Before-Birthday Post!

The story's pretty much titled Harder Than Diamond, but take what you will from it.


I saw him in the corner of the restaurant, leaning on a wall and staring at me. Inconsequential now, but we were in a cheap Chinese place, all-white walls with some paper lanterns hanging from the ceiling. The guy wasn’t seated, wasn’t eating. Only staring. I strolled on over to that corner, looked at him, and looked away.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“A man,” he said.
“I guessed as much. What’s your name?”
“Benjamin Dukeman.”
“Nice try. I know your initials now, but not who you are.”
“A white-collar, working-class man. I fill a certain niche.”
“Professional spy, among other things.”
“You’re intelligent, sir.”
“The honorific there to cover your ass?”
“Instinct.”
“Of course. Why did you call me here?”
“I didn’t. The Organization did, but I know what you meant.” He paused.
“Am I going to get an answer?”
“You should already know, but just in case, there’s a large object that’s been found thirty miles away. We think it’s a new mineral, harder than diamond. We’ve got to stop Them from taking it.”
“And we start now?”
“No. We eat first.”
I ordered sweet and sour pork: inexpensive, tasty, and satisfying. The man who called himself Benjamin only had dumplings with soy sauce. We strolled outside into the noon sun, yet a shiver ran down my arms and spine. I could tell something bad would happen shortly, and that I’d be around to see it. Typical for a member of a syndicate such as my own.
Between our syndicate, called the Organization, and the other one, who we called Them or It, every single developed nation in the world was controlled, syndicate members pulling strings and presidents or dictators moving in response. Dennis wasn’t exactly higher-ranked than me because we had different specializations: my job was to keep silence and decrease suspicion, while his was to find important people, and sometimes even capture them. A dangerous man, but so was I.
“You seem simple, Ben,” I said.
“Small talk is certainly not a bad idea, but something I don’t want to listen to.”
“I said you seem simple. You’re a little deeper than I think you are, but you’re proving me right.”
“There’s nothing simple when we’re caught up in something this big. We don’t even exist when you forget the ‘you’ and the ‘me’. It’s ‘us’, or ‘we’. It’s serious, deadly so.”
“How far do we have to go, anyway?”
“We’ll be there in about two minutes.”
We finished the walk in silence. I was glad for it—Dennis said a lot for me to chew on. By the time we arrived, we had each put on our sunglasses, which kept the sun at bay and hid our eyes from anybody wanting to know our emotions. Precautions come easy in the syndicate business, after all.
“It’s not like we’re in disputed territory: we’re in upstate New York. This is an Organization country, plain and simple,” I said.
“Lines for countries aren’t drawn on the ground. What’s to stop Them from coming here?”
“Do we even have a plan for this material?”
“Not my position to know. We’ll learn at the same time, if we ever learn at all. We’re just here to stop something big from happening.”
“It’s going to happen. I can feel it.”
“Then we’d best be on our guard.”
Our path meandered off the sidewalk, until it was going directly away from the street. A massive crater had been dug in the ground about 200 paces from the road with a massive shining mineral in the center.
“This is what we guard? What’s it even called?” I asked.
“No independent scientists have gotten word of this thing, so there’s no name yet.”
“Makes sense.”
A slightly overweight man of about 40 walked over to us from where he had been staring at the diggers trying to uncover the entire mineral. He said, “Thank God you’ve arrived. They will be here soon to interfere. Your weapons are in these briefcases. You each get a Desert Eagle, two fragmentation grenades, and a sniper rifle. Hopefully you won’t have to use them.” He walked away.
“We will,” I said to Dennis. “Ben, why don’t you position yourself past the edge of the hole, so that you can’t be shot at easily? I’ll be following the overseer. Ben?” He already taken his briefcase and gone to where I had suggested. I sighed.
Clouds started to gather around the area, falling to the ground as a dense fog. I found infrared goggles in the case, too, so I put them on and made a connection between them and my eye implant so that I could get a better interface. I moved over to Dennis’ position before staring through the scope. The unnatural clouds were obviously a product of the members of It who planned on taking this mineral. I turned around to look down at the crystal itself. How would they steal it, anyway?
“Run, Ben! Get out of this hole!”
“What? Why?”
I sprinted up the ramp that had been dug, throwing myself into a nearby ditch. When Dennis got there, he asked again.
“They plan on destroying everything around it. They assume that the mineral is durable enough to withstand explosives. Those clouds provide suitable moisture to keep the mineral compact when the explosives go off. I don’t know how that’s supposed to work.”
I stared upward, seeing a beam of light pivot before pointing at the mineral in the crater. A voice called, “This is an assault by the Prime. Expect no survivors, for we plan to keep what we take.”
Quickly, I took a shot with the sniper rifle at the light’s source. A body fell and could be seen falling in line with the shaft of light until it hit the mineral. I heard the crack from a hundred feet away.
“You have been spotted, enemy,” the voice called again. “Today will be the day you die.”
I took out my Desert Eagle and turned to Dennis. He stared at me with the megaphone in his hand. Dropping the megaphone, he quickly unsheathed a knife.
“I’ve been following you, Dennis, for three years. I’ve witnessed some of your crimes. Being a double agent is simple. Being a triple agent takes serious work. You will answer me on who the third group is.”
“Higher beings. Aliens.”
“Lies.” I turned further and shot him in the wrist. He didn’t drop the knife; he dropped his entire forearm. His face twisted in rage as he pulled out a knife with his other hand.
“You think someone in my position is not ambidextrous?” he shouted.
“You’re dying as we speak. It’s a bad sign that you can’t feel the pain, which means your body has temporarily shut that out. It’ll be worse than ever when you feel it, if I give you the time to do so. You have already gone insane. There’s only one place you can call asylum, and that’s the grave.”
He snarled and swung his knife at me. I caught it with the gun, which I then pointed at his face and fired. Blood stained my clothes. A pity; they had been expensive to purchase. The Primes wouldn’t like how I had been wasteful.