Guy LeFleur

Session 01 — Operation Living Bomb

Guy drove south from Canada to Las Vegas Airport, taking the long route specifically to avoid airport security screening of the sensitive equipment packed into his vehicle. A Québécois demolitions specialist with a missing eye, a missing thumb, and a service record that read like a cautionary tale does not benefit from extra scrutiny at federal checkpoints. At the airport he met Ronnie Vint and Sammy Castaneda for the first time — two strangers with their own reasons for signing up with a private military contractor nobody had heard of. Their driver, Sam Elliott, loaded them into a corporate limousine stocked with an open bar and a corporate AmEx, and the long drive to the Voss Campus in Arizona began.

During the ride, Ronnie produced his own deck of cards and suggested a poker game. Guy watched him palm the aces from his own deck — a clumsy bit of sleight that would not have fooled anyone paying attention, and Guy was always paying attention. He said nothing. Ronnie lost anyway, badly, then accused innocent Sammy of cheating and knocked the cards off the table in a fit of rage. Guy filed the information away. He holds no grudge against a man who cheats at cards, but he remembers who lies and who takes the blame for it. A man who cannot lie himself learns to catalogue the dishonesty of others.

At the Voss Campus, Adrian Voss and Major Jenkins briefed the assembled team in a secure conference room. The strategic situation was unlike anything Guy had encountered in the Canadian Armed Forces: since The Meteor Event, super-powered individuals had been appearing globally, and their primary target — designated The Exploding Man — could walk into a crowded market, detonate, and crawl away alive to do it again. The mission was capture, not kill. Before departure, Yi Jiangku, the head of Voss research, distributed three mysterious manila folders to various team members. The labels read “Hungry God,” “Toasty Titan,” and “Jens.” Guy was the only operator who managed to read all three before they were whisked away. An IQ of 14 means noticing things other people miss, and Guy has spent a lifetime compensating for his blind side by watching harder with the eye he has left.

The team inserted by night parachute into the Afghan mountains, five kilometers from a Taliban-controlled cave complex. Major Jenkins spotted a tripwire on the approach vector; Jens Hartmann disarmed it cleanly in the dark. Guy pressed forward and identified a pattern in the minefield that the insurgents themselves relied on — red paint markers spray-painted on specific rocks, marking safe corridors through their own defensive maze. A sapper’s trained eye reading the enemy’s system, then turning it against them. Sammy slipped ahead alone and eliminated two sentries at the cave entrance with knife work. Guy recovered one of the bodies and rigged it with captured explosives as an early-warning booby trap — grim, professional, effective. The kind of thing his uncle’s FLQ contacts taught him before the RCMP shut that chapter of his life down.

In the lower chamber of the cave complex, Guy executed a textbook grenade assault: two knockout gas grenades rolled into the space in quick succession. Three insurgents collapsed. The target remained standing, completely immune to the chemical agent — a fact that raised immediate questions about the nature of his abilities. Major Jenkins dropped the target with a Sonic Weapon built into his Voss Combat Suit, and Ronnie secured the prisoner with a rifle butt and restraints. The exfiltration proved chaotic. Four insurgents mounted on flying carpets intercepted the extraction helicopter over the mountain passes. Guy timed a grenade throw from the helicopter door with the precision that demolitions work demands — the device detonated between two pursuing carpets and destroyed both in a single blast. Ronnie shredded the remaining two from the rear-mounted .50 calibre turret. At a NATO base in Afghanistan, as dawn broke, Major Jenkins raised a glass of whiskey and delivered news that would change everything: their own Voss Combat Suits were waiting at the Voss Campus.

After the debrief, Guy examined burn marks on his arm with an expression that suggested he did not know how they got there. The origin remains unknown.

Session 02 — Terra-ble First Impressions

The debrief at the Voss Campus went the way Guy’s debriefs always go — rapid-fire, technically precise, nothing omitted. He covered the hike, the sentries, the garbled Arabic radio response, the flying carpets. Then he produced the button he had been given to summon Major Jenkins and set it on the table. Ronnie slapped it immediately, because Ronnie has never left a button unslapped. Instead of summoning anyone, it began playing smooth jazz. Even Jenkins cracked a grin.

Guy discovered the base’s Obstacle Course and ran it several times before showering — a demolitions specialist maintains physical conditioning even when the body fights him on it. When the suit race against Ronnie came, Guy reached the top of the thirty-foot rope and made a decision that was equal parts engineering calculation and Overconfidence: he let go. Thirty feet of free fall, landing in a superhero crouch while the suit’s impact absorption systems burned through a significant chunk of their power reserves. The suit held. The math said it would hold. The part of Guy’s brain that also said tabernac, what if it doesn’t was overruled by the part that refuses to be outdone by a Brit.

Down on R&D Level -1, where the power suits hung on the wall like seven-foot exoskeletons, Guy went straight for the technical manual. While Ronnie terrorised scientists by pushing a coffee mug toward the edge of a desk with one finger, Guy was reading, sketching, and designing. His notebook filled with detailed technical drawings in a mix of English, Québécois French, and metric measurements — the language of a man whose engineering education happened in three different contexts, none of them a proper university. He designed Limpet Mines: small disc-shaped charges for the suit’s arm launcher, configurable for timer or motion-triggered detonation. He also designed a spring-loaded forearm knife. His request for a microbot surveillance swarm failed — the scientists lacked the fragment material to make it work — but they promised to try again if resources became available. Guy accepted the limitation without complaint. An engineer works with what exists, not what he wishes existed.

Terra changed everything. Voss led the suited team down to R&D Level -2, where The Portal shimmered in the centre of a restricted chamber — a circular arch constructed from meteor fragments, connecting to a planet that the research team had designated Terra. A previous recon team had gone through a month ago without powered suits and never returned. Guy was the first to test it. He stepped through, assessed the blasted landscape and the two suns hanging in an overcast sky, confirmed the portal functioned in both directions, and stepped back. On the alien surface, Guy found a three-foot hole in the side of a hill and attached a concussion limpet mine to the entrance as insurance while Sammy crawled inside. The tunnel led to an underground chamber where a Terran Insectoid — chitinous, cold-blooded, the size of a small car — gnawed on what appeared to be a human femur. The team retreated. Some intelligence is gathered by knowing when not to engage.

Guy’s analysis of the ruined city that the team found further north drew on every scrap of his engineering training. The damage patterns — crumbling concrete, exposed steel beams, blast scarring — matched conventional weapons, roughly a century old. Not meteor impacts, not alien technology, not the insectoids. Ordinary war, fought by whoever had built the three-legged furniture, driven the three-wheeled vehicles, and erected the statue of a three-eyed, three-armed, three-legged figure at the city’s centre. A combat engineer’s eye reading the decay, the fracture lines, the way structures fail when force is applied by someone who understands load-bearing walls. From the top of a twelve-story building, the team watched a swarm of two to three hundred insectoids digging methodically across the northern landscape. Guy watched them with the same analytical focus he brings to everything — counting, estimating distances, calculating threat density. The team returned through The Portal with time to spare, carrying suit footage, alien artefacts, and Hernandez’s bloodstained fatigues.

Guy’s notebook now contains more questions than answers. The portal, the fragments, the dead civilisation, the insectoid swarm — each one is a problem that wants an engineer’s solution. He has not yet found it.

Session 3 — What Happens in Vegas

Las Vegas R&R produced, for Guy, precisely one item that mattered: an antique detonator, found in a specialist military surplus shop two blocks off the Las Vegas Strip. The seller described it as a relic. Guy described it as gorgeous. He held it for approximately four seconds, turned it over twice, and handed over $2,000 in cash without negotiating. He is not a man who haggles over things that speak to him. The detonator went into the breast pocket of his jacket, where it remained for the rest of the trip, periodically produced and turned over in his hands the way other men handle worry beads. He also upgraded his Leatherman to a newer multi-tool with a better saw blade and a slightly improved torque ratio, which he considered a reasonable secondary acquisition. He won a Mahjong game at a casino table — cleaned out the table, actually — and handed the winnings to Ronnie to offset whatever new disaster Ronnie was navigating. That was business.

Gordon Ramsay’s residency restaurant was on the itinerary, and Guy sat at the table with his lighter on the tablecloth and watched the open kitchen flames with the focused appreciation of a man who loves fire the way other people love music. The creme brulee arrived and he requested a small handheld torch to finish the sugar himself. The waiter brought one without question. Guy caramelised the crust with the steady hand of a man calibrating a detonator, studied the char gradient, and ate it slowly. Ramsay emerged mid-service, and Guy used the encounter to request a custom creme brulee — slightly deeper sugar layer, different torch angle. The request was delivered with the flat technical precision of an engineering specification. Whether Ramsay found it charming or baffling, Guy could not determine. The lighter never left his hand while the kitchen flames were visible.

The mission assignment landed before R&R was finished: team lead for the meteor recovery operation. Guy accepted it the way he accepts most things — without visible reaction and with immediate internal reorganisation. A team lead plans, and Guy had already begun. He pulled data on Terra circuit board compositions from the Voss Dynamics research feed and started a technical analysis notebook, working through the component materials and trying to reverse-engineer the manufacturing logic of whatever civilisation had built them. He was three pages in when Jenkins mentioned, in passing, that Nash Miller had been assigned to the parallel team under Jenkins’ command. Guy’s pen stopped. Nash Miller is his Enemy — listed in his personnel file as a formal designation, not merely a grudge — and Miller was now operating on the adjacent track to every mission Guy would run for the foreseeable future. Guy finished the sentence he had been writing, closed the notebook, and ordered a whiskey. He said nothing further about it that evening. His lighter clicked open and shut, open and shut, while the bar noise continued around him.

Session 04 — Fallen Stars

The sweep across four countries was a logistical problem, and Guy ran it as one. Greenland first: the Dragon arrived before the team reached the fragment site, intercepted it cleanly, and departed. Guy watched through the suit optics, confirmed the State Farm logo that Jens called out through the scope, and made no move to intercept. There was nothing to engage. Some assessments happen quickly. He logged it, moved on, and adjusted his threat matrix for the remainder of the sweep. Every fragment was handled through doubled gloves. This was not a rule anyone had issued. It was engineering common sense, and the fact that Ronnie had picked one up with his bare hand in Iceland was a data point that now sat in Guy’s notebook alongside a string of question marks he had not yet converted to conclusions.

The bear in Russia required solutions in series. The first application — Sammy’s improvised device, fourteen pounds of shaped charge delivered at close range — produced a hole in the creature and, subsequently, a living creature again. Regenerative biology. Guy watched it reconstruct itself with the attentiveness of a man who has just seen a load-bearing assumption fail. When Ronnie came off its neck with the head and the thing finally stopped moving, Guy moved without ceremony to the remains and applied thermite. Thorough, even combustion, sufficient temperature to preclude further cellular reconstruction. He does not know for certain that it worked. He knows it was the correct call given available materials, and that is the standard he holds himself to. He filed the thermite application specifications in his notebook in case the question comes up again. The question will probably come up again.

The R&D facility was where the day became interesting. Under the pretext of suit maintenance — legitimate enough, the servos on his left arm had been registering a microvibration since Norway — he was working at a technical bench when a classified folder was left open on the adjacent station. The first two items were meteors, designations he recognised. The third was not a meteor. The label read Hungry God. He had seen that phrase before: Yi Jiangku had distributed a folder with that exact label in Session 01, one of three sealed briefings handed to selected team members before they shipped out to Afghanistan. The connection sat in his chest like a detonator waiting for a signal. He read what he could, memorised it precisely, and was back at his bench by the time anyone looked in his direction.

Throughout the facility, the equipment had been misbehaving — lights flickering in patterns that did not match any power-cycle logic he recognised, workstation screens locking up and recovering, environmental sensors briefly misreading temperature gradients. The scientists on the floor attributed it to power draw from the suit charging arrays. Guy said nothing, because the power draw from the charging arrays was not remotely sufficient to cause those symptoms. The glitches were not random. Whether they were related to the fragments, to Ronnie’s unexplained contact incident in the mess hall, or to something else entirely, he cannot say yet. His notebook has a new section. His lighter has been clicking faster than usual. He is the only person on the team who knows what the folder said, and he has not decided yet what to do with that.

Session 05 — Deep Sea Fragments and Desert Swarms

Miller caught him in the corridor. The man’s face held the particular expression of someone who has decided on a course of action and is now performing the announcement of it as though it costs him something. “I’m going to expose you,” Miller said, or words functionally identical. Guy assessed the threat vector, confirmed no immediate physical component, and walked past him to the briefing room. The statement lands in the notebook between “Hungry God” and the Chinese sub coordinates. Miller does not have the operational intelligence to know what Guy has seen in R&D. What Miller has is a version of Kandahar that his uncle’s rank made official. Guy has not yet decided whether Miller is a problem that requires management or a problem that will manage itself into irrelevance. He has time. Miller does not know that.

The briefing produced significant intelligence. Voss described Terra’s final days: a massive flying creature — squid-whale morphology, roughly one hundred feet — had attacked the planet. The Terrans responded by channeling their collective fragment-granted powers into a single individual, creating something approximating a god, and killed it. The bones lay on the surface where the team had walked. Guy connected the data immediately: the “Hungry God” folder in R&D, the third incoming object, the creature’s biology. If something similar is approaching Earth, Voss Dynamics may already be engineering the same response protocol. He made no external indication that this information meant more to him than it meant to anyone else in the room.

The sub mission was a mechanical problem and Guy treated it as one. He operated the retrieval arms — two fragments pulled cleanly from the seafloor under combat conditions, one while dodging a torpedo and the other while a massive anglerfish was destroying a Chinese submarine thirty meters to port. Ronnie’s piloting was unexpectedly excellent — vertical maneuvers, lateral positioning that maintained firing solutions for both turrets. The Chinese presence at exact fragment coordinates was the more significant detail: three submarines, precise targeting data, at sites that should have been intelligence-secure. Somebody is feeding them location data. Guy filed that against Ronnie’s quiet meeting with Xander in the corridor that morning and drew no conclusions he could not verify. But the data point exists now, adjacent to others.

The forty-eight-hour pass produced a different category of result. At The Bellagio, the cards cooperated. Guy doubled his stake repeatedly until the number reached $700,000 and casino security materialised with the particular body language of men who have been told to be present. Ronnie bribed them with chips — generous, immediate, effective. Guy credited the sum to his room and moved on. The money is not the interesting part. The interesting part is that Ronnie’s brief meeting with Igor at Medieval Times produced something that made Ronnie very quiet for the rest of the evening, and Ronnie is only quiet when he is holding something he considers valuable enough to protect with silence. Guy saw the exchange. He does not yet know what crossed hands.

Then every phone in the building lit up — Los Angeles, The Dragon, mass casualties — and the screaming started from outside that was not about Los Angeles at all. The parking lot was full of insects. Nine-foot armoured predators, dozens of them, tearing through tourists like paper targets. Guy moved to the valet stand, collected five sets of keys by reaching past a man who had frozen entirely, found the Lexus by remote chirp, and accelerated toward the swarm. The vehicle is not an elegant weapon. It is a mass-times-velocity equation with leather seats. Guy intends to apply it to as many of the creatures as the chassis will survive. Brittany is here, copies of her firing into the swarm, all of them screaming Sammy’s name. The bugs are the same as Terra. The same three-foot tunnel diameter, the same clicking, the same central eye. They are here now, in Las Vegas, eighty miles from where Jens opened his portal roadside three weeks ago, and nobody on the team has said that aloud yet. Guy noted it.