Marking Territory: An Awakened Novel (The Rising Storm Book 1)

by N. L. Paradox

  For his part, Harold Westlake looked rather unimpressed by this information. “Is this something that I should be elated over?”

  “Research has shown,” Mallory explained, “that a rather large percentage of the general population gets their news from social media in one form or another as opposed to actual news channels. This could potentially be a gold mine for us from a campaign perspective.”

  “How so?” Westlake asked, leaning forward slightly with clearly piqued interest.

  Walking around the side of the large barrier between them, Mallory slipped up onto the desk top and slowly crossed her legs. As was the intention of the movement, the woman smiled when her employer and owner’s eyes briefly flickered to the long, stocking-sheathed legs before returning to her eyes. “We can use social media as a supplementary news source to put out pretty much whatever information we want. All it would take is creating a bunch of fake accounts and have them share whatever news stories we want so you’re cast in a positive light.”

  “Or,” Westlake said as he rubbed his chin in consideration, “place any opponents in a negative one.”

  “Exactly,” the campaign manager said with an eager smile. “We’ll need to bring in some really good computer people to do this. We should maybe explore the possibility of creating some fake news web sites in case we need a boost. We also might want to look at adding some additional layers of security on site.”

  “Do you really think that will be necessary?” Westlake asked as he slowly began stroking one hand along the smooth, silky length of her calf.

  “S-sir,” Mallory said in a slightly trembling voice as she fought against the urge to simply sink to her knees at the man’s feet, “there are many things happening at Westlake Industries that we wouldn’t want the general public to know about. Should some intrepid reporter find out about it…”

  “Our security is the best in the country,” Harold interrupted, shifting the position of his hand so it now caressed the softness of her thigh, eliciting a soft, trembling moan from the woman, “and our systems are self contained. The only way someone would be able to access our information is by physically entering the building and accessing the core server. Don’t worry my pet,” he said, his voice pleasantly confident in both his company and his own... personal prowess, “no one will find out anything we don’t want them to.”

  Unable to hold back any longer, Mallory slipped from the desk to straddle Westlake’s lap, pressing her core wantonly against him as she whimpered and nibbled at his throat. “Yes Master,” she whispered heatedly, drawing upward at his gentle urging until her lips were capture by his in a kiss that had her practically melting.

  As the woman began to strip in clear desperation, Harold Westlake idly lamented the fact that he no longer had Mr. Wiseman on his payroll. With his skills, it would have been quite a simple matter to establish that strong cyber-foothold Mallory had been talking about. It was really a shame that he had perished in the building collapse during that whole Keith Blake debacle. There was still the question of why the man had even been there in the first place, but considering a multitude of female bodies had also been recovered, Harold simply assumed it had been an improvised brothel of some sort.

  Still, there were other computer experts available to him. While none of them were anywhere near the caliber of Mr. Wiseman, they would certainly be more than sufficient for his purposes. He would need to make contact with them and get them established in various parts of the country so the computer footprint was spread out and wouldn’t lead anyone back to him.

  His consideration on just whom he intended to involve in this task was put on hold as the softness of Mallory’s mouth enveloped him and washed all coherent thought from his mind.

  Chicago, Undisclosed location

  Ashe looked up from the schematic laid out on the table as Gear entered the facility. At his side was a familiar blonde, teenage girl dragging a suitcase behind her and bouncing a computer bag on her hip.

  “WiseCrack,” Ashe greeted in his typical, neutral way with a simple nod.

  “Hey Ashe,” the girl said tiredly as she let go of her suitcase and slipped the computer bag from her shoulder.

  “Everything okay?” the vigilante asked with a raised eyebrow.

  “Yeah,” Angela said with a sigh as she sunk into one of the chairs around the table.

  “She’s missing Kitty,” Gear explained with a smile.

  “I trust it won’t interrupt your focus,” Ashe said, the unspoken warning clear in his voice.

  “I’ll be fine,” the blonde hacker assured him with a wave of her hand. “Besides, after what happened yesterday, I’ve got more motivation than I know what to do with.”

  “Good,” the shadowy man said in approval, “because I need you and Gear to get the fine points of this ‘stealth suit’ worked out quickly.”

  Frowning slightly in confusion, Angela reached into her laptop bag and drew the computer from it, setting it on the table and booting it up. “Is there something going on you aren’t telling me about?”

  “With Harold Westlake’s declaration yesterday, I need to get into Westlake Industries and get you access to their systems. Once I do that, you can copy and download any information they still retain about Project Mantis and Project Norman.”

  “Why the hell would you want those?” Gear asked cautiously.

  Seeming unconcerned by the way his two associates were looking at him, Ashe returned his attention to the schematic on the table. “Once we have them, we can leak them and anything else WiseCrack is able to find to the press. If nothing else, I suspect there will be enough incriminating evidence to place his candidacy in very serious jeopardy.”

  “I’m surprised you don’t just go kill him and blow up the building,” the weaponsmith muttered. When Ashe didn’t respond, Gear’s eyes widened. “Jesus, you’re actually considering that, aren’t you?”

  “Of course,” the vigilante replied as though such a train of thought should have been obvious, “but it would be far more effective to completely discredit him and his company. Killing him right now would only serve to make him a martyr and encourage others to take up his cause.”

  “Do you really think there are that many people who are anti-fey?” Gear asked skeptically.

  In response, Ashe looked over at WiseCrack, who tapped out a few commands on her laptop. “His speech is still trending at number one on social media and hundreds of groups have popped up supporting him. It’s still too early to tell, but if he’s able to maintain even part of this momentum we could have a serious problem.”

  “Does that answer your question?” the vigilante asked before poring over a particular part of the schematic he seemed so interested in.

  “Okay,” Gear said as he settled back in his chair and folded his arms, “so what are we going to do about it?”

  “The first thing you’re going to do is get that stealth suit functioning and assembled,” Ashe said as he made several notes on the tablet beside him. “Once that’s done and WiseCrack and I have put together an infiltration virus, we’ll put together a plan of operation to get into Westlake and get WiseCrack access to their mainframe.”

  Because the man had barely even looked at either of them during the bulk of their conversation, Gear stood up and walked over to get his first real good look at the schematic that seemed to have the bulk of his friend and boss’s attention. Looking it over, the weaponsmith frowned in confusion. “Ummm, boss, why are you looking at an exploded view of a Colt nineteen-eleven Airsoft pistol?”

  “I was considering the design for a new sidearm,” Ashe replied as he tapped his lips in consideration.

  “An Airsoft pistol?” Angela said incredulously even as she came around the table to look as well. “What the hell is that going to do, annoy the bad guys to death?”

  “Not if the air system in the grip and slide was replaced with an electromagnetic accelerator.”

  For several seconds, silence hung in the air as both
weaponsmith and hacker stared at Ashe in wide-eyed, slack-jawed shock. It was Gear who managed to recover first and say, “You want to turn a pellet gun into a fucking rail gun? Are you insane?”

  “The miniaturization process of the rail gun has already had great strides through the joint efforts of the U.S.’s REDCOM and the Canadian’s DRDC,” Ashe explained. “They’ve managed to reduce the size down to that of a slightly larger than normal Barrett fifty caliber rifle. Between the three of us, I’m confident we can get that size down to at least assault rifle size or even pistol.”

  Both Gear and WiseCrack looked at the Airsoft schematic, up to Ashe, then back to the schematic, then back up to Ashe once more… all the while maintaining a look of dumbfounded disbelief. “Ashe, you can’t be serious,” Gear told him in an almost pleading voice. “You’re talking about an engineering feat that obviously the best minds in defense research haven’t been able to crack. What makes you think we could possibly do better than them?”

  Shifting so he was standing upright, Ashe gave the two a steady look that showed absolutely no hesitation or doubt whatsoever. “When was the last time I gave you an assignment that you failed to complete?”

  “Well, never,” the weaponsmith admitted.

  The question and answer hung there for several seconds before Ashe rolled up and collected the schematic. “Work on the stealth suit for now, that project is time sensitive. WiseCrack,” he said, turning slightly to look at the blonde teen, “Gear will get you set up in the other room. If you need anything that isn’t already there, just tell me and you’ll have it.”

  “Ummm, okay,” Angela said as the man turned and walked from the room before she looked at Gear. “Is he serious about making a… a… rail pistol?” she asked in disbelief.

  “You know Ashe,” the weaponsmith sighed, taking Angela’s suitcase while the hacker closed down her laptop before gathering it and the bag up, “he says what he means. If he says we can miniaturize the electromagnetic accelerator system that a rail gun uses, you can pretty much take that pretty much as gospel.”

  Moving through a steel door, Angela gasped when she found herself in what was any hacker’s ultimate wet dream. One entire wall of the room had been replaced with a giant LED touch screen display that went from floor to ceiling. Several feet away from that was a large, circular desk with an opening at the rear for entry and a seat in the middle. Upon taking a peek inside of the desk area, the hacker saw that there were multiple input devices such as keyboards, mice, tablets, imaging dials, and more. There was even a complex-looking VR system dangling from the ceiling directly above where the chair rested. While she wouldn’t know for sure until doing a full check of the system, what was displayed on the giant screen seemed to indicate that all of this hardware was hooked into some kind of supercomputer mainframe.

  “Holy shit,” Angela whispered in awe as she ran her fingers delicately over the primary keyboard with the kind of gentleness one typically saw from a car fanatic.

  “I’m guessing you’re good with this,” Gear said with a smile.

  “How in the hell did you get all of this?” the girl asked as she sat down and started running through a files check and system diagnostic before looking up at her friend.

  “Ashe,” they both said simultaneously.

  “So I’ve already uploaded the design specs of the suit to your system here,” Gear explained, walking over to the huge screen and tapping on one particular folder. Instantly the file opened to display multiple files of various types. “What I’m running into problems with is the computer virus aspect of it and a way to have the suit automatically send the virus to any security systems.”

  Looking through a couple of the files, Angela raked her fingers through her hair, a thinking gesture still left over from her days as Harry Wiseman. “This isn’t going to be easy,” she said cautiously. “Coming up with the virus to get any security system to basically ignore the suit while projecting a mirror image at the same time, isn’t all that hard. The problem is how we get the virus into the security system in the first place.”

  “Exactly,” Gear said with a sigh. “Any idea how we can do it?”

  “Not yet,” she said carefully in a distant kind of voice that indicated something was on her mind, “but let me look into a few things. I’ll let you know when I’ve got something viable.”

  “All right,” the weaponsmith said before sighing himself. “In the meantime, I’ll start working on a way to somehow shrink an electromagnetic accelerator into the frame of a fucking pistol.”

  “Sounds like fun,” Angela said distractedly as her fingers flew over the keys.

  As Gear opened his mouth to make some kind of snarky reply, he stopped and actually thought about it. In all the time he’d been with the man, Ashe had never asked something of him that was beyond his capabilities. Sure, they’d been pushed to the limit on more than one occasion, but not once had something been asked of him that he was forced to admit he wasn’t able to complete. In fact, more often than not, Gear ended up finding the challenge to be somewhat enjoyable, testing the limits of his engineering and weaponsmithing skills and actually improving them with each project.

  “You know what,” he said with a smile WiseCrack couldn’t see, “I think it will be.”

  Tearmann Institute, Newfoundland, Foghlaim Building

  “So, I’m guessing all of you either saw or heard the news last night,” Ms. Hollister said with a wan smile. When the majority of us nodded or murmured some kind of affirmative, the witch came around her desk and perched herself on its edge. “I know it’s a pretty scary thing since most of you are from the U.S., but there’s something you might not know when it comes to anti-fey fanaticism.” Pivoting slightly, she tapped out a few keys on her laptop before the image of a rather stern-looking bald man standing before what looked like an American flag appeared on the smart board.

  “This is Congressman Walter Booker,” she said, slipping from her desk and moving to stand beside the board so everyone could see. “About fifteen years ago, he and several other members of Congress tried to enact a bill that would essentially ban all fey from entering or remaining in the United States.”

  This previously unknown knowledge, to me anyway, caused my eyes to widen in surprise. Apparently, I wasn’t the only person who’d never heard about this because I could hear a few gasps come from my classmates, including Ashley.

  “Oh yeah,” Ms. Hollister continued, “they basically tried to do what Russia did to homosexuals, make it illegal to even be one, except they swapped out homosexuals with fey.”

  “How in the world could the United States government allow something like that?” a girl towards the back of the room asked in shock.

  “Well,” the woman said with a smile, “it turns out they didn’t. The bill died before it ever made it to the floor of the House of Representatives. The scary part is, there were quite a few Congressmen and women willing to vote in favor of the bill. It was actually a pretty close call whether or not there would be enough votes for it to pass.”

  “So,” I said, being careful to keep the rising anger out of my voice, “you’re saying there were… are... a lot of people in the government who were anti-fey before Westlake even came along?”

  “It makes sense,” Kitty said from beside me. “The fey represent not only the pinnacle of the human condition, but actually leap beyond it. While there are plenty of people who obviously don’t bear any ill will towards fey, there are easily just as many, if not more, who range from being suspicious to downright homicidal towards us and likely have been for centuries.”

  “And why do you say that Kitty?” Ms. Hollister asked with undisguised curiosity.

  I was just opening my mouth to warn our teacher that was a bad idea, but Kitty beat me to the punch. “Well,” she began, her voice taking on that tone that I’d come to know so well whenever she launched into ‘scientist mode’, “if we accept the idea that fey have been around at least since ancient Egyptian ti
mes, it stands to reason that the rest of humanity would be quite divided when it came to the acceptance of fey back then.”

  “Because they would view a fey’s abilities as either a gift from the gods or a curse from whatever evil deities they believed in at the time,” Ashley said with a nod, clearly picking up on Kitty’s angle.

  “Precisely,” our friend said with a rather annoyingly superior smile. “In that respect, fey could be viewed as spirits of good or evil depending on what was most beneficial to the person perpetuating the viewpoint. Over time, that concept likely morphed and evolved into suspicions and fears of a more practical nature. While there probably wasn’t so much a concern about a fey’s powers coming from one deity or another, the concern would be if the fey themselves would use their powers to help or harm humanity.”

  Leaning back in her chair, she draped one arm over its back and crossed her legs, projecting an essence of ‘I’m a genius’ that I caught even without the benefit of heightened senses. “It’s basic human nature to fear what we don’t understand, because we don’t know if it will help or hurt us. This just gets elevated when it comes to fey because now we’re talking about not only intelligence, but we’re adding emotions and free will into the mix, so there’s really no controlling us. I bet that’s a pretty scary concept to people if they really think about it.”

  For several moments, no one in the class spoke with all eyes fixated on our genius friend in a kind of awe. Had we not heard Kitty go on even larger tangents regarding some kind of scientific principle, I’m sure Ashley and I would have probably been just as gobsmacked as everyone else in the class. As it was, I was too busy worrying about the other students starting to view Kitty as a know-it-all, and thus a target of harassment. I didn’t know what Ashley was thinking, but knowing her, she was probably worried that Kitty had just offended the teacher by trying to show her up like that.