“They’d killed an officer under my command,” David replied softly. “I followed them into a warehouse. An ONSET team saved me, barely.”
“I don’t intend to fail this,” Tsimote said calmly. “The others don’t understand. They have no idea what’s out there.”
David considered this a foolish statement at best. Samuels and Stone had worked “out there”. Casey had, from some of his comments, joined up after helping an ONSET team track down a supernatural killer in Iraq. And David had seen Shanks’s eyes. There was something about the boy that suggested the boy knew as much about the dangers as any of them.
Unwilling to make an argument of it, he simply nodded slowly. “I don’t think any of us intend to fail,” he said finally, getting up to go sleep.
Tsimote watched him go in silence.
#
At six AM the next morning, the same blaring klaxon went off, and David slowly dragged himself to his feet to Koburn bellowing “Reveille!” again.
Exhaustion from the previous day conflicted with expecting it this time to have David out with the others exactly at the five-minute mark. Koburn was standing in the front of the room, tapping his foot impatiently.
“Follow me,” he ordered once they’d all shambled into some semblance of order. Again, Casey was the most functional of them all, though David took a small amount of pride in being almost as awake and ready to go as the ex-soldier.
Koburn led the six trainees into a small lecture room that wouldn’t have looked out of place in the police training academy David had gone through—and returned to twice, once for advanced training in investigation and tactics, and a second to teach some of the early classes. A projector sat in the middle of the room amidst twelve simple wooden desks. The ONSET trainer gestured for them all to sit and then propped himself against the table with the projector.
“Some of you,” he said quietly, “have never seen real supernatural trouble and are wondering why the United States even has a secret branch of government, let alone supernatural strike teams.
“The rest of you”—his gesture took in David, Tsimote, Casey and Shanks—“have seen some of the horrors that are out there and understand why ONSET exists. Even you, however, are wondering why ONSET Campus is one of the most fortified locations on Earth. Why we have a small army of conventional troops, why we have so much firepower and technology at the command of what is, at the end, nothing more than a SWAT team.
“This lecture is on why,” he said grimly, and hit the button on the projector. A frozen image of a mountainside with a play icon on it appeared.
“This video clip is from late oh seven,” he told them. “It is camera footage from the Commander’s Leopard tank of Delta Company, Armored Battalion Thirteen of the Swiss Panzerbrigade Eleven. They were carrying out training exercises in the Alps when, well…watch.”
The teacher hit a button, and the video clip started.
#
For a moment, all the gun camera showed was frozen mountainside, then the camera rotated as the Commander reviewed the sixteen tanks crunching their way over the frozen field. The video was completely silent, so it was a complete shock when the tank on the end of the even line suddenly erupted into the air.
The sixty-plus-ton vehicle flipped completely end over end, slamming turret-first into the ground almost a hundred meters from its launch point with a visible crumpling.
Standing under where the tank had been driving was a monstrosity out of nightmare. Six or more meters tall, the creature looked like a moss-covered stone figure of a man—one someone had carved by rough description. Its rough mouth was open in a silent scream as it charged at the next tank in line.
There was no way the tank driver could have reacted, and the creature ripped the mighty armored vehicle in half with one yank of its immense arms. The professionalism of the Swiss army was demonstrated, however, in that the first shots hit the monster as it was attacking the second vehicle.
The camera was bouncing and wavering insanely as the tank started backpedaling, the formation rotating as the vehicles tried to open the distance and fire on the creature. The first few rounds did nothing, exploding on the troll’s stone skin and stripping off moss.
The second salvo of rounds, however, showed that the Swiss had learned the first salvo’s lessons. Bright red lines flashed across the camera’s view as armor-piercing rounds drove into the creature’s skin and detonated, lighting up the night as dozens of machine guns chattered to life as well.
The monster felt the armor-piercing rounds, raising its head in a bellow, silent on the film, which shook the trees around it. Whatever it felt wasn’t enough to kill it, however, and it charged the line of tanks with a speed that left the camera only recording a blur.
David had to shake his head to clear dizziness as the camera spun to catch the stone creature slamming into two of the tanks simultaneously with the force of a train engine. Its broad arms crashed clean through the front armor but got stuck. For a moment, it stood still, a fist buried in each tank.
As it stood shaking its head in confusion, a second salvo of armor-piercing rounds slammed into it. This time, the Commander’s tank was close enough to clearly see the rounds punching through the stone of the creature’s flesh. Some kind of black ooze dripped from the wounds, and the creature spun around to face the other tanks. One of its hands tore free from one of the tanks it had struck.
The other brought the sixty-ton tank around with it, only breaking free in time to send it hurtling directly at the camera.
#
The film stopped there and faded to a still shot of the same field. The smoldering wreckage of seven of the company’s sixteen tanks littered it, and the photographer had caught six of the remaining tanks, in a carefully aligned circle, training their main guns on the broken stone pieces of the creature.
“That,” Koburn said quietly, “was a greater troll. So far as we can tell, in eras of lower magical activity, they go to sleep like dragons. They wake up more readily than dragons, however, and nine have awoken in the European mountains in the last decade. It is only a matter of time until one wakes up in the Rockies, and they are, as you saw, incredibly hard to kill.
“Worse,” he continued grimly, “is their shared attribute with the type of Empowered we also call a troll. Both must eat human flesh to survive—nothing else provides nutrition. Evidence suggests that a greater troll requires a lot of human flesh—we have not always been so lucky as to have a tank company literally drive over the troll.
“That said, at least we know what trolls are,” he continued, and hit another button.
An image of a desolate town appeared on the screen at the front of the room. Desert was visible beyond the adobe houses and shacks, and sand blew through the street. The blowing sand caught forever in mid-gust explained why the bodies piled haphazardly through the streets were half-buried. The occasional half-buried AK-47 showed that they had not been defenseless. Several of the houses had holes in the walls; one had been completely demolished.
Just in the field of view of the first camera there were dozens, possibly hundreds, of bodies. The picture switched to another angle, looking into the town along a partially cleared highway littered with the wreckage of the town’s dozen or so vehicles, and more piled bodies.
A third picture showed what had been the town’s school. The teacher had clearly ordered the children to hide and then held the door shut with his own body. He’d been torn in two, the gore of his death still visible in a room protected from the elements by its walls, and splattered across the remnants of the students he’d tried to protect.
David swallowed hard as a fourth picture of the main market of the town came up. A handful of armed men had tried to make a stand behind a crude barricade thrown together from the remnants of the stalls. The picture showed half a dozen carrion birds picking at the piles of corpses.
They were the only living things in all of the pictures.
“The name of this town is class
ified,” Koburn said quietly, as a fifth picture of the town—from the air, the bodies no longer visible with distance but the damage to the buildings still clear—appeared. “It’s in southern Afghanistan, near the Pakistan border. The Taliban blame us for this. We…don’t know what actually did it.”
“What do you mean, we don’t know?” Leila Stone, her voice choked, asked from behind David.
“This was discovered by a roving Army medical team just over a year ago,” Koburn explained. “An OSPI team with an ONSET squad in support was sent in to investigate. Most of the people were killed by a creature with claws, and we think it was all the same creature.
“The OSPI team was led by a Mage Inspector, who tried to investigate with Second Sight.” The instructor paused, his gaze locked on David, who returned his regard steadily. “The Inspector has been undergoing intensive psychiatric care on this Campus since. Our current best hope is that if we magically block out the memories, she will recover in another year. Such an operation is…delicate.
“We believe,” he finished quietly, “that there were about two thousand people in the town. None of them escaped.”
#
Koburn fiddled with the projector again and a new image appeared on the screen. The burned wreckage of four armored personnel carriers framed a line of sandbags and a stunning vista looking out over snowy mountains.
The snow in the front of the scene was stained red. Dozens of bodies were scattered across the sandbags; the hastily dug machine gun pits were slaughterhouses. It was hard to tell with how badly the bodies were torn up, but it looked like they were wearing US Army winter camouflage.
“On October fourth, two thousand and four, a research team for the Office of Supernatural Policing and Security identified the presence of a major dimensional rift in the Rocky Mountains in Montana,” Koburn said quietly. “Overhead imagery of the rift was quickly acquired.”
The image of the slaughtered soldiers faded into a sterile overhead shot of a similar snowy mountain landscape. In the center of the image was a black-and-purple inkstain-like splotch. Around it were a number of small figures, difficult to make out.
The image zoomed in, centering on one of the figures. There was nothing to judge its size by, but it was roughly humanoid-shaped, naked with skin blacker than the darkest human. Massive curled horns emerged from the creature’s temples, wrapping around to almost rest on the obviously male figure’s shoulders.
“We estimated that the rift was allowing several dozen demons through every hour—three to four hundred a day,” Koburn continued. “At the time, neither ONSET nor the Anti-Paranormals existed. The Brigadier commanding OSPI’s High-Threat-Response teams requested and was denied the authorization to deploy small-scale nuclear weaponry—the threat was deemed insufficient. Instead, the Committee of Thirteen borrowed eight combat brigades—two divisions’ worth of troops—from the Army, the Marines and the Montana and Washington National Guard.
“This,” he said quietly, switching back to the original picture, “is what happened when the first two brigades thought they could handle the estimated twelve hundred demons that had come through when they arrived. Their assault turned into a retreat within two hours, and then into a desperate attempt to hold the line against the demons’ counter-offensive.”
A new image appeared on the screen. This one had been taken in action. Four tanks and a dozen APCs were charging across a clear snowy field. Lines of tracer fire and the muzzle flashes of the rifles of the infantry advancing with the tanks had been caught in the frozen tableau. So had the dozens of demons facing them, including one identical to the one Koburn had originally zoomed in on. Now with the tanks for scale, it was clear that the demon was easily twice as tall as a human. This one had an APC in its hands, held off the ground in the process of being thrown at one of the tanks.
“The remaining brigades arrived in time to prevent the line breaking, but the two units in the initial contact suffered in excess of ninety percent casualties,” the instructor continued.
“The grind up the valley to get a team of OSPI Mages to the rift took three days,” he told them. “We took more casualties in the four days of the Montana Incursion than in any other four-day period since the Vietnam War. Eight brigades and three OSPI High- Threat-Response Teams—out of four in existence at the time—assaulted that valley. Thirty-two thousand men and women.”
Koburn paused, surveying his students as a slow slideshow of further images of combat and violence between demons of all sizes and colors on one side and the US Army on the other played behind him.
“Twelve thousand two hundred and fifty-six survived. Of those, eight thousand five hundred and thirty were permanently maimed. Of the surviving three thousand seven hundred and twenty-six, seven hundred and eighty-two suffered psychological traumas sufficient to result in discharge.
“The remaining twenty-nine hundred and forty-four soldiers formed the core of what is now the Anti-Paranormal Companies,” Koburn finished. “They are a conventional military force trained and equipped to fight the supernatural.”
The slideshow stopped on a picture of an under-construction mountainside base. Without the skyscrapers and walls, it took a moment to recognize the ONSET Campus.
“An inquiry by the Committee of Thirteen concluded that a lack of resources, information and authority hampered the fight against the Incursion. They also concluded that the rift suggested that we should expect more and more dangerous supernatural activity in the future.
“This inquiry was completed in June two thousand and five. The Office of the National Supernatural Enforcement Teams was established in February of two thousand and six,” Koburn finished.
“It is our job to make sure that we never again see twenty thousand dead on our own soil.”
Chapter 7
Hours of lessons blurred together over the following days. Lessons piled on lessons, in marksmanship, in supernatural politics, in the organization of the supernatural branch of the US Government.
David learned that a special committee of Congress, formally the Special Committee for Supernatural Affairs and informally the Committee of Thirteen, wielded the full power of Congress in supernatural affairs. He learned that the Familias were the body of the vampire politic in the United States, a group of nine vampire families of Italian and Russian descent that ran a huge portion of organized crime in the US.
The identifying marks of a hundred types of supernatural were drilled into their brains. The many different kinds of powers a supernatural could show. They learned the weapons and attacks all supernaturals were vulnerable to, like silver, and the more specific, like vampire’s nonfatal but still debilitating allergy to full-spectrum light.
Hours upon hours were spent in gyms, honing reflexes and testing out new supernatural powers. Secured lead chambers were used to train the Mages, and David watched Tsimote wield fire like he was conducting a symphony.
Koburn had gone over multiple forms of martial arts with all of the trainees, enhancing existing training and focusing it into new forms. Mostly, he taught them a modified form of Krav Maga, as opposed to the Tae Kwan Do David had learned in his police training. Casey proved to be a master of Krav Maga, but this was insufficient.
Around the end of the second week, the burly black man came to quietly say goodbye to David. While Leonard Casey had proven some of his supernatural abilities, they boiled down to him being a glorified human bloodhound. He could follow anyone, anywhere, but Koburn had suggested—and Casey had eventually agreed—that it was a talent more useful to OSPI than to ONSET.
So, their number shrank by one, and David focused on his training with all his might.
He learned how to use his Second Sight fully and discovered that his enhanced perception extended to his other senses as well. The lights and auras of his Sight were no longer terrifying and strange. Now they were another tool in the arsenal Koburn had helped equip him with.
The lessons blurred hours to days, and days to weeks, an
d the next thing he knew, he was being roughly awoken early in the morning once more, and hustled down a set of stairs on the lower floor of the bunker—stairs he hadn’t realized existed.
#
The grizzled instructor hadn’t been kidding about breaking them, David reflected as the door slid shut behind him. He took the moment to reflect as he tucked into a dark corner, eyeing the rest of the shadowed tunnel—some kind of training complex under the basement to the bunker he’d been studying in for the last four weeks.
No one had come down with him, and he hoped that it meant that the others were getting their own final test, as they’d told him this was for him.
One last test, Koburn had told him. This was it, this shadowy underground complex, clear as day to his new senses. They hadn’t given him a mission or anything. Simply woke him up at four in the morning, hustled him into the tight-fitting black bodysuit ONSET used as a uniform, and dropped him into the complex.
Now he stood underneath a vaulted concrete ceiling high enough for an elephant, and looked back at the metal door that had just clanged shut behind him. The tunnel stretched out to both sides of him, and he squared his shoulders.
It was too late to change his mind now. He’d thrown his lot in with ONSET, to serve and protect humanity from those who would abuse the powers that came from beyond the Seal. After four weeks of training, he was only barely beginning to feel he was ready, but he also understood just how understrength ONSET was compared to the threats it faced. The five men and women left in his class would increase the national agency’s active supernatural strength by almost five percent.
ONSET needed David White, and that meant that whatever this exercise was, he’d deal with it. Well.
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