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T-MINUS FOUR MONTHS….
This is not the way an escort mission is supposed to be, Reaper thought.
An escort mission was supposed to be bigger than this, MORE than this. An escort mission was supposed to involve some sort of large, valuable payload being transported slowly through winding city streets, right there in the open and exposed to enemy attack.
It should also involve as many as six of those blind, self-righteous, stupid Overwatch fools, putting up enough of a resistance to be a worthy opponent before he and his hand-picked squad put them out of everyone’s misery for good.
There was supposed to be a lot of shooting, a lot of noise, a lot of excitement, a lot of nothing that was part of this mission.
THIS escort mission was sitting in the enclosed rearbed of a truck, by himself, with three large wooden crates that bore no markings of any kind. If it wasn’t for him being there, they could easily have been mistaken for three boxes of machine parts being shipped from a factory.
There had been no enemies. Reaper hadn’t even needed to draw his shotguns. He had anyway. It felt more comfortable having them in his hands.
There was no reason for him to be here. This was an absolute waste of his talents. No reason at all, except a shitload of money in Talon’s accounts, and a multinational corporation whose paranoia exceeded its intelligence-gathering capabilities.
“We don’t expect there to be any trouble,” the Vishkar Corporation representative had told Reaper before he got in the truck. “It’s extremely unlikely. But we don’t know that for certain. Some of our . . . information sources have dried up recently.”
Reaper had laughed, a whispery, choking sound that made the mid-level bureaucrat shudder. “You mean you lost your pet operative,” he had sneered.
The Vishkar official’s mouth had grown decidedly pinched.
Vishkar might not know what was going on, but Talon certainly did. This woman they called “Symmetra” had never in the past been affiliated with Overwatch, or any other government or military agency. So when she had fought alongside Overwatch on a mission a few months ago, Talon had taken notice. When she had joined Overwatch on three successive missions in a row, Talon had become extremely interested.
Even now Talon didn’t know the whole story, but Reaper’s understanding was that she had been their top clandestine operative, responsible for all sorts of corporate espionage and dirty tricks. And then one day, she walked away from the company, taking all her proprietary Vishkar-designed weapons and tech with her, evidently to join Overwatch. On her second mission, Reaper had gotten caught between two of Symmetra’s turrets, and they’d incinerated him almost to ash. It had been . . . bracing.
She hadn’t been a member of Overwatch back in the day, back when his life turned to a pile of necrotic shit. She’d probably been a little kid back then. She bore no responsibility. He’d still enjoy blowing her head off.
Maybe he’d enjoy it a lot, because it was her fault she was in this truck. Whatever was in these crates, Vishkar had needed them moved, they were desperate to hold onto them, and with Symmetra gone, they evidently had no idea if they could do it on their own. So they’d thrown a fuckton of money at Talon and requested their best agent for what was essentially a milk run.
“Their best agent”. Reaper scoffed. Let Talon think he worked for them and their mission, world domination, rah rah rah, go evil team. Let them try to stop him once he’d wiped out Overwatch and turned his attention to them.
Thinking about the future was better than just sitting by himself in the back of a truck, with some packages he’d been warned not to touch. “It’s for your own good,” the Vishkar man had said, daring to put an ounce of disdain into his voice. “They can be rather . . . chatty.”
Reaper guessed they were artificial intelligences, like Athena. He’d known her a long time, but that had meant nothing the day he accessed the Overwatch Gibraltar base and hacked her. He would have taken all she had to offer and deactivated her, if the damn ape had let him.
How “chatty” could they be? Anything had to be better than sitting in total silence while nothing happened.
Then again, what if they started talking, and never shut up? What if that went on for the rest of the transport? Come to think of it, maybe not “anything” was better than total silence.
In the end, curiosity was the tipping point. Reaper laid his shotguns down and moved over to the crates. The truck was still moving, but his balance wasn’t affected at all. Going over to the middle crate, he very carefully, very quietly raised the lid and looked inside.
What he found was about as underwhelming as he’d imagined. Inside was a gunmetal gray sphere, maybe the size of a medicine ball. It looked almost like an omnic’s head, if the omnic had no face.
Reaper sighed, and reached out to poke the metallic object. Before he did so, however, he became aware of a very low, very quiet noise that was coming from it. But he couldn’t make it out. He drew his arm back, and instead leaned over, bringing his “ear” as close as possible to the sphere without touching it.
It was still hard to hear, but it sounded something like . . .
”ssssssssssss-peeehhhhhhhhhhhh-zzzzzzzzzzzz”
He pulled back. He supposed this was sleep mode for whatever the thing was. And he imagined what it would be like if the little thing woke up and began loudly chanting that sound for the next half hour.
He’d put the shotgun to his own face in five minutes and pull the trigger.
Carefully Reaper closed the crate once more, and backed away. Curiosity killed the cat, and a Swiss bitch with stupid wings brought him back.
He’d found there were worse things than death. There were worse things than boredom too.
The rest of the trip was as uneventful as the first part. Vishkar had paid a lot of money for nothing, except maybe a little peace of mind. It made no difference to him. He just watched as the Vishkar air transport picked up the three crates and moved them to wherever the fuck they were intended for. Then he caught his own Talon transport, and resolved to put this snoozefest out of his mind forever.
And he did. For a little over four months, anyway.
The End.