The Evaluators

It's unfair. Why the heck do I always get handpicked for the wrong job out of 200 other quest-scouts? Why don't I ever get jobs like following migratory birds to chart their flight patterns, or going on diving missions looking for new fauna?

If it's dangerous call Cliff Bungey. Shit! It's almost like I am dispensable.

This time I had to visit 'Andamans' - a small cluster of islands plumb at the bottom of India, to investigate the sudden appearance of radioactivity in the area. The island I had to visit was partly populated by natives who still lived blissfully unaware of annoying modern gadgetry. Although the quantity of detected radiation was too small to endanger human life or be the result of a nuclear explosion, they wanted to make sure it wasn't a new kind of weapon. So here I was, in my super stealth F-72 aircraft, heading for a very vague destination.

I landed in a forest during the dark of midnight as specified in my program. My F-72 didn't need a runway and landed straight on the ground like a helicopter using newly developed air-thrusters that kept the plane stable during the landing. The din created was unbearable, luckily there was no one for miles around to hear it.

I immediately left the plane and ran silently through the dense growth, the infra-red night vision goggles and my automatic gun made it easy to handle any unlucky wild beast that happened to cross my path, but the jungle was thick and my progress was painfully slow. I couldn't have dared to land my plane any closer to the target, as it would have blown my cover instantly.

I had been running constantly for an hour now. Keeping myself in top shape was one of the obligations in my job so I was only barely out of breath. The jungle was getting denser and my speed had slowed down considerably. I was beginning to wonder who would use an atomic weapon in a place like this.

According to my GPS, I was getting near the target, in a little while I had got within 500 metres of the projected target, but funnily enough, there was nothing that looked like result of an atomic explosion. The margin of error was not more than .02%, according to my computer. I was standing right on top of the site of a .25-megaton nuclear explosion, wondering what in the name of sweet heaven was I looking for.

I was ready to give up, go home and give my officer a good ear chewing for what he did to me, when I thought I saw a light flicker in a clump of trees right opposite me. There, it flickered again. It looked like the top light of an ambulance, very faint and pulsating.

Relieved at finally finding something I set out for the cluster very carefully. The tree cluster looked ordinary enough from nearby, the light wasn't blinking any more. I almost began to believe it was a figment of my imagination. 

I decided to investigate behind the trees, just in case it wasn't.

Breaking my way through the cluster, I found myself at the edge of a tall hillock. There was a small opening in the wall, just wide enough to allow me to crawl through. This was the only place the light could have come from, I decided to get in and find out more.

The passage was dark, and the odd loose pebbles and sharp edges on the stone wall constantly scratched my body. I was bleeding from a couple of places when I got to the other side. But, what I saw there made me forget the pain. The hillock was actually hollow from inside. Actually it wasn't a hillock at all, it was some sort of modern underground building, and I had crawled inside the main opening.