Work Text:
Ten squinted into the monitor at the weird shape showing up on his Spaceborne Imaging Radar. It wasn’t showing up on any of their other imaging devices on the ship. Maybe his screen had a glitch?
“Hey, Tae. Are you getting this blip on your SIR?” he directed at the other side of the bridge.
A pair of headphones – accessorized with cat ears – popped over the numerous monitors blocking the rest of Taeyong from view. Ten figured that his friend had been caught hunching over his keyboard. Again.
“What? Uh…lemme check…” a flurry of typing ensued. “Hm. Yeah, I can see it too. That’s weird. Are we supposed to be here yet?”
“Definitely not,” Ten shook his head. “We’re still supposed to be 4 hours out.”
“Maybe it moved? I mean…it is a spaceship.”
That was the thing about having your trip destination be a vehicle – it was prone to moving. But this one wasn’t supposed to be moving. It was supposed to be harboring an army of evil clones and waiting in a specific position for the rest of its fleet to catch up before it attacked Earth 2.
Ten and Taeyong’s team – SuperM – was an elite aero-military strike force that had been assigned to find this particular battleship. Named “One”, their sources claimed that it not only harbored a sizable number of enemy soldiers, but more importantly, the Commander General of the Red Force.
The Red Force had been raiding Earth colonies for the past 65 years. Recently, they’d even managed to occupy the Venus settlement. Taking their enemy’s military leader out before they could launch their next attack on the Earthen Empire would be the biggest win in humanity’s history for this entire war.
So far, all the information that they’d gotten from their source – a disgruntled scientist on the Red Force R&D team – had checked out. Except for the location of this ship. According to their information, “One” should have been farther away than this.
“Maybe this isn’t “One”? Taeyong said. But even as he said it, Ten could tell that the grey-haired man didn’t believe it. The ship a few clicks ahead of them was undoubtedly a Red Force battleship. Not only did it have their recognizable transport design, but it was HUGE. Definitely big enough to be transporting the 50,000 soldiers that their source purported to be on-board.
Ten decided to call everyone in. One short message over the ship-wide comms later, and every SuperM member was gathered on the bridge. From how fast Taemin and Mark had gotten here, Ten could tell that they’d already been heading this way. Since they’d been in the engine room, they’d probably noticed Ten slowing the ship down and gotten curious.
While they were waiting, Ten and Taeyong had managed to slow the ship to a complete halt and turn the transparency on the hull on. With the view zoomed a few thousand miles in, they could now get a visual on the ship that had managed to bypass all their sensors except the old-fashioned SIR that Ten had insisted on having installed.
If he and Taeyong had any lingering doubts about the identity of the ship before they got a visual on it, they were gone now. The Red Force military logo was emblazoned on the underside of the ship in red and black. Their enemy wasn’t exactly known for subtlety. Not with a name like “Red Force”.
Everyone on the bridge stared in silence before Yukhei asked, “I didn’t sleep through my alarm, right? I thought we had a few hours left still.” His messy bedhead made it clear that he’d been asleep when Ten called for a team meeting.
Ten shrugged. “We did, but, I guess it…moved? But why? Dr. Hyukjae had specifically indicated different co-ordinates.”
Taeyong added, “Also, it wouldn’t make sense for them to be all the way out here. This is a lot farther from the black hole they were going to use to power that shitty teleport system of theirs.”
Taemin chuckled and said, “You only hate it ‘cos you can’t figure out how they do it.”
Taeyong ignored him.
Frowning, Ten turned to their captain and asked, “Baekhyun, what should we do now?”
Looking uncharacteristically serious, Baek stared ahead at the battleship and asked, “What about our informant? Any word from him? Have you tried to ask what’s going on?”
Ten leaned forward, refreshing his open SMail page. He used a generic email address and service to contact their mole. The messages were heavily encrypted, of course, but he’d found that hiding in plain sight was often the best tactic. The result was the same as it had been for the past 5 minutes. Nothing. Dr. Hyukjae had been quite responsive for the past week, as the date for this mission – “Infinity” – drew closer. But now – nothing. Ten couldn’t tell if this behavior was the doctor being careful or not. Any spy would want to avoid communicating with the enemy literally before the attack. But the Doctor had been taking the risk all the same. What had changed? Was this normal caution or something more sinister? Was Ten being paranoid? The navigator frowned at the screen and hit the refresh button again.
At the back of the bridge, Kai straightened up from where he'd been leaning against the wall. The combatant made his way across the room to Taeyong's station with a thoughtful look on his face. Leaning over the tech’s shoulder to get closer to the monitor, his brow furrowed as he said, “Well, it’s the right kind of ship to transport an elite member of the military, if nothing else. The Commander General’s rooms should be there, in the starboard quarter area.” He pointed towards the back of the ship as it appeared on the SIR output.
No one contested his apparent expertise with Red Force ship architecture. Kai had spent 2 years trapped as a prisoner of war on a number of enemy ships. He’d started off on an ordinary transport to a moon prison, but then he’d caught the eye of one of the higher ups – a formidable female commander who led the BP unit – and gotten dragged around with her on various missions over several months. He would never shut up about how bad food had been on the transport to the moon prison. But he never talked about his time with Commander Jen. As soon as he spoke, an awkward air had filled the room. Which meant that everyone was too busy trying to avoid referencing Kai’s trauma to notice the new little black chip plugged into Ten’s servers. Right next to the fiberglass panel Kai had been leaning on before he walked up to Tae.
Across the bridge, Ten was refreshing his SMail page with no success. Even weirder still – his connection to the space-wide web was getting spotty. It hadn’t been too bad before, but somehow it had gotten worse in the past couple of minutes. Attributing it to their relatively close proximity to a black hole – even though they were still far enough away for the interference to be minimal – Ten dismissed this in favor of looking to their captain for guidance.
Baekhyun had been staring at the ship ahead of them with his eyes distant. No doubt, he was going through their plan of action and adjusting for the chances of success based on the new situation. Without Captain Baek’s ability to make these kinds of on-the-fly strategies, SuperM would have been dead 10 times over. Once again, Ten thanked the stars that they got Baek as their leader.
After what looked like a long internal battle, Baek said, “Let’s hit them anyway. If anything, their movement means that there’s something going wrong with their original plan. Us hitting them now would only be more surprising, rather than less.” To Ten, he said, “We’re still good on our stealth cover, right?”
“We’ve got at least 3 days’ worth of power left dedicated to it,” Ten replied, nodding.
“Good. With any luck, we’ll be able to get in and out without them ever finding our ship,” Baekhyun nodded. “Ok, everyone. Let’s get this started. Get suited up. Lucas, Kai, with me.” He added as he strode back towards the weapons bay he’d been in before the meeting. “I need to re-fit your body armor – I was working on it earlier.”
Kai nodded, as Lucas replied with, “Yes, hyung!” The Combat Leader was always eager to spend up-close and physical time with his favorite person on the ship.
Ten rolled his eyes and shared a knowing glance with Taeyong across the room. No doubt Lucas would insist on getting his bicep measurements taken again for this fitting. Even
though it was a quick pre-battle modification.
“The usual bet?” Taeyong asked
“You’re on” Ten replied. “Always glad to take your money.”
Too busy grinning at Taeyong across the room, he missed seeing his network connection falter and halt completely. A millisecond later, his screen flickered and everything seemed to go back to normal. Back on Earth 2, the mission control room went into a full blown panic as the SuperM ship went completely offline. And stayed there.
One floor down in the weapons bay, Bāėkhyün was licking the blood off his fingers. “That was easier than I thought,” he said through a red smile. Kāi was hauling Yukhei’s cooling body around, rifling through his pockets. Frustrated, he glared up at Bāėkhyün and asked, “Did you have to get blood everywhere? The buttons are all slippery now.”
Stepping neatly around the pool of blood collecting around SuperM’s former Combat Leader, Bāėkhyün said “If he hadn’t jumped back so violently, there wouldn’t be that much blood on his clothes.”
Rolling his eyes, Kāi retorted, “Anyone would move back if you swung a giant blade at their neck,”
“Well, his stellar reflexes botched what would have been a perfectly clean beheading. If your neck is getting slashed either way, why leave a mess? He got fluids all over my AR-57.” Pouting, Bāėkhyün picked his favorite laser gun from its wall rack. The muzzle was covered in a spray of fresh arterial blood. “Yėøllie gave this to me on my birthday, you know. So many fond memories. We had a wild ni-“
“Please spare me the details of whatever depraved things you and your pyromaniac boyfriend did with that gun. Get useful and help me find his- Oh! Fucking finally.” A triumphant smile on his face, Kai dropped Yukhei’s body as he brandished a thin, long, pendant on a string. “There we go. His security key.”
Smiling placidly, Bāėkhyün said, “Time to stage some treachery.”
Across the room, Kāi brushed his hair back from his forehead and nodded smugly. He didn’t seem to care about the smudges his bloody hand left in his hair.
It had been a simple matter for the x-exo members to infiltrate SuperM. The Red Force R&D department had done a good job of boosting the clones’ intellects far above the average human’s. After that, the team of clones had simply created a spy network to find just the right kind of fake information to lure an EXO unit into a trap. Capturing the duo that showed up was a piece of cake.
Bāėkhyün and Kāi had been lucky enough to have the EXO unit that responded be their originals. They were chosen to replace them. The rest of the x-exos sulked, and Kyüngsøø had seemed especially put out. Not as put out as the originals, though. Kāi still cackles when he remembers the look on Jongin’s face as the evil clone winked through the window of his original’s prison cell. At the time, Kāi had already donned Jongin’s Earth 2 military uniform. They were identical. Except for Kāi’s poison-green hair.
What followed was 2 years of wandering around with his lover Jen as he laid out a pretty trail of breadcrumbs. He waited patiently for Earth 2 military forces to find and “rescue” him, a poor “prisoner of war” who Jen was “torturing”. That’s another thing that he cackles about regularly. The rest of the SuperM members just think he tends to be giggly.
All the while, Bāėkhyün had been adapting to his role as the “tortured partner” who had lost his comrade in a raid. He’d used his “angst” and “determination” to climb steadily through the ranks and become the leader of this elite group. All for this moment.
You see, SuperM had had too many victories over the Red Force, right from their first mission 3 years ago. Their Commander General had decided to take the group out in the best way possible – from the inside.
Grinning, Kāi stepped into his new – working – body armor, then picked up his favorite red saber. Even if the others on the ship had finished suiting up already, they would find that their own body armors had several weak spots. Their beloved captain maintained their gear, after all. Once again, he was glad that Bāėk had been wise enough to make the weapons bay his domain. Not that he’d ever tell the captain. The man was cocky enough as it was.
Across the room, said man was moodily cleaning off his AR-57 rifle as he prepared for the massacre. He looked genuinely upset about the stains, but Kāi knew that his mood would improve with a couple more kills.
Just in case anything went wrong, the pair had gone ahead and let the Commander General aboard “One” know they were completing their mission today. The battleship had moved closer just to disrupt SuperM’s plans and give the two the opening they needed to ad-lib their way through this double-cross.
They’d also decided to take Lucas’ security key first. They were going to upload a virus onto the ship systems and set life support to shut down just after they left. Just in case. Picking one of the crew members to look like the culprit had the dual purpose of being hilarious and hiding the pair from suspicion a while longer. The less that Earth 2 knew about x-exo, the better.
Over the PA system, Ten’s voice came saying, “Uhh, Captain? I think we should hold off. There’s something wrong with our connection to the Control Room back home.”
Over his own personal comms Bāėk let Ten know that he was coming back to the bridge, then he turned to Kāi. Hefting his clean gun onto his shoulder, he said, ‘I’ll take those two. What are you gonna do?”
Grinning, Kāi gestured vaguely in the direction of the engine room and said, “The grease monkeys first. That way I can disable the ship’s backups as well.”
“Let’s clean up any strays as we head to the escape hatch. I don’t want to run around looking for them. Man, I can’t wait to see Yėøl. I feel like I’ve been dying without his- “
“OOOK. That’s enough of that. Shut up before I slice you in half.”
“Yėøllie does plenty of splitting me in half without your help-“
Kāi walked out before that depraved slut could continue. Sometimes – sometimes – he wished he’d been stuck with the original Baekhyun. He still seemed loud, but he didn’t seem the type to try and gross him out with sex jokes.
Further along the corridor, Kāi could hear Mark’s excited chatter as the engineer no doubt tried to get Taemin as hyped for the mission as he was. Sighing wistfully, Kāi wondered if the R&D department could make him a Mārḱ clone if he asked nicely. He was going to miss this energy after they killed the team. Although, realistically speaking, a Red Force clone of Mark would probably have the wrong kind of energy…
Hm
Food for thought.
Stepping into the engine room, Kāi spotted the bubbly man across the room right as Taemin asked, “Why do you already have your weapon out? Are we already leaving?”
Kāi ignored him, striding toward Mark. Might as well get the slightly harder bit done first. Not that he’d truly hesitate to kill anyone. Red Force mental conditioning had long ago erased any warm fuzzies that his original started out with. Jongin had had the most natural empathy. Which naturally meant that Kāi had undergone the most hellish training of all the x-exo clones. No matter how distantly cute he found Mark, nothing could affect his mission.
As he neared, Mark asked, “Hyung, what’s that in your hair?”
Bāėk made a pleased sound as their escape pod docked firmly into “One”. As soon as they walked through the airlock and onto the ship, he made eye contact with the only person he probably wouldn’t ever kill (...maybe). Just as delighted to see him, Chanyėøl smiled widely at him from a few paces away. Bāėkhyun was home. And he’d managed it without getting any more blood on his beloved AR-57.
Behind him, Kāi hadn’t been as lucky. But Bāėkhyün suspected that the man had actually been going for the blood-drenched look. After all, everyone knew that the clone had come out of mental conditioning with the most unhinged personality.
A few thousand miles away, the SuperM ship drifted listlessly through space, darker and quieter than any occupied ship would be.
Somewhere far, far, away on Earth 2, a disguised and jumpy Dr. Hyukjae stumbled out of a transport and onto a public terminal. According to his map, this was the closest one to a military base.
Still woozy from illegally jumping through several Red Force teleport stations, the researcher hadn’t yet found his balance. Tightly clutched in his hand was a hard drive holding everything he’d ever worked on in Red Force R&D. He knew, by now, that the SuperM team he’d pinned his hopes on was probably dead.
He’d put two and two together after decoding prisoner records last night – a Baekhyun and Kai in a high-security jail in Red Force territory even though there was another Baekhyun and Kai set in SuperM.
The doctor had immediately packed his bags and gone for Plan B. Hopefully the Earth 2 military force had kept their elite force’s blood samples. He was going to need something to base their new (old) team on.