Chameleon - The Friday Team

Barker didn't realise until his head started to spin, but he'd been
holding his breath for far too long. He was physically comfortable,
which would be necessary in the next few minutes. The butt of the
assault rifle tucked itself firmly into his chest as though it was born
there. The image of the hunter that was now his prey as clear to him in
the tiny screen that glowed gently on his right eye-ball as the fading
sun behind his current position, nestled high on the rocks overlooking
the valley. He tried not to make any unnecessary movements. The
functionality property of the rifle's diagnostics read 98\\%; more than
enough. So he manually locked the rifle in place with a flick of his
thumb, and the tiny jets immediately held the barrel completely steady.
Barker took another deep, slow breath to calm his heart-rate just a
little more. Inevitably, his lungs juddered as the extra oxygen from
the suit's tube near his mouth struggled in, more out of nerves and
stress at what he was aiming at than the impromptu hike up here. Behind
him, further down this side of the small, rocky mountain, two of his
squad were cautiously approaching. Barker whispered into his
mouthpiece, even though the sound would go no further than a few inches
if he shouted out loud thanks to the sound-dampener. "Stay there, don't
come closer."
The two soldiers immediately halted and bedded themselves down into the
rocks. "Instructions, sir?"
"Just keep still, I see it. Wait." Barker issued the instructions into
his mouthpiece to transmit the image to the squad without thinking, his
mind almost fully on the animal languishing on the river bank. "There,
you see it?"
There was a few seconds of silence before he was answered. "Sir, we
can't see anything but - "
Barker had no time for others' opinions on his sudden departure from
the camp. He was the lieutenant and they would obey him to the letter,
but a nagging doubt over what, why, he'd just got up and climbed the
nearest hill without a word was like a command to him, and demanded
that other people witness this. If only for his own sanity, than
anything he would need to prove. In fact, he still wasn't sure if he
actually could see the creature or it was his mind that had finally
snapped with the weirdness of this assignment and how it had, so far,
failed. Still whispering: "Look at the bushes to the right, follow the
line left to the outcropping and then go downwards and a bit right. You
see its forearm?"
An answer wasn't forthcoming in the next half-second.
"Do you see its forearm? Answer me!"
"Er, no... oh, hang on..."
Barker knew that the soldier would see it. The same way it had happened
to him, it would take a few moments and then the animal's apparent
camouflage would succumb to a calm but desperate mind. The soldier
would see the image on his own visor, transmitted from Barker's sights
and now to the rest of the squad. He would be redeemed. His unusual
departure, such weird and unexpected behaviour from their leader, was
justified. Why he'd done it was still a mystery. What had prompted him
to get up and run to the hills with his rifle only half programmed into
his suit was as far away from common understanding to Barker as it was
to the others. Except here he was, and the fact that he'd found what
they'd been trying to see in the flesh for weeks was irrelevant. There
it was, in his sights, ready to take his bullet.

The animal was on its back, one arm in the river pulling water out
with its multitude of snake-like digits and casually throwing it over
its solid chest, the head facing the river, away from Barker and its
knees bent as though it was a human being somnolent in the fading,
evening sun. Barker didn't think about what colour its skin really was,
too much, as they'd already reasoned that it was a few evolutionary
steps up from having chameleon properties. In fact, Barker would later
realise that their reasoning was as far off the mark as it could be;
the animals had no physical camouflage whatsoever, it was all far
deeper than that. Except now it served a purpose to make sense of their
lack of witness to this creature, so the theory remained unchallenged.
The digits on its hand were close to how they'd modelled them from the
torn victims, except it seemed to be relaxing for the creature to twist
and move them as though imitating the trickle of water in the stream.
It was as though each hand held over twenty independent snakes, thick
with muscle and capable of tearing through anything that they wanted to
kill or destroy. The word 'medusa' flickered in Barker's head as he
stared at the digits, the 'fingers'. He desperately wanted to see the
creature's face, except it was turned away from him. That would come
soon, one way or the other.
"Magnify one point one," he whispered, slightly louder now. "Reduce
barrel lock by half." The sights homed in by a tenth, the creature now
completely filling the image, and the barrel-jets eased to allow him to
move the cross-hairs as he wished.

Now, do it, press the trigger. This was it, handed to him on a plate,
like winning first prize in the ultimate competition. Doubts swirled in
his mind and his training made him attend to them quickly and discard
them equally as fast. The cross hairs centred on the back of the
animal's hairless skull, and he eased it gently downwards to the solid
neck, if it could be termed a neck. Just a collection of solid muscle,
more like. Barker could practically feel the squad hold a collective
breath.
Any other person would have continued to wait and ponder. What had made
him suddenly just get up like that for no apparent reason and climb the
hill? Something in his mind must have been alerted to its presence.
Could have been the intensity of the mission, the way the natives had
been slaughtered like a disease, that had triggered a sense of mercy
and desire to stop the hunters no matter what, that had honed him in to
them. A part of his mind that human beings had not discovered perhaps
awoken from an evolutionary sleep. All this and more swam somewhere in
the background of this scene, played out with him in it as though he
would wake up at some later date with the squad no nearer to halting
the killings.
A breath after Barker depressed the trigger for a single shot he issued
the command to put the rifle into full-firing mode, just in case he
needed to evaporate the river and completely obliterate the riverbank
afterwards with a heavy volley of full-impact ammunition. In that
instant of firing the thoughts and doubts made way for the focus of his
duty, steam-rolling into the forefront of his mind faster than the
bullet on its way to his prey. The whole of the rest of the scene was
played out in that split second and Barker saw it all like he was a
spectator and not playing out the part himself. Sighting-data to the
bottom, right of the tiny screen indicated that the animal was just
less than three kilometres away. It would take less than a millisecond
for the titanium-tipped bullet to reach it, and in that time, the
animal turned its head and stared directly into Barker with two
deep-red slits that his subconscious mind logged as being eyes. It also
moved, faster than Barker or any of his squad would have thought
possible, and the bullet slammed into the ground below where the
animal's head had been not even a half a moment ago. The explosion
caught the back of its neck as the soil and ground fired upwards in a
vain attempt to cause even the semblance of an injury.
That should have been the end of it, anything capable of moving that
speed would quite reasonably have meant that Barker should just turn
his rifle on himself, remove all the safety parameters from its
built-in computer and blow his own head off. The thought of trying to
evade these killers now, if it had been given the chance to take hold,
would have made him give up for good. The way they destroyed whole
villages of natives in minutes, leaving only decayed flesh behind (some
of it even cindered from the speed at which heads were taken off or
hearts pushed through), would surely make Barker succumb to the fear
that he had always kept a lid on.
Except it hadn't actually been like that. The creature had not moved
that fast, which Barker would realise after the event. It had turned to
look at him while he was still focussing on its head and deciding,
quickly, where he would place the bullet to make absolutely certain of
capturing any part of this animal. Perhaps it was the same way that
Barker had known to climb this mini-mountain for the answer to a
desperate riddle that had made the animal know that it was being
hunted. Maybe this weirdness was as much a part of the planet as it was
the feelings railroading inside Barker's head, or perhaps it was all
just a natural turn of events in what he wanted to identify as a very
unnatural situation. But it had turned and stared straight at him with
that intense colour of its eyes, then straight into him, into his mind.
After this scene had been played out to its natural conclusion, Barker
would realise all this and more. He would swear that the creature could
read his thoughts and intentions as easily as it languished in the
fading sun. He would swear this quietly to himself, as there would be
no-one else who would accept such crazy ramblings from such a hardened,
experienced lieutenant. And he would know for a fact that the creatures
had no real camouflage that they'd be able to identify, even though it
appeared to the whole of the squad, all their back up resources and
technology, that these predators could blend into any environment like
evolutionary-advanced chameleons.
He didn't have time for any of this now, and pressed the trigger again,
sending a plethora of full-impact bullets speeding down towards the
direction of where the animal was moving, following their direction
with a slight move of the barrel to allow for the distance. The
stabilising jets on the barrel compensated to the amount of bullets
flying through the gun's systems from Barker's belt-pack of ammunition.
Moving the barrel also helped the bullets to avoid exploding in each
other's wake, which had been known to happen. As the animal tensed its
heavy set stomach to sit up and run, the line of Barker's bullets
caught up with it and half a dozen of them hit its back, a couple of
them reaching its alien spine and exploding there. It buckled and then
slammed back down onto where the ground was slowly disintegrating from
nearly a hundred explosions with a thud that Barker could imagine was
terrific.
And there it lay, devoid of life and therefore its penchant for
camouflage, for him and all this world to see at last. Barker lay
still, staring at the sight of the dead creature through the smoke and
confusion in the sight-screen of his rifle, as the events and
implications slowly caught up with him. The two soldiers now appeared
next to him, the rest of the squad on their way to where Barker's prey
could be retrieved. To Barker, it was as though the animal would just
sit up and run if he so much as took his thoughts away from it, let
alone his sight, and he held the rifle pointing directly as its head
until the squad arrived. The thudding of his heartbeat echoed inside
his head like a hammer. When one of the soldiers tried to distract him
by touching his shoulder, Barker nearly broke the man's wrist with his
reaction.

It lay on the table in the main tent surrounded by a thick aura of the
squad's disbelief. Barker leant on one of the computers and just stared
at its face. Where he had seen the eyes, there were just two thin lines
that remained firmly shut. Where the bullets had entered the torso and
exploded, the flesh had been cauterised and belied the heavy-set
muscles and bones that had enabled it to do its job of relentlessly
destroying the natives without remorse. The digits on both its hands
were tightly closed in on themselves so that the arms looked as though
they ended in spear-tips.
"Do it," Barker whispered.
The corporal whom he had appointed as surgeon approached the animal
with the laser-cutter, firmly grasped its forehead with one be-gloved
hand and pulled roughly until its head moved to face him. Barker
remained at the side of the room, the others staring silently on as the
corporal flicked the blade on and moved it closer to where the animal's
eyes were meant to be. The whole room seemed to take a step back. Why
did Barker want to see the creatures eyes so much? The feeling
dissipated and the surgeon started to cut open the eye-lids. Barker
felt nauseous, and his head started to reel as though he'd been clubbed
from behind. He suddenly wanted to shout out to the surgeon, yell at
him to stop what he was doing and then order the rest of the squad to
just raise their weapons and fire into the cadaver to obliterate it and
forget the consequences. As though the animal would open those hypnotic
eyes and turn to Barker to stare directly into his mind and rummage
around for whatever it could find, as it pushed its hand into the
surgeon to burst his heart through his back. In his imagination, Barker
could see the soldiers aghast at the reanimated predator as it tore
into them all, including himself, the raising of weapons too slow for
more killings as it sat up from the table with its back hanging open,
and the speed at which it would run from the tent and they would be
left a squad of dead soldiers.
"Sir?"
Barker's head swirled and he steadied himself on the computer desk.
This wasn't happening here... the room again, the squad, the dead
animal. Momentarily he was back on earth in his apartment, looking at
all this on the main vid-screen. Then he felt all of them looking at
him with a collective shadow of his own confusion, and the silence of
the moment brought him back to reality. The animal was still on the
bench, still very much dead, and a dark goo ran from where the surgeon
had done as ordered and cut open the eye-lids. "Sir, the eyes?"
Barker checked himself in case he collapsed right there in front of
everyone, then relinquished his position from the side of the room to
approach the creature and look into its eyes. He didn't know why he
wanted to do it, but something inside gave him a need to order this
impromptu and adapted autopsy. The last time he saw it was in his mind
(his imagination?) when it had turned to stare at him from three
kilometres away at the very moment it knew he had found it and was
going to kill it. Then, the eyes weren't eyes. They were just a smooth
red paint that filled a couple of slits on its face. Barker wanted to
see real eyes, a cat-like slit or the mesh of a giant fly, something
real and unimagined that he could relate to. He needed to make sense of
it all, and this would be a good start.
The corporal-surgeon tipped the animal's head more towards him as
Barker approached the bench. In a fleeting moment of the insanity
creeping back, he looked at the creature's face and saw his own eyes
staring back at him. He couldn't help a gasp out loud, to which more
than one soldier thought about raising a weapon to the cadaver in case
it was, however impossible, still alive and would strike out. Then
common sense prevailed and he saw it for what it was. Just darkness,
where those red slits should be. His stomached churned and then settled
back down. Heart beat steadied. Regaining his composure, Barker turned
on his heels. "Carry on," he announced, leaving the tent with a bemused
squad and a makeshift surgeon who did not really know how to 'carry
on', what to do next, where to cut.

Outside, he stared up at the twin planets, the smaller one a child of
the larger and nearer and more colourful than its parent. He gazed
serenely as the light-purple clouds drifted above the distant mountain
range, the plain where they'd set up camp like a gigantic ocean of
protection against anything they or their sensors would see approaching
them (apart from the killers, as they had been like ghosts). And now,
he knew, they would be able to see the killers. There was no
camouflage, it was all created in their minds. Created by who, he
thought. Or by what? In his mind he went through the sequence of events
that had led him here, to this point where he'd captured one of the
planet's predators without knowing how he'd done it, and knew he
wouldn't be able to make sense of it with any amount of logic. So, as
he'd always trained himself to do, he let go of reason and accepted
instinct, allowing him to see the events through a different
lens.
His conclusion was sound, he thought, and would stop the killings.
Barker wandered calmly back towards the tent where his prey lay silent
and vulnerable. He ordered radio contact to the satellite station
through his suit-comm. "Control? Barker."
"Control here. Go ahead, Lieutenant."
"Get me a squad of atmospheric hovers and some good pilots, I know how
to find them."
"Find who, Sir? The hidden natives?"
"No, the killers, the predators. And get us off this planet. They're
coming for us, now" I just know they are, he wanted to add, but bit his
tongue.