It rained the next day. Seventy years of technological advancement with respect to weather was overridden in an instant. Freak of nature. Kerrick, of course, pulled outer guard duty. The XO happened to do this to all new recruits, and if Kerrick wasn't the newest, well…it must have been a mistake.

Still, Kerrick went into the wet and the fog. Fuck the officer. His boots were gone, they weren't his anyway, and they were useless for his line of work. He pulled outer – that meant he was a spotter. Certain people did not want to be disturbed; certain people included His Excellency Dervis, a diplomatic envoy who wanted off planet.

Kerrick was happy to oblige the fucker; Dervis didn't care about Alzath, and Alzath didn't care about him. The only reason he had hired Kerrick was because one of his guard team had been hit by the flu and was bed-ridden for the next week. $65.37 a day, plus benefits for his week of diplomatic service.

The rain was steady, hard, a distracting, monotonous rain. It coated Kerrick's glasses and promised to make spotting fun, in a hell-no sort of way.

His post. A tower, jutting out from the center of the Marik Hegemony's diplomatic compound. It was cold up there, cold and lonely and completely isolated. And it was a hell of a place to be in crosswinds like these.

Kerrick was soaked by now; he'd been soaked about four steps outside the door. His non-uniform jeans were a shade of darker blue than normal, and his grungy Marik MP shirt given to him by the quartermaster clung to his skin. He pressed the elevator key, and waited for the cheery ding to let him know it had arrived.

It never dinged, whistled, beeped, lit up, or fucking well danced. Shit. His luck. The elevator was out. Again. Kerrick looked up; rain fell, some vertically, some diagonally. All of it, it seemed, was aimed at him. The usually depressing grey sky, an additional bonus with the onset of winter, was now pretty much solid black.

Winter never came to Alzath.

Yeah, and elevators never fucked up either.

Still…the orbit of the planet was set close to Alzath's sun, and by all natural physical right, Alzath should have been a balmy 42 C. So, something beyond physical reality was raping Alzath's ecosystem; perhaps metaphysical, perhaps ethereal. Kerrick didn't know, and didn't really care, because it was happening.

He looked up, into the rain and clouds and stars, and he started to climb.

Thirty five meters later, he pulled himself onto his spotter's platform. There was a roof. Good god, there was a roof. Kerrick glanced at the chair under the roof. He supposed the roof was there to keep him dry, but it was a failure at life. First, the evidence on the chair said the roof couldn't keep the chair dry, anyway. The 'Water-Resistant Maximum Strength XR-2h1 Single Occupant Seating Device', apparently.

And second, he was fucking soaked on the way up here. Kerrick smiled, sadly, bitterly. His Dragunov was still dry. His weapon. Tough son of a bitch.

More than could be said for his radio. Well, not HIS radio. It was the Marik Hegemony's radio, bolted to the sniper tower, connected by land line to the intel center buried somewhere deep (and dry, said a piece of him prone to complaint) within the Hegemony's compound. It was also technically a rough-weather piece of equipment. Judging by the duct tape repairs and cracked casing, it was also older than he was.

He tested it, flicked the power switch on. It whined before whoomphing and letting a thin plume of smoke float into the air. Jesus. At least it still functioned, albeit barely. He had a sudden urge to kill something. But that wasn't his job, at least not yet. He was here to watch for insurgents or operatives or armies that randomly materialized out of the ground or something. He wasn't completely sure on that aspect, as his CO (a decent fellow, strangely enough) had spoken a mixture of Standard and some Marik dialect.

Ah, what the hell. Out of impulse maybe, instinct, Kerrick powered up the quartet of searchlights attached to the corners of his tower.

"Snipe, please confirm four lights hot and armed." Someone in intel either didn't trust him or just wanted to make sure he wasn't dead.

"Corfirmed, intel, its black out here and getting worse." And suddenly Kerrick realized it was. His lie had been woven easily enough, but when lies became truth… Kerrick flipped the safety on the Dragunov off.

"Uh…negative, Snipe. Doppler shows no inclement weather patterns in our area. Reconfirm status?"

"Black, intel. You heard me. Take a look outside." The rain seemed to become more effective at masking…well…everything.

"Stand by, Snipe." There was a silence. Kerrick pushed a searchlight with a foot. It swung easily, and illuminated the bare hillside. Wait. There was a flash. A flash of something, a single heartbeat of complete illumination, and then it was gone. "Shit," Kerrick mumbled under his breath.

"Sensors have picked up movement, Snipe."

Kerrick glanced through his scope, watched the rain and the mist and the dark dissolve into nothingness in his sight. He looked towards where he had seen the flash, and saw what appeared to be a mirror reflection of himself. Except his scope was set on some power of zoom, meaning it was way the fuck out there.

"Contacts, bearing three-zero-six!" Someone in intel was excited and/or concerned, and in this situation it didn't matter which.

"Stationary single contact, visual confirmation established." Kerrick waited for someone to hear him. Waited for someone to care.

"Come again, Snipe? Single stationary?"

"Confirmed."

"Jesus." There was a brief second, where something inside Kerrick screamed; his mind or his body or his soul, something, screaming at him and around him and utterly him. His foot caught something as he slid closer to his searchlight, and he fell to a knee to keep from losing the Dragunov. A bullet glanced off a metal post behind him, right where his head had been a second earlier.

"Someone fired! Someone fired! We have live fire, vector nine-seven-one!"

Someone in intel was screaming something over the radio, but his voice seemed weak and distant. A bullet smashed out the searchlight Kerrick had been edging for, fire blossoming in a brief supernova before the fail-safes cut in and the electric surge was plunged into darkness.

"Contacts at three-zero-six accelerating. We have inbound fire. Repeat, weapons fire inbound." And there went the alarm, just in time for a gout of fire to shoot up from a point four yards in front of the compound's gates. Lights flickered into life on the edge of the compound before dying in a brief instant.

Warm. Sticky. Kerrick's shirt was stained with blood. Someone's blood. HIS blood. Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck.

Another sniper shot, and someone screamed.

"Snipe! We need hostile neutralized." Kerrick pulled himself up on the railing. Sighted. There he was. She, actually. She was playing the same game as him, looking down at some unsuspecting victim. Playing God. He wondered briefly if she knew she was dead. Her body seemed to jerk and was gone.

Something? What? Kerrick let his hand relax; he'd pulled the trigger. Jesus, he felt drained. He didn't know where he'd been shot.

Automatic weapon fire cut through his haze some, short and sharp and nearby.

"Enemy vehicle sighted! Distance, seventy meters!" It was a truck. Just a cargo truck, carrying…something. Fire belched from its cargo bay, echoed by a brief shower of flame from the gate of the compound. Some sort of cannon. The truck continued inexorably.

A shell whistled by his head. He hadn't seen the flash, hadn't heard it fire. Concentrate. The truck was shrugging off assault rifle fire easily. A huge flare shot up from Kerrick's right. Some other unlucky sniper's tower crumbled, and Kerrick saw its occupant leap, silhouetted against flame.

"Someone stop that thing!" Intel was back, panicking. And they were wrong. The truck wasn't stopping. Not by rifle fire. Some sort of armor, spurning bullets gleefully. The cannon fired again, and this time saw its muzzle flash, saw it hit its target.

"What…!? Intruders – " Intel broke off.

Fuck. The thing was loaded down with infantry. Tank and transport. Anybody that approached it would be cut down six ways from hell.

Kerrick fired. Not at the tires, not at the body, but at the grunt manning the cannon. He toppled over backwards. Kerrick resighted on the cab. The driver was barely visible through a thin slit of glass and a thick layer of steel plating. Nearly impossible to hit.

But he was still visible, and it was still possible. Which is what Kerrick was here for.

Kerrick's shot took the man in the throat; his body slumped sideways, sending the truck into the wall just next to the gate.