"War is pure hell." William Sherman

Katya inserted the disk into the computer terminal with a slightly savage jab and quickly surveyed the screen in front of her while she quickly typed on the keys. Her gloves were skintight, but very carefully kept to make sure that her finger prints were not found on the scene and the tips were weighted slightly so that they couldn't get her ways of hitting the keys to identify her either. She'd been doing this for so long sometimes she forgot what it was like for those who didn't do it all the time to watch an old pro work, and thus she missed the look of respect and admiration Rahne shot her way briefly. She reached up with her glove and tapped the device in her ear quickly as she ran into yet another road block on the screen. She looked at the stop watch on her left claw device and cursed. She did not have time for this. As the mouth piece came out of the communication device with a slight whir she spoke as soon as it was within range, "Nicholas, come in." Nicholas's very British voice answered back in a calm tone she'd normally associate with icebergs, "Nick here. What's the problem, Cat?" She didn't mince words. "They changed the password. Is there a junk file I can get into, or a backdoor to get into? I don't have time to fuck with this piece of plastic right now. We're two minutes behind schedule this second." She heard a very succulent curse echo over the line as she heard him answer, "Yeah, there is. Okay, go into the subfile zero zero six and there should be a operating system file called..." She listened to the directions and followed them as quickly as he was able to rap them off, quickly finding the backdoor he had directed her to. She didn't bother to say anything other than "Thanks" before she cut off communication and quickly broke through the barriers they had erected to entry. She then watched as the material popped up onto the screen and hit the backup command quickly. Time seemed to crawl and she felt sweat start to run down her back as she kept glancing at her timer. To keep her mind off of that she glanced around her at the other monitors and, seeing something odd, she glanced closer. She took the swivel chair she was in and, quickly glancing at the progress of the disk and seeing it was still working steadily, shot her chair over to the other computer terminal. Just as she thought... this type of security computer wasn't supposed to be in this type of facility... it was too high tech and was usually only reserved for...

"SHIT!!!" When she shouted out that word she didn't really give a fuck who heard and Rahne knew it. Katya quickly typed passwords and codes as quickly as she could conceive of them into the computer and, miracle of miracles, one of them worked. She skimmed the material quicker then most people would be able to follow. "Oh FUCK!" She shot her chair back across the room and shot the disk out, noting that it was about 3/4 of the way done with a small portion of her mind as she hit her communicator and put it onto the universal channel for the whole team. "ABORT!!!! I REPEAT ABORT THE HELL OUT OF HERE!!! THEY HAVE NIMRODS!!!" She didn't even take time to shut down the computers or anything else as she grabbed Rahne by the arm and ran for the nearest exit, throwing a typical EMP grenade behind her, not really caring if they were subtle anymore so long as they made it out alive. Rahne didn't need any prompting, having heard her proclaimation, and quickly took the lead toward freedom. Katya should have known it wouldn't last worth a damn.

The wall blew out with all the subltey of a bullet ripping through tin foil. She took one look at the mechanical monstrocity before her, and didn't even hesitate. She dove at it, turning her mutant power to what she liked to call "Screw 'em to hell and back" mode. She didn't scream in pain as the EMP pulses shot through her body and then through the Sentinel, but that was only because she was in too much pain to scream. The Sentinel went down though... hard... with much hissing and spitting and a very loud crash. Katya lay there for a second in agony and then rolled painfully to her knees, Rahne suddenly at her side to help her gain her feet. "It's going to rebuild itself. We have to get out of here. Now." Rahne's voice seemed exceptionally loud, but Katya just shook her head and held up the rebuilding nodule that was in the Sentinel. "I make damn sure that, when I take down something, it stays down. I screwed up all the computer parts and phased them into other parts of the Sentinel as I was ripping through it." When Rahne started to look a bit hopeful at their chances of survival, Katya shook her head. "I can't do that more than twice before I get so screwed up I start hallucinating and parts of my body start shutting down like I've been electrocuted. You screw with electronic impulses in things to that degree of complexity and with that type of biofeedback system, you gotta pay the piper somehow. We've got to get the hell out of here." Rahne nodded and quickly raced out the hole the Sentinel had made, Katya bringing up the rear a bit painfully.

They almost made it a whole ten yards before they ran into the wall of soldiers. Katya would have cursed at her luck if she wasn't already swinging around the high powered machine gun and simply mowing down anything that had the nerve to move a molecule. She knew the armor would stop most of the bullets, the razing on head level was the only thing taking any real damage on the soldiers, but that was just to distract them as she concentrated. The soldiers sank knee deep into the ground before they could really react well, Rahne still solid where she was hopping around killing people. Katya just shouted, "Rahne, FREEZE!" and she did like the good little soldier they had trained her to be. She then simply let the ground go and she heard the screams of agony, ignoring them as she threw the now empty Uzi around and clipped it onto her back again, diving into the fray as she did so to take maximum damage with her claws. She slashed one throat as she dove over another one's back, not even counting the moves or how she did them. She simply let her movements flow like blood and she shed the enemies as a result.

She threw her hand out and crushed a nose up into someone's skull with a slight crunch, her leg already moving into a position to break another neck. She loved being in the heat and thick of battle like this. She always felt so alive, pain was meaningless, and the energy that went through her was enough to keep a city running for a year. THIS was life at its greatest potential. You lived every second in battle and counted yourself lucky to live the next as you took control and threw your fate into the hands of your experience, your reactions, and the fates. She just loved that feeling of freedom. It was times like this she hoped that Maverick had been right before he died and that there was a Valhalla for her to go to someday. She'd be happy for eternity to just be fighting and feeling life like this.

A few seconds later she and Rahne were over the thick of it and quickly running for their lives. Katya knew she'd left no one behind her alive, but it wasn't the people that she was worried about. It was the mechanical goons that she was really worried about. She blended into the shadows and quickly blended as much as she was able as her and Rahne booked it toward the contingency meeting point.

She stumbled across Romany. She knelt down by the woman quickly and, feeling she had a pulse, motioned to Rahne to take her and move it again. Romany had other ideas, though. She grabbed Katya's hand. Hard. Katya locked eyes with her for a second and heard words she didn't want to hear issue from her lips. "Pete's back there. Covered me when I got shot down. Please help him." Katya cussed because she knew one thing. Normally she would be worried about her own skin and only her own skin but she knew that, if anything happened to Pete during this mission, that bastard of a father of his would turn all the information he had on her and the X-men over to Apocolypse, screw the consequences. She'd normally just figure she'd go back and kill them all or screw them over equally well somehow, but, as she reached into her uniform, she knew she wasn't going to listen to common sense and was going to go back into that suicidal pit after a man she barely knew. She handed Rahne the disk, looking into her disbelieving eyes. "Take this and her to the meeting spot. If Pete and I aren't back there in an hour, book it the hell out of there quick. And here..." she reached into her uniform again and this time pulled out a small device, pressing it into Rahne's hand. "It's a cloaking device that will hide you for up to two hours from the Sentinels. It's a blanket cover though, so be careful how and where you use it." Rahne nodded as she picked up the now unconscious Romany. Since she was now in werewolf form, she'd make good time, that was a certainty anyway. She glanced at Katya and asked, "So you're going back for him then?" Katya nodded. "Yeah. Someone gotta get this piss poor operation to get out of here in one piece. Magneto would call me an amateur and worse if I didn't." Rahne just shook her head as she raced up the hill and was quickly gone with her burden.

Katya waited until she knew she was out of range of any type of eavesdropping, and threw her communicator to the ground and stomped on it. It was her way of doing things from this point on, and talking over an unsecure channel was just damn stupid. She pulled a new communication device out of her claw compartment and put it in her ear. She gave her security clearance and smiled as a familiar voice said, "Greetings. Please state your name and intentions precisely now." Katya shook her head at the comfort of a familiar voice and said, "M. This is Katya. Security code: Cat's Laughing Now." She waited the telltale milisecond before answering back, "Yes Katya. Would you like updates on your body temperature and what kind of physical danger you are currently in?" Katya replied roughly, "Negative. I need you to tell me if there is a mutant male biosignature in the immediate area. His electro sig is blue, white, yellow, with sparks of red if that helps." She heard a sigh of irritation, showing the human characteristics Monet used to have as she processed the information and scanned the immediate area. "Yes. There is a mutant male approximately 300 yards from your present location to the East... your left, my dear. He is surrounded and his temperature is spiking all over the gage. His elecro signature is different shades as you described them in your horribly inefficient way." Katya smiled a bit as she said, "Thanks, M. Over and out." With that, she turned off the com link and quickly moved off in the direction M had indicated. She wondered if she was an idiot or just suicidal, and then just shrugged because there really wasn't that much of a difference to the terms anyway. Either way, she was going into a situation which she might not survive. But at least she'd get to kill things and take out her bitterness at life out on something, right? With a savage smile at that thought, she shimmied over a barrier and blended into her surroundings to stalk her prey.

************

Pete knew he was in deep shit, but what was he supposed to do? Let his sister die? Not bloody likely, as she was the only bloody family member he could stand with any type of patience. That, and she still owed him some bleeding scotch for the last time he pulled her butt out of the fire. He couldn't let her die with that type of debt to pay off... scotch was damn hard to find without connections nowadays, and she'd seduced the right type of guards to get it, dammit. He stood staring down a big hulking goliath of a machine in front of him and cursed. He'd used up pretty much every temperature scale he could think of on his hot knives, had taken down a couple with regular bullets and everything, but he hadn't come prepared to take down Sentinels AND humans. He was running out of firepower, and it was only a matter of time before the exhaustion caught up with him. But he wasn't out of tricks yet. As the Sentinel spouted out the usual "You have been scanned and found to be an outlaw mutant" spiel he pulled out the flare gun he had stuffed into his jacket from one of the emergency outposts in this hellhole. It was raising its arm to blast him to hell when he shot the flare right into its optical centers. A few seconds later as its systems were crashing and trying to rebuild, its head blew apart and lit up the night. He had managed to shield his eyes barely in time, but the surrounding humans who were waiting patiently for the bloody mutey to die weren't as prepared. some grabbed at parts of their bodies as shrapnel from the Sentinel hit them, some of them merely grabbed their eyes and tried to find up, but whatever the case Pete saw it for what it was. An opening. He grabbed the machine gun off the fallen soldier closest to him and blew as many people away as he could with the damn thing still attached to the body and then, grabbing an assault rifle off another one, ran toward the hills. Only to run face to face with another Sentinel, and this one was bloody pissed off AND ready to blow him to kingdom come. Damn. He stuck a cigarette into his mouth as he one-armed tried to take some pot shots at the thing with rifle, and then with hot knives when that didn't work, and then lit the cigarette with his other hand. So, he'd get to see his mother in hell quicker than he thought he was going to. Just to be spiteful he chucked a rock at the thing as it finally got a lock on his mutant signature -- he refused to run from the tin can -- and it lit its arm up to fire.

He wasn't prepared for what happened next. Suddenly the light in the Sentinel's eyes was obstructed by a big pipe coming out its face. The light in the arm fired, but Pete was already moving out of the freaking way as much as he was able with the damn thing falling toward him. It missed him, both ways, barely. He then looked at the woman standing behind the now downed Sentinel, and would have made a snide comment if she wasn't already shoving another object into its reconstruction unit and nulling it with concise precision. She then spoke into her comm set. "M. Could you give me some clearance from Sentinels here? Scramble them or misdirect them if possible, but I need a freaking opening and I need to get to a certain set of coordinates set by my cloaking unit without being followed by these damn toasting pieces of slag. Can you do anything about this?" He didn't hear what was being said, but he did see the satisfaction light up her face and the exclamation of "Excellent! Thank you." With that she turned toward him. "Let's get the hell out of here, shall we?" He didn't have to be told twice. He saw the sparkle of metal behind her, and barely had time to shout out a warning before he was firing hot knives into the face of the mutant behind her. The SOB had to have been a camoflauge mutant to have blended in that totally, and not a human regen like the others around here, of that he was certain. He made sure the guy was dead by kicking him over to make sure the head was totally gone, and then took off after Cat, who was booking off onto a very treacherous stretch of land, probably to try and lose any pursuit, which he appreciated. If they lived through this, he figured, he'd treat her to a shot of scotch. She deserved that much for being damn stupid enough to go running after a teamate she didn't even know worth a damn. Whatever her motivations, he appreciated this lesson in stupidity and would repay her act of courage someday. This, he thought to himself as he admired her form weaving in and out of trenches and briars, was a woman worth killing for.