Sleep came easily when he had just killed a man. Today, however, despite the fact that he had killed more men than he cared to count, rest was elusive. It wasn't that their faces haunted him, or their voices, their movements as they died, none of that registered. It was what he had seen in the antechamber that wouldn't leave his mind. And the worst part was, he was going to have to go back.
There weren’t a great many things that could innerve a killer such as him, a hunter of men. But there was something about the artifact they've brought back from Europa that was tenacious. It would not leave the constellations of his mind no matter the effort put in or the amount of intoxicants drunk, and he had drunk many this night.
His contractor had liked his meticulous attention to detail. The implants he had opted for a year earlier made sure no one had survived. The benefits of his augmentations outweigh the occasional throbbing headache from overuse. He could see through walls, hear heartbeats and see those half dead or faking it and finish them off, he could even see where best to grab or shot someone when said person was on the run, so the resulting force would hit for optimum damage, but not kill. Sometimes, it wasn’t a shot to the head which he was after. Sometimes stopping the person in his tracks was what he needed.
Retinal and palm scanners had been a constant throughout the facility which he had raided, and opening crucial doors was a necessity. For this, he required meticulously preserved heads, hands that shill had all fingers intact and, more often than not, the door which he needed to open required both, or even sported a tongue-pattern recognition system. On more than one occasion on his rampage, the key personnel had displayed and flared up like hot coals in his mind’s eye. A result of his ocular implant – and he could later be seen carrying around their heads as he trudged through the hallways like some barbarian, seeking to add those bone structures now vacant of a body to his collection. He remembered one scientist in particular. He had been an older man, a smart man, smart enough to realize Saul Gramatix was going to cut his head off. The man had begun to inject himself with a pain suppressant and was about to fire a shot of plasma into his face, when he was intercepted and killed. It had turned out the man’s head was the key to opening the last gateway before the antechamber. Of course, walking around the rest of the facility with a severed head had been a bit awkward. The faces of those who had seen him and ran, those expressions still swam in his thoughts. He pushed them aside to make way for fresh concerns and they receded like afterimages.
Beside his bed, on his night desk, a rectangular device the size of a thumb began to pulse red, lighting up his ceiling. Saul turned over in his bed. He ran his hand inches above the device and a screen of pellucid light flickered into life – holographicaly projecting a three dimensional image in the air above the device.
“Gramatix,” said a shade of a man on screen. His voice was calm, measured and somewhat gruff. His head was cast in shadow, backlit and hunched over the screen. “What are you doing? I presume you are still at home? There is a job to complete. Get to it.”
“I have done all you asked, the artifact has been destroyed,” said Saul.
“Then why am I still reading residual pulses on my screen?”
Saul Gramatix knew it would come to this. He had foreseen it. The reason he knew wasn’t rooted in divination or prescience on his part. The reason was actually quite simple. He had seen a small fragment of the artifact fly off in the blast when he attempted to destroy it. He had picked up its wild trail on his retinal display. At the time, however, he thought it too small to attempt and find. He had presumed it would not be picked up on any scanner. He should have known better. He should have damn well known better.
“Do not destroy it,” said the onscreen face. “Bring the fragment to me.”