Author's note:

I was struck with an urge to write for the first time in nearly a decade after reading Alephkeller's "Assignment Risk" series on AO3. As a human being who actively struggles with balancing faith and cynicism, I found it incredibly refreshing to see a dichotomy between the main factions of their story that wasn't so shallow as to pit one side's best example against the other's worst. Both have flaws, both have advantages. I tend to lean towards Zion's point of view because of its emphasis on choice and personal development through the acknowledgement and forgiveness of shortcomings and mistakes. I can understand if that is not your persuasion. Please know that I mean no offense, and, if religious symbolism and discourse isn't your cup of tea, I will not hold it against you if you move on. If you're looking for fap material, I'm afraid you've probably come to the wrong place.

An Angel With Scales

Chapter 1 - Matthew 10:29-31

Allen flicked the lever on the console up once, watching as the windshield wipers cleared a stray leaf. His eyes snapped back to the road, watching it as if it might disappear in the mess of autumn leaves.

“There’s more space in the back, Kess, you look like a can of sardines,” he jabbed.

“I like being up here, it’s easier to talk with you,” His companion, a large Daxy packed into a combat vest and a large leather coat, parried back. She gave what she considered a disarming smile to the disgruntled driver. Allen went quiet at that, tapping the brakes at a bend in the canyon road.

“I still can’t believe they let you come with me alone; us unmarried men aren’t supposed to be alone in the same space with unmarried women.” He groused, pushing in the clutch and shifting gears.

“Would you rather be in a triplet with Damien?” She smirked sweetly, her green and gray scales catching the sun.

“And be subjected to his cologne to Salt Lake and back? Hell no,” He winced as her expression wavered at his cuss. “--Sorry, heck no. Force of habit. I’m just surprised they agreed to this, that's all.”

“It’s OK, I know you’re trying,” Kess replied. She looked over the dashboard at the colors of fall. Oranges and yellows, similar to the setting sun, flooded the roads. “Elder Clements gave the approval.”

“He would,” sighed Allen, he looked over at his companion. “He must really trust you.”

“He trusts you too,” Kess smiled at him, her eyes searching his expression.

“I don’t know why, I haven’t really had a conversation with him in months,” he kept his eyes forward, a loose smile on his lips.

“You know your way around machines, and you’re a quick thinker. As an Apostle he made an inspired decision, I think,” She patted him on the head, enjoying the way his short brown hair slid on her scales.

“And what inspired him to send you with me?” He took a joking tone.

“Someone has to keep you safe. You think I’d trust another man to do it alone? Who’s going to carry you if this breaks down?” She tapped the shank of the metal device strapped to his right leg.

“I’d carry myself, this just helps with running, that’s all,” he batted her talon away. He lost his playful tone, “I do appreciate it though.”

“I only wish I had been permitted to come with you before,” she stated, “I prayed for you every day, that he would protect you so you could come back.”

“Can’t choose your calling, Kess. You were needed elsewhere,” he replied, “You should have been praying for your own safety. Retrieval is way more risky than maintenance.”

“Two years as a missionary, and now it’s just like old times,” she smiled.

“I don’t think our missions were quite the same,” he grimaced.

“True, but God put you into my life, Allen. Only He will I allow to separate you from it.” She took a scriptural tone, her angled face staring squarely at him.

“I wish I had your faith,” his eyes felt pricked at the admission.

“You have more than you know.”

As they rounded the final turn, the canyon mouth opened to reveal the great brown sprawl of what was once Salt Lake City. Dots of green speckled the landscape, overgrowing the ruins of the southern suburbs.

And then the leveled belt of land separating the ghost cities from Fort Christ. A modular wall was set up along the highways as a clear border for the Daxy settlement.

“It pains me to see it even now,” Kess breathed, looking at the flattened strip. It was an artificial no-man's-land. A scar caused by her people to establish a defensible position on the plains.

“A mile wide, from Canyon Rim to Magna. Best I can figure is that they didn’t need the whole valley,” Allen mused in morbid fascination.

“One day, Zion will take these lands back. God will see it done,” she said solemnly, claws clutched to the dash.

“It will be a long time before something like that can happen. Can’t expect God to do all the work,” He said, looking for the temple in the far distance, its spires hidden by the surrounding skyscrapers. “We would need air superiority, or it would just be the invasion all over again.”

She stayed silent, her slitted pupils turned skyward and her hands folded in silent pondering. Her scaled lips curled in a frown.

“It’s not your fault, Kess.” Allen patted her knee, but her attention remained on the skyline. He took a slow breath, then pulled the van over to the side of the road. “I’m going to go check the camo. Can’t be too careful.”

He stepped out and climbed atop the wheel well. The panels seemed to be synced, but lightly covered in scattered leaves. He looked at the road ahead and, seeing the treeline thinning out, decided to clean them off.

-

“We should pray before we proceed any further,” Kess stated as a matter of fact. Allen looked at her for a moment, then nodded.

“. . . Sure, do you want to say it, or should I?”

“Would you?”

“No problem,” He said. She bowed her head and closed her eyes. Ten years prior Allen would have laughed at the notion of a Christian Daxy, but now he couldn’t bring himself to. “Dear Heavenly Father, we are grateful for this day you have given us. We are grateful that we have made it safely to our task. Please protect us as we go to do thy will. We say these things in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.”

She opened her eyes, and nodded softly with a smile. She turned to him, “How far is it to the listening post?”

“It’s just Midvale. Not super far as the crow flies, but Salt Lake traffic was always a pain. Not as bad as New York, I guess.”

“Traffic should be less of an issue with the city abandoned, right?” She cocked her head.

“Not necessarily, people were being pulled from their cars during the invasion,” He turned slightly to avoid the remains of a 3 car collision, pulling up onto the sidewalk.

“It’s so quiet . . . “ She mused, looking at the dark store fronts and the overgrown parking lots. She imagined what it would have been like walking these streets when they were populated, window shopping with friends, and fooling around to impress boys.

“We’re just a couple blocks away, I’m going to back us into this empty driveway and we’ll hoof it from there,” Alex pointed at the driveway of a modest home with an empty car port. The paint on the house was faded and peeling, the lawn patchy and overgrown. The van looked right at home.

“Ok, let’s go over the plan again,” Allen turned to her as he pulled the parking brake and killed the engine. “This listening post went dark about two weeks ago, we need to get in, find the reason it’s not sending a signal and get it communicating again. Then get out. Simple.”

“Isn’t that a big deal? Why did it take so long to deploy us to fix it?”

“Eh, there’s a few layers of redundancy in our surveillance equipment. If all else fails, the listening posts are an old fallback that we’ve been using since the war started.”

“What could have happened to make it stop communicating?” She asked, unfamiliar with the task.

“Oh, I can think of a dozen reasons off the top of my head, but the most common is that it’s lost power somehow, or something is blocking the optical emitter. I’ve had a tree grow in the way of one before,” He smiled at the memory, “that one sucked to troubleshoot.”

“I can imagine,” Kess spilled out of the passenger seat, decompressing like a sponge as she stood to her full height. They forked around to the back of the van and started pulling out equipment. He picked up a backpack and a tool belt with the odd handle sticking out of its pockets. Then he donned a jacket, checking to make sure that it covered the coil gun holstered at his side. Kess hefted a large case over her shoulder.

“Are you really bringing the 5 foot rail?” He asks, gesturing at the case.

“What happens if we are seen?” She asks. He shrugged and started walking, the faint whirring sound of his brace tickling her ears.

“Well, kind of the whole point of these posts is that they don’t put out a perceivable signal. They just pick up radar pulses and relay the direction they came from via the optical antenna. The Daxy shouldn’t even know it’s here,” he lectured.

“That’s a comfort, but even so I don’t feel right about this,” Kess said, her trained eyes scanning the buildings for possible threats as they went. An invisible dread gnawing at her bowels told her that here, at Fort Christ’s door step was not the place to take chances.

“You were a hunter before, weren’t you? You’re trained to stay alert,” Allen gave her a thumbs up, “I trust you to keep us safe.”

They came upon an unassuming one story house just before the road tee’d onto Redwood road. A quick opening of the 5ft chain link fence, and some fiddling with a combination lock at the back door got them into the house. Passing the kitchen, Kess looked at the dusty inside with wonder. Old shag carpet covered the front room and a floral pattern couch sat across from a tv set. Black and White photos and silly childish crayon drawings were framed on the papered walls.

“What interesting decorations your people have,” Kess mused as she pulled a picture from the wall. It was an image of a baby human boy, playing in the sand with a tiny vehicle of sorts. The child looked so innocent and cute with his toy. She could imagine playing with a little one of her own like this. Her heart ached in longing.

Allen looked at the room and sniffed a bit. “Yep, definitely grandparents. Years gone, but I can still smell them.” He smiled bitterly, “Come on, the briefing said that the main housing is in one of the bedrooms.”

Passing through the living room, Kess stopped to see a picture of a man, kneeling at the base of a tree, looking upward with an expression of pained resolve. The words “Nevertheless not my will, but thine be done” were engraved across the bottom of the frame.

“They’re believers,” Kess said in silent awe at the picture.

“Yes, they were.” He stated, moving on to the bedroom.

“Are.” She asserted. He nodded slowly before opening the bedroom door. A black box sat on a desk next to the queen sized bed. A pair of thick cables extended from one of its sides and snaked across the floor before traveling up the wall, stapled in place, to a slight hole in the ceiling.

“Kess, I need to remind you,” he held up a hand as she entered.

“I know. Don’t touch the console.” She said, gently.
“Daxy skin has a different resistance than humans and--well, you get the gist. They weren’t counting on many Daxy joining Zion at the time.” Allen stopped himself mid monologue.

“Honestly I’m more scared for you, who has to touch it.”

“Well, we get 3 password attempts, or we’re dead. So, here’s hoping the briefing was correct,” he smiled, trying to sound cavalier, but there was a nervous edge to his tone. At his touch the screen flashed to life with a digital keypad on the display. He pulled a notepad from his pocket, looking down to a scrawled set of numbers, which he started pressing on the touch screen. Pressing enter, the screen flashed red and the keypad remained. Kess nearly jumped to push him down.

He gulped, his face flushed as he double checked his notes. “God Damn it, why do my 4’s always look like 9’s?”

He started carefully selecting the sequence again on the keypad, this time the screen flashed green and the keypad was replaced with an interface. He let out a sigh of relief, looking back to Kess who seemed frozen in place, her eyes wide. He cracked a smile.

“I was joking about that first one, Kess. I’ve been reading my own handwriting for decades, I know what my 4’s look like.” He laughed at the end. Her expression melted from an apprehensive stare to an indignant frown.

“That isn’t funny!” She huffed, “You can’t just play with things like that, what if someone else had tried twice before?”

He was fully laughing at this point. She growled, before jumping forward and picking Allen up by his armpits, like a stray cat, and then tossing him onto the comforter of the bed. His laughter was replaced with coughing and spitting at the cloud of dust that puffed out of the sheets. After a minute he composed himself and rolled off the bed to his feet. She smirked at his dust smeared look. He liked her smile. He wanted to see it more often, but he knew it was vain. He didn’t deserve it, after all.

“Well, I guess that’s it then, back to work.” He returned to the console. With a few button presses the device entered maintenance mode and the front panel clicked open. With practiced hands he began his diagnostics.

“We already know that at least one of the C14 batteries are working,” he waved a pen-like device over the entrance of the panel and after hearing no beep, confirmed “and aren’t leaking radiation.”

“Wait, radiation?”

“Yeah, it’s a radioactive battery, Layers of carbon 14 graphene contained in a grown layer of synthetic diamond to convert the gamma radiation into electricity. They’re pretty cool. I’ve got one in my brace, actually,” he tapped a thicker portion of the metal housing on his leg.

“Anyway, power is fine over the main lugs, no corrosion, nothing looks physically wrong with the internals.” He turned the front panel so he could see the screen, but didn't close it. “There might be a crack in the fiber optic line” He tap at the screen, “Nnnnnope, that self tests fine. Ugh . . . I’m just going to run a calibration on the antenna.“

It was then that Kess noticed a distant sound from outside the window, one so familiar that she could never forget. The distant whirring of a shuttle; slowly getting louder and higher in pitch.

“And just like that, we have feedback from the receiving end! The stupid thing probably got knocked out of alignment in a storm or something. Just a few more tests,”

“Al,” She called.

“Looks like the radar receiver is working, we’ve even got a signal. Bearing 16.24 degrees with a distance of 600 meters.”

“Al,” She hissed.

“Oh, and it’s on the move, Bearing 15.82 degrees with a distance of 300 meters. Hmm, that can’t be right.”

“AL! It’s flying straight towards us, we need to get out of here NOW.” Kess roared, pulling the case from her shoulder and slamming it open on the bed. She began unfolding her instrument.

“Kess . . . It’s right on top of us. And it’s not leaving.”

-

Next Chapter: https://rentry.org/opv8d