meant for swimming, so “up” was not a way out. He wondered which direction was the closest shore.

He picked one and walked.

President for Life Karayev could not believe the rebels would be so foolish as to attack the best-defended site in the entire nation of Tyrgyzstan: the site of the Sea of Chaos. The compound surrounding the cave’s entrance contained hundreds of soldiers and dozens of pieces of weaponized alien technology.

His beloved exoskeleton, fished from the waters of the Sea weeks ago, had sent dozens of rebels to the flames of hell since the attack began minutes before. The Glorious Leader of His Nation and Father of His People had merely to point and the tight-beam microwave projectors at the end of each arm would roast whatever he wished to see die. By contrast, the rebels’ small-arms fire made not the slightest dent in his armor or the similar armors worn by his most trusted guardsmen.

Even his foot soldiers were annihilating the attacking force, using lesser but still amazing alien devices. Yet the rebels did not retreat. Clearly, they were stupid and suicidal and deserved death at the hands of true patriots.

Karayev stomped his armor to the perimeter of the facility and spread his arms wide. He activated his armor's loudspeaker. “This land belongs to those with the will and strength to take it!”

High above, Khanum indulged in a smirk. Indeed, she thought.

Steady, rapid swim strokes brought Stalnoivolk to the aluminum boat in little time. Lucero cast illusion after illusion at the man to derail him, to no effect. His hands bent the edge of the boat as he hauled himself inside. She saw that a metal, circuit-etched circlet around his forehead blocked her illusions. She wondered if she could pull it from his head before he could rip her arm off.

Stalnoivolk lifted the steel doughnut from the boat's ragged floor and examined it. Keeping his eyes on the device, he asked, “Where is Stevens?”

Lucero gestured towards the water. “Down there.” She swallowed. “Dead.”

Stalnoivolk looked over the side. Deep in the darkness glowed a single pinprick of red.

“HA!” the Russian bellowed. “Like cockroach, that one.”

Stevens had no idea where he was going. He checked the air gauge and could not decide if the hour of air left to him was to be cherished or hated. Despair scratched at the base of his throat. He would die. Forgotten in the lightless cold, alone.

A hand clapped on his shoulder.

Sunlight poked Stevens's eyes like a vaudeville comedian. He wished the sun had a face so he could slap it in return. His shoulder ached from where Stalnoivolk’s grip had crimped and cracked his dive armor. He tried to recall the symptoms of the bends. His ascent from the sea floor, powered by a single leap from the giant Russian, was far too fast to be safe.

As his eyes gained the ability to focus, his efforts to remember the details of decompression sickness slipped from his mind, replaced by an intense study of the rifle barrel inches from his face. Cracks and snaps of the nearby battle mingled with hums and roars.

Next to him was Lucero, unharmed except for a circlet around her head that looked to be painful, and Turner, who looked as though he had been thrown under farm equipment. Stalnoivolk held the steel doughnut in his hands, his face placid, Khanum’s mind control technology still in place.

A shadow fell over the group. Khanum’s floating platform descended before them. “Quickly!” the woman shouted. The Russian strode to her side and held out the master control unit for her inspection.

The Beloved President for Life and Most Noble Son of the Tyrgyz Mountains could not believe what he saw. A floating square? His secret police had been right - the rebels have advanced technologies in reserve. Yet what good could it do them now?

The square, carrying a single passenger, dropped gently but quickly towards the entrance to the cave. Karayev decided that its passenger must be important; thus, that person had to die, and die quickly. He signaled to the three guardsmen in exoskeletons to converge at the cave’s mouth. The rebels at the fence had been so badly beaten that the regular soldiers could be trusted to handle them.

Khanum ran her fingers over the surface of the control device. Spies had been smuggling to her photographs of other alien technologies as they were excavated, and from those she had determined commonalities. As she had hoped, the master control unit structure shared the same design logic.

Four alien exoskeletons stomped towards her, one of them blasting Karayev’s blustering voice as it ran.

“Ah,” she whispered. “There.” She touched a triangular spot near the edge of the doughnut.

A whine escaped the four exoskeletons as they seized up. Karayev's loudspeaker muted. Nearby, alien heat cannons hissed and fell silent. All recovered technology in the area shut down.

Gunfire grew louder. Her men outside of the camp redoubled their assault, encouraged by the government soldiers’ amazing weaponry failing. Khanum read from the data feed in her goggles that her men would take the site in four minutes.

She stepped down from her platform and addressed the Americans in English. “I had planned on sending Stalnoivolk to obtain the unit after my electro-pulse bomb overwhelmed the devices within the sea. How helpful of you to spare us the effort.”

Stevens had a retort in mind, but forced himself not to make it and concentrated on reading the woman. While her eyes were hidden behind goggles, the arrogance of her posture and the tone of her voice made her character plain. Dominance was her only goal in life. Turner was right: this woman would not only win, she would never stop until the world and everyone in it bowed to her. Based upon what she'd done to that point, she probably could do it.

Gratitude towards Turner for forcing him to stay and fight flickered through his head. Then he went back to hating the man.

Khanum folded her arms. “The final member of your team is already dead. He, or should I say she, was intercepted in a truck a kilometer from the camp and shot. You are all that is left.” She pointed at Stevens. “You. You are Doctor-7. The planner.”

She pointed a pistol-shaped device at his head. “Do tell me, Mr. Stevens, what was the plan?” Stalnoivolk released him and stepped to the side. She flicked a switch on the pistol's handle. "How did you plan to stop me?"

He rummaged through his mind for the best play. Given the constraints, that would be to throw up a few ideas, and then piece it together on the fly, basing the structure on her reactions to generate maximum believability. Don’t worry about content, and turn it to his advantage later. “Uh...first--”

A burst of heat enveloped his head. Stevens rolled on the ground, clutching at his face and scalp, gurgling and squealing in pain. Khanum lowered her gamma-wave pistol.

She reattached the device to a thin rail on the leg of her suit. “I am well aware of your role in this enterprise, Mr. Stevens, and your expertise.” Stalnoivolk lifted Stevens to his feet. Khanum leaned into his face. “You, good sir, are a liar by trade. A confidence man. A treacherous man. A man so untrustworthy that his own people implant an explosive device in his skull to keep him in line.”

She tweaked his nose. “A man I could use.”

As the heat dissipated from his head, Stevens blinked hard. What?

She continued. “Your particular skills and experiences are lacking in my forces. They would be quite helpful in my larger ascent. Quite helpful. In return, I would make you a very, very rich man. A powerful man.”

Stevens coughed and got to his feet. His hatred of her conflicted with his love of the words she spoke. Wealth? Power? “I’m listening.”

“Mr. Stevens, I have just destroyed the bomb in your head with this gamma emitter. You are free of your American masters. Your life is now mine, not theirs. Do you wish it to be a long one of riches and importance in the great sweep of history, or a brief one that ends here and now in a most unpleasant and slow fashion?”

Stevens closed his eyes. The Task Force X plan had been blown to hell. There was no saving it. Then again, he hated this woman to the core of his being on sight. But he could make her offer work to his advantage.

Long-term service to the woman was out of the question; she would kill him out of paranoia or over a trivial slight sooner or later. Nevertheless, four escape routes from her service came to mind immediately. He could make it work. Riches and freedom, plus burning Task Force X. Revenge on Amanda Waller while making a fortune. He relished the thought. Betraying one hated overlord for another? He could do it. Khanum needed to be stopped, but he was not the man to do it. In part because he was not of the sacrificing kind. Mostly because he had no idea how.

Then another thought lit up in the back of his mind. The idea grew stronger and louder until it crowded out the rest.

He opened his eyes and smiled.

And smiled.

And smiled.

Khanum grew annoyed. “What?”

Stevens neither moved nor spoke.

“Is that an acceptance, Mr. Stevens?”

“Why would I do that? I've won.”

At this, at last, her self-possession slipped. “What?”

He pressed. “Do you think for even one moment that this wasn’t exactly what was supposed to happen?”

She hesitated. “Yes. I do. I believe that your plan has failed. Your strongest team member is under my control. Two of your team have been shot to death. Your field leader has been beaten to the brink of death. Your illusion-caster cannot perform her magic with the jamming circlet on her head and the gun in her back. You yourself are about to be executed. The master control unit is mine. The cave is mine. The sea is mine.”

“And you have about...” He pretended to make a calculation in his head. “...six minutes left to enjoy them.” His placid smile did not waver.

“You made your living as a confidence man with such obvious lies, Mr. Stevens?”

“Are you sure that's what I am?”

Khanum sneered. Too much of her own plan had gone perfectly for the Americans to be able to do more than annoy her now. She had everything in hand and all of her enemies defeated. Moreover, her plans ran six levels deep; no one else on the planet could possibly anticipate and counter all of them. It was impossible.

Yet the American remained confident. A superhuman ready to crush his skull, the goal of the expedition in the enemy’s hands, a rifle pointed at his head, and yet he glowed with the confidence of a man who had just won the world.

Contingencies rolled through her mind. What could the Americans be holding in reserve?

Stevens gave a light chuckle. “I can’t believe you haven’t figured it out,” he said.

She studied his face. A slight twitch at the outside corner of his left eye.

Her hand drifted back towards her gamma-emitter pistol. He did not react. She then touched the master control device. He twitched again, ever so subtly. A few swift moves of her fingers across the device’s surface. Despite his efforts at control, cues of discomfort flitted on the American’s face.

Blue lines lit up along the steel doughnut. Full understanding of its functionalities would be difficult, but basic activation of the core systems would be simple. She returned her attention to the American. “Mr. Stevens. Your plan. The American plan. Did it account for my obtaining the alien technologies?”

“Of course.”

“That’s remarkable,” she said. “Such foresight.”

“We have the best minds, the best planners.” The words came out of his mouth a little quicker than they had in his earlier sentences.

She snorted. “Indeed.” He twitched again. His inability to hide his fear disgusted her. As stupid as the others, she thought. How could she have been so foolish as to offer this incompetent a position of power? With a flourish, she activated the master control unit.

The American’s signs of fear disappeared. “Task Force X mission accomplished.”

The bottom fell out of Khanum’s stomach.

A roar and a shriek poured out of the cave’s opening. The exoskeletons of President for Life Karayev and his most trusted advisors activated and reassumed their original configuration, torquing apart the men inside them. Their screams folded into the ambient noise.

The ground lurched and cracked. All staggered to keep their feet as fissures grew and the land began to subside beneath them.

Lucero felt the rifle barrel at her back pull away and heard the man behind her take a few shuffling steps to keep his balance. Taking a chance that he was no longer looking, she pushed the circlet off of her head and quickly created a small illusion in the man across from her. He saw the man guarding Lucero as transformed into a giant, monstrous insect. As the world had gone mad, he did not question the sight, and shot the creature in its head, then ran away screaming from a second illusion. Lucero fell backwards and rolled across the pitching ground to the guard’s corpse to take possession of his assault rifle. She lifted it and emptied its clip at the back of Stalnoivolk’s neck.

The bullets shattered against the Russian’s flesh. Also shattered was the mind control unit mounted at the top of his spine. Clarity returned to Stalnoivolk’s eyes.

Khanum did not care. The control unit would give her mastery of it all, if she could only decode it in time.

Before her eyes could focus on it, she was thrown backwards over a projection of rock. The Russian had punched at her with enough force to stove in the side of a tank, and the protective magnetic field produced by her suit dispersed the force enough to merely hurl her several meters. Khanum scrambled to her feet and adjusted the machinery along her waist to strengthen the field for a second blow. She knew that the control unit had lay on the ground near where she had been struck. She had to get it back.

Stalnoivolk stalked towards the fallen conqueror without a word; his purpled face betrayed an anger so vast his vocal cords could not form a sound strong enough.

“NOT NOW!” Stevens yelled over the roar of the shaking earth.

The Russian paused and clenched his fists.

Stevens yelled “I ORDER YOU TO GET TURNER AND LUCERO OUT NOW!”

Decades of attention to duty overrode Stalnoivolk’s will to revenge. He reversed direction, grabbed his teammates, and leapt into the sky.

Stevens pulled on his diving helmet. He suspected that whatever happened next would be best faced in full diving gear. Especially if Jane Doe had done her job.

Half a kilometer from Stevens and Khanum, a sinkhole opened. Sunlight fell upon the Sea of Chaos for the first time in millennia. A mammoth opalescent sphere rose from its waves. In a blur, it shot deep into the sky.

“Preserving ten thousand cows’ worth of meat?”

“You said that already.”

Ordered to wait by the truck the rebels had seized near the mining camp just before the raid, two men passed the time debating the purpose of the cargo and refusing to discuss the insane battle happening a kilometer away.

Why anyone would try to deliver a truck with crates packed with nothing but rock salt? They’d shot the driver, so he couldn’t tell them.

"Maybe Karayev wants to make a statue of himself out of it?"

“The army is turning the underground lake into the largest bowl of soup in history!”

Their guessing game stopped when they saw the mammoth sphere shoot heavenwards.

They would have offered their theories on the origins and purpose of the sphere as well, had they not been shot while watching it fly.

The diminutive and allegedly dead driver of the truck holstered her pistol and pulled off her bulletproof vest. The blood packs on the vest’s outside worked well enough, though they made her truck driver costume uncomfortably sticky.

She watched the sphere rise and wondered if any other part of the now-broken plan would go off. Specifically, the part where she wouldn’t die.

She hoped so.

Alien technology across the mining facility reactivated, now at full power. Corrosive gas shot from air transforming devices. Heat ray projectors melted rock into magma. As the scientists had predicted, the machinery was transforming the region to suit the needs of an alien race.

Far above the site, the airborne sphere flattened into a thin film and formed a giant bubble that enclosed the entire area.

A sheet of transparent material streamed down from the sky several hundred meters in front of the leaping Stalnoivolk, forming the wall of a massive dome.

Lucero, held tight in his left arm, called him by name. “Gort?”

He hit the ground and leapt again, straight towards the bubble’s wall.

Lucero gripped his sleeve. “IVAN!”

With a light pop noise, they passed through the bubble wall without resistance, which sealed up behind them. Stalnoivolk landed just outside of the hemisphere and set his teammates down.

Lucero felt ridiculous for being just a little disappointed at the lack of spectacular impact.

Turner struggled to stand but could not. “Doe,” he said. “She’s still in there. Gort, get her out.”

Lucero said, “What about Stevens?”

Turner coughed. “He’s dead already.”

Khanum, wearing an oxygen mask and using her magnetic field to protect her from the corrosive gas all around her, fired her handheld weaponry at a fleeing Stevens. Around her, men clutched at their faces and throats, every surface of their body burning in contact with the gas. She paid them no attention. A fleeing man held the master control unit of the Sea, and she would have it back no matter the cost.

Stevens, weighed down by the hard plastic dive armor and the control unit he had just stolen, scrambled across the broken terrain and hoped for a miracle. His armor grew warm as the orange gas dissolved its outer coating.

A sinkhole opened in front of him, and from it climbed a trio of large brown-green insectoid creatures, each one twice as tall as a human. The creatures clattered towards Stevens, the plates of their exoskeletons shrieking and squealing as they rubbed against one another. He turned and ran in a fresh direction, away from the beasts and struggling to maintain his grip on the control unit.

Khanum’s pursuit of Stevens halted by the sinkhole in her path and the aliens who emerged from it.

The newest conqueror of Tyrgyzstan glowered at the ancient conquerors of Tyrgyzstan. She raised up a microwave pistol. “THIS LAND IS MINE!” she screamed.

The loud air-circulation mechanism of Stevens's dive helmet was not enough to cover the sound of the aliens’ spiked forelimbs tear apart the woman behind him.

Jane Doe knew that she could not possibly reach the edge of the bubble in which she was trapped before all of the air beneath it had been changed into a corrosive gas. An orange cloud covered the mining site, and it was growing. When the cloud reached the payload of her truck, the chemical reaction would turn it all into an inert foam, but that meant suffocation rather than burning.

Stalnoivolk plunged from the sky and landed near her with a gentle thud. “We go now, katyonak.” She nearly wept in relief.

A huge thrust of his legs, and they were gone.

Stevens ran as fast as he could, which was not very. He complained to himself that this improvisation off of the original plan was not his best. Plates of his armor cracked, weakened by the gas. The control unit slipped and fell from his hands, smashing on the ground, and he did not care. His skin burned.

And then above the noise of his respirator he heard what he least wished to hear: a squeal of exoskeleton plates in motion behind him. A hard, heavy object tripped him. His chestplate shattered on impact with the ground. Gas burned his skin through rips in the dive suit's rubber under-suit.

He rolled over to see an alien above him. It raised one of its limbs high, the spear tip pointed down at his chest.

“I HATE YOU, AMANDA WALLER!” Stevens yelled.

Orange gas curled into the back of Jane Doe’s truck trailer. A wisp reached the giant mound of rock salt.

Lourdes Lucero, Marcie Rappaport, Ivan Gort, and Benjamin Turner watched in awe as the atmosphere of orange gas within the giant bubble dome transformed into a mountain of white foam in the span of a single breath.

The bubble popped with a barely audible “poip.” A hemisphere of semi-rigid foam, kilometers across, rested proudly on the Tyrgyz terrain.

Hours of digging through the soft white mound turned up the burned, blackened remains of hundreds of men, victims of the corrosive gas. Dozens of alien insectoid corpses were found as well, all suffocated by the inert foam the gas had become. Several of the beasts had dug tunnels through the foam, searching for breathable atmosphere, to no avail. The alien technologies, changed by the foam, came apart when exposed to air.

The body of Gerald Stevens was never found.

Candy-apple red in the way only artificial coloring can make it, the sauce from the General Tso’s Chicken stuck to the sides of the man’s mouth. He licked it away and sighed with satisfaction.

The man scratched his neck. His entire body was still irritated, but the passage of a month had weakened the discoloration to the point it looked like nothing more than sunburn. The cuts on his hands from digging through a mountain of foam healed in that time as well. Once he could pass for normal again, the ran a quick pair of grifts on two marks on the West Coast for a little cash, and then, at last, made a well-earned pilgrimage to the one place on the planet he loved: Bamboo Garden, a small, ugly Chinese restaurant in a suburb of Rochester, New York.

He sipped the always-weak tea and leaned back in his chair. Years in prison, fortunes lost, a suicide job in central Asia, all done, all finished. He was free. He could get revenge, if he wanted. Or maybe dedicate himself to a few big scores and retire. Best of all, he didn't have to decide yet. The world was his for the taking.

The fortune cookie gave a reassuring weak snap in his fingers. Slightly stale, just like he’d remembered. He threw one half into his mouth and read the strip of paper with his fortune.

It said, “You’re needed.”

He looked up. Only one other customer was there, reading a menu. She lowered it. Lourdes.

His waitress approached. Her face altered a bit. Jane Doe.

“Oh, hell no,” he whispered.

He heard footsteps behind him. Stevens shot to his feet and turned to face Benjamin Turner and Ivan Gort.

“OH HELL NO!” Stevens shouted. “I AM DONE WITH-” The room pitched. “With...” The walls receded, then closed in. Sweat beaded on his forehead and his mouth went dry. “...with...” His knees buckled. Stevens fell to the floor.

As the edges of his vision went dark, two thick legs in short brown heels came into view.

The last thing he heard before losing consciousness was Amanda Waller’s voice.

“Brief him on the plane.”

=========THE END========