ONSET: Blood of the Innocent
Page 6
“We’re not tracking them anymore, are we?” the Commander said levelly.
“The transponder is on the cab, not the trailer,” Charles explained. “If I had to guess, I’d say yer Arbiter friend pulled into a truck stop and handed four random owner-operators an envelope of cash and the keys to a very modern truck cab in exchange for their current vehicle.
“He and his minions pulled out with the fledglings with their new cabs, and their old cabs get driven all over the United States by completely innocent truckers.”
“We’ll need to validate that,” David pointed out.
“I agree,” the dragon said. “That will fall on OSPI at this point, though; there’s no point in sending ONSET teams after them, and—”
A ringing sound cut Charles off in mid-sentence, and the dragon tapped a command on his keyboard to answer his telephone.
“Major, a pleasure. What do ye need?”
“You have White down there, don’t you?” Major Warner’s crisp voice said over the telephone.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Cut him off. He’s off the Romanov case as of now,” she said sharply. “He’s off every case; he’s been officially relieved of duty and his clearances suspended.”
David winced.
“I know you can hear me, David,” she continued. “I’m sorry. The Committee has ordered a board to review your actions. I need you to come up to my office, ASAP.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he replied.
Warner was silent for several seconds, then sighed.
“Yeah. We’ll talk in person. Get up here.”
The program shut off with a click and Charles unfolded himself to look David levelly in the face, his black eyes unreadable.
“Ye should go, lad,” he said gently. “Ye needed to know we’d lost them, but now ye need to focus on yerself.”
“I know. What do you know about the Arbiter?” David asked quickly.
“Nothing,” the dragon replied. “And I mean it, David; that’s not because yer clearances are suspended—I don’t care about Omicron’s bullshit. I’ve never heard of the creature…which means the title, at least, is less than eight hundred years old…and isn’t used anywhere on the Internet I can find.”
GIVEN THAT BUILDING ONE, the central tower in the Campus, was inside the thirty-foot concrete walls and at the center of an open area patrolled by armed guards and under continual manual and automated surveillance, the security measures to actually enter the building were probably overkill.
The minigun and remote-controlled weapons behind concealed panels were almost certainly overkill, but the Campus’s defenses had been designed by a group of professional paranoids.
David presented his ID to the armed guards and provided a thumbprint as requested. The guards were just as respectful as usual, and he wondered if the rumor mill had picked up his suspension from duty yet as he made his way up to Warner’s third-floor office, passing through another checkpoint to get there.
The short and slim redheaded woman was waiting for him behind her desk when he arrived, backlit to his eyes with the aura of the painting behind her and its defensive spells.
Warner’s own aura pulsed azure blue. She was a powerful Mage, though she hadn’t taken the field while David had been a member of ONSET.
She gestured him wordlessly to the chair in front of her desk, one of the uncomfortable unpadded ones she kept on hand for when she was displeased with her officers, and waited for him to sit.
“Major,” he finally said. “You wanted me to see you.”
She sighed.
“I did. You don’t deserve to hear this mess over a phone or a radio, even if it is of your own making,” Warner told him.
“Personally, I don’t think we needed to involve the Committee in this, but they’ve been watching our actions against the Familias very carefully of late,” she continued. “The new President seems determined to ignore the fact that Omicron exists, which has left the Committee feeling they need to keep a more direct eye on us themselves.
“They knew something had happened and they asked Ardent for an explanation. He wasn’t going to lie to them,” she concluded. “They are…unimpressed with your decision, Commander White. I’m not certain they agree with your estimate of the threat level that this Arbiter represented.”
She held up a hand before he could say anything.
“You and I understand how such things are assessed,” she continued. “I trust you when you say how powerful he was. The Committee, however, are mundane to a man and woman. They don’t understand.
“All they know is that an ONSET Commander, one of the people they have been told are among the most powerful supernaturals in North America, backed down and let forty vampires, beings we’ve told them are among the most dangerous supernaturals in North America, go.
“Can you see why that seems problematic to them?” she asked.
David nodded. When Warner didn’t continue, he spoke aloud.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“They’re requiring us to hold a board of inquiry, which means you are relieved until I can assemble four ONSET Commanders who haven’t worked with you to sit on it,” she concluded. “Your actions stand at the nexus, Commander, of which is more important: the policies and standing orders of the Omicron Branch, or the independent authority of our team leaders in the field.”
She sighed.
“On the record, the board can do anything up and including sending you to a maximum security supernatural penitentiary for twenty years,” she told him. “Off the record, you’re most likely looking at a fine and a formal censure on your record; do you understand?”
“Not entirely, ma’am,” David admitted.
“I doubt half of our Commanders would have done any differently in your position,” Warner admitted. “And even if half of our Commanders might have, the authority of the officer on the spot is not something we can afford to minimize—even if you did fuck up.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She shook her head.
“I’ll accept that you might not have been able to beat him, but damn it, David, forty vampires…”
“When the Arbiter promised to make them swear never to harm a human, he meant it,” he pointed out. “That much I can be certain of. Who he truly is, where he took them…I don’t know any of that.”
“That he even exists tells me we don’t know as much about our enemy as we should,” Warner admitted. “But that’s my problem now. You, Commander White, are on leave until the board can convene.”
“What about my team?”
“Technically, they’re still on duty, but we’ll be placing them on leave as well, at least for now,” she told him.
“Am I restricted to Campus?” he asked.
“I know you,” she said with a laugh. “Don’t leave the country, don’t forget your phone. Otherwise, do what you want until we call you. You won’t run—and it’s not like we couldn’t find you if you tried.”
8
Even access to magic didn’t seem to have accelerated the rumor mill, in David’s experience. It certainly hadn’t slowed it, though, so all three current members of ONSET Thirteen were waiting in the lobby of the two-story apartment building assigned to the team.
In better times, all eight suites in the building would have been occupied and ONSET Thirteen would be at full strength. With the losses taken the previous year in Operation Sun Net, none of the ONSET teams were over half-strength, hence using Elfin Warriors like Klein and his people to fill in their numbers.
At least this meant he only had to face three subordinates immediately, with Hellet, Stone and McCreery the only ones sitting in the small living room waiting for him.
“So,” Stone greeted him, the man’s voice soft and high-pitched, twisted by the scar on his throat. “Do we still have a boss?”
“Your confidence in my continued employment is heartening,” David replied. “Yes, I’m still your boss. For now.”
“For no
w?” Hellet repeated. “What’s going on.”
“I have been officially removed from active duty pending the convening of a board of inquiry to go over my decisions with regards to the Arbiter and the fledglings,” he told them. “Depending on how long it takes, you’ve been placed on leave as well.”
He shrugged.
“If it takes more than a week or two to pull together a board, I imagine you’ll be sent back into the field under a different Commander, but until they make that call, I’m still officially Commander of ONSET Thirteen.”
“After everything you’ve done, that’s all it takes?” McCreery demanded. “You’re a goddamn hero, sir.”
“Thank you, Agent, but I know my record,” David replied. “So does Major Warner. So do the Commanders who will sit on the board. It’s not my record that’s being called into question, Shevon. It’s my judgment.”
Hellet shivered.
“That Arbiter…he was old, sir. And powerful. A Mage and a vampire both—I’ve never seen an aura like his before. Maybe one of the stronger demons might have been similar, but…”
“No,” David replied. “Ekhmez was…well, he wasn’t human. The Arbiter is. Mantled and ancient, perhaps cursed…but still human.”
The demon Ekhmez had been the architect of the disaster known as Operation Sun Net, having coopted enough minions on Earth to lead the Omicron Branch’s police forces into a series of traps that had almost killed them all—before David and a handful of others had killed the creature in a desperate strike into the heart of the headquarters of ONSET’s sister organization, the Office for Supernatural Policing and Investigation.
“Unfortunately, it also appears he is very smart,” David admitted. “Charles says we lost track of the trucks, which means he and those fledglings are now lost to us.”
“Damn. Do you think he’ll keep his word?” Stone asked.
“He meant it when he said it,” the Commander replied. “I could See that. He might change his mind, people do that, sadly, but when he promised to show them a different way, he meant it.”
“So, what do we do now?” McCreery asked.
“We’re on leave,” David told her. “You can exercise, train, or you can head off and visit or whatever you normally do on leave.”
“What about you, sir?”
“I’m going to hit the library here,” he admitted. “There doesn’t seem to be much in our computers, but we’ve got records going back to the early nineteenth century. It’s possible someone encountered this Arbiter before…and if there’s anything about him, anywhere, I want to know it.”
IT WAS easy to say he had a plan for digging into information on the Arbiter while still riding the high of a mostly successful mission and before his relief had really sunk in.
Having been on the go for almost twenty hours, however, David had to sleep before he could execute any of his plans—and the whole situation looked much more intimidating in the cold light of a Colorado spring afternoon.
An unwillingness to murder men and women chained to a wall might cost him his job, which…didn’t say particularly good things about the organization he worked for, did it?
That thought on its own kept him staring out the window of his apartment at the various buildings of the Campus until twilight had almost entirely fallen. If there’d been more than beer in his fridge, getting very, very drunk would have been tempting…but it was almost impossible for a Class One Regenerator to get drunk off beer.
The same supernatural healing that would bring him back from bullet wounds or third-degree burns laughed in the face of artificial intoxication. The only highs his body seemed truly able to get now were natural ones, from excitement like being shot at.
In the absence of the ability to get drunk, research sounded like as much fun as anything else he could do.
DAVID WASN’T sure where the United States Library of the Supernatural and Paranormal, often called simply the Omicron Archive, had resided before the ONSET Campus had been built. Now, however, it lived on the thirty-second through forty-fifth floors of Building Three, above the Campus’s primary hospital.
Like so much else on the Campus, it also lived behind multiple layers of security, so he wasn’t surprised to see one of the Archive’s librarians rushing toward the main entrance as he made his way through the thirty-second-floor security checkpoint.
“Commander White,” the bespectacled middle-aged woman greeted him. “It’s been some time since you’ve graced the Library. I’m Sharon Williams; I don’t know if you remember me.”
“I was mostly here with my training squad, Miss Williams,” David admitted. “I remember what we were supposed to be learning that day, not much else. Sages have an…interesting impact on memory.”
Sages were supernaturals capable of instilling knowledge that would normally require years in weeks. There were only four employed by the US Government, and each of them was more precious than an Army division.
“They do,” Williams agreed. “How can I assist you, Commander?” She paused, coughing hesitantly. “My records show your clearance is under partial suspension, so there are things I won’t be able to show you.”
David nodded.
“I’m mostly looking for deep-background research,” he told her, “but some of it might be high-clearance. I’m hoping the suspension only applies to active files.”
“It depends on how deep-background, I suppose,” Williams told him. “Certainly, I can’t show you anything active…not that we keep much in the Library that is truly active. What did you want to look at, Commander?”
He smiled. The conflict between a librarian’s urge to be helpful to anyone who actually came to their library and an Omicron officer’s need to maintain discretion and classification was clear on Williams’s face.
“Ancient history,” he reassured her. “Truly ancient, by Omicron standards. I want to look at what we have of the O-Circuit reports and case files.”
Williams blinked and pushed her glasses up her nose.
“The Omicron Circuit?” she questioned. “Yeah, I guess I can show you that. All of that’s seventy or more years cold.”
The Omicron Circuit Judges and their deputized officers from the various branches of the US Army and police forces had been the old answer to supernatural occurrences. When it was rare for an entire state to see more than one likely supernatural incident a year, all the USA had needed were three or four “in-the-know” Judges and maybe two dozen Pinkertons, Federal Marshals and soldiers.
Forty people, operating under the direct authority of the US Supreme Court and the President himself, had been all that dealing with the supernatural had required in the USA for almost two hundred years.
“The Circuit Archive is on the top floor,” she told him. “It’s…not well organized. I mean, it’s a hundred and eighty years of files, and only some of the Judges had good secretaries—and none of them wrote the reports themselves!”
“It was a different time,” David agreed. “Do we have any kind of organization?”
“We had them all scanned to microfilm in the nineties, so you shouldn’t need to go to the originals, and we’ve had a few people go through and set up a database with high-level topics for most of the files.”
“So, if I wanted to find reports on vampire interactions, I should be able to find them?”
“I can’t make guarantees, Commander,” Williams warned, “but I’ll show you the setup.”
THE SETUP WAS INTIMIDATING. David was no stranger to reading or research, even if neither was high on his list of things he actually enjoyed, but the Omicron Circuit Archive was something else. A single ancient computer completely lacking in even a local network connection ran a database program that David wasn’t sure was any newer than the machine.
The database program had a listing of every roll of microfilm in the collection, some twenty thousand rolls holding almost two million pages of reports, photographs and court files. It was a mind-boggling amount of data and a st
ockpile that Williams clearly had only slightly more idea what to do with than he did.
“So, what are you looking for, Commander?” she asked after running him through the system. “It’s a pretty giant haystack, depending on what kind of needle you’re looking for.”
“Let’s start at the beginning,” David replied after a moment. “Can you help me find the very first reports we have on verified vampire encounters?”
“Well, that’s one of the categories we were flagging, and the microfilms are supposed to have the date included.” The librarian hrmed to herself as she tapped on the keyboard for a few minutes with David watching over her shoulder.
“Yes, here we go,” she concluded. “There might be something older, but it wasn’t labeled. This is Justice Conrad Bitter’s report on the St. Paul’s Church incident in what is now the city of Augusta, Georgia, in 1795.”
“Bitter was…one of the very first Omicron Circuit Judges, wasn’t he?” David asked.
“George Washington supposedly had a ‘special affairs’ squad during the Revolution itself, but no records made it to our archives,” Williams told him. “He appointed two Judges to deal with ‘affairs of superstition and ungodliness,’ men who took the secrecy of their work seriously and are otherwise forgotten to history: Conrad Bitter and Joseph Reginald.”
She shook her head.
“By 1796, Reginald was already dead, his replacement not appointed for another year. For eighteen months, Conrad Bitter was the man who dealt with the supernatural inside the United States.”
“A mundane,” David observed. “That can’t have ended well.”
Most mundanes did not deal with continued exposure to the supernatural well. Mental and nervous breakdown became more and more likely as exposure levels increased. Someone like Williams, who only saw most of it secondhand in documentation, would likely be fine for decades of service.
A mundane Inspector, like those that made up the bulk of OSPI’s numbers, could generally only handle about two years of field work before being benched. Anything more and the likelihood of losing them, one way or another, grew too high.