by Aer-ki Jyr
David swept the castle twice, then dragged all of the bodies over to the lounge. He used his Pefbar to search the room for monitoring equipment aside from the obvious security camera on the ceiling that he telekinetically disconnected…then he began his Ikrid interrogation one by one as the prisoners slept, still with no alarm or activity to suggest anyone knew he was here. How long that would last he didn’t know, which meant he needed to be quick.
He’d gotten so good at worming his way into people’s minds that he no longer needed them to be awake, though that did help if he wanted to delve deeper. The stun energy in them also interfered a bit, especially if they’d gotten hit in the head, but so long as their mind wasn’t shut down he could still connect to them. Regardless, the more obscure the information was the more difficult it was to access, with him relying on memory threads and surface thoughts for most purposes, though right now he was just pulling personal identity information, seeing who each of these people were.
As he worked through them he began to worry, for none of them worked for The Word. They were just local hires as residential staff to maintain the grounds, and David was beginning to think that The Word had deceived them again with the castle being a gigantic red herring until he got down to the last three people. He pulled the man who’d been in the wheel chair up off the ground where he’d fallen and set his paint-splattered body on one of the numerous couches and put his exposed fingertips against the man’s forehead…immediately sensing a much more structured mind.
It took all of four seconds for him to make a Word connection, then another six to confirm that this was in fact his target…the Master himself.
David let him sleep and pulled a quick check on the last two people, confirming that they too were just local staff and not Word members, meaning the Master was the only one here who didn’t belong…which appropriately made the cover all the more convincing.
“Alright big guy, let’s see what you’ve got around here,” David said, kneeling down behind the couch and coming in at the elderly man’s head from the back, hacking into his nervous system and pressing an armored forearm against his neck to suck the stun energy out and partially wake him up to aid in his memory search.
The Master blinked his eyes open and tried to turn his head, but the Archon held it firm, leaving him to groggily try to get his bearings as David confirmed that there were no weapons or guards on site, other than the two hired from a civilian security agency…which were little more than babysitters to drive off unwanted guests. There was also no alarm system or hidden chambers, only a computer that linked in to the secure Word comm system that allowed him to send messages out to his Agents…and a second system to likewise correspond with the other Masters.
There were 12 of them in total, each with their own operations and facilities. They kept in contact remotely, using numbers instead of names. This one was Master 7, though his real name was Gustave Beland…but more than that David couldn’t get out of his hazy head, so he woke him up the rest of the way and physically held him in place on the couch, which wasn’t very difficult considering his weakened and decrepit state.
“Bonjour?” he asked into the air, but David didn’t answer, nor did he let him turn around enough to see him. He held onto his head tightly and began digging deeper into his thoughts as the haze cleared from his mind…which went straight to his desk drawer when he saw the other bodies lying around.
David got a clear mental image of a small case inside that contained a kill pill, but there was no way he was going to let that fall into his possession.
“Relax and you won’t be harmed.”
“Who are you?” Beland asked, switching to English.
“Star Force,” David said, feeling the spike of fear run through the man…and he hoped he wouldn’t have a heart attack on the spot, though he sensed that Beland was actually hoping that might happen. “Easy fella. You’re not getting away and no one is coming to help you.”
David followed up that assertion, confirming from the Master that there truly was no help coming. His entire operation here relied on secrecy. He was hiding in the open, and now that he’d been discovered the only way out was by getting to his desk and swallowing one of the pills.
“What do you want with me?” he asked, and David could sense that he was going to play innocent, though the man was puzzled why he was being held down on the couch in such a rigid position.
“I know you’re the Master, and I’m here to get you to rat out the rest of The Word’s leadership…along with all your subordinate Agents, if you don’t mind?”
David’s coy honesty came with an unexpected bonus, for when he mentioned leadership the Master’s mind went directly to the other Masters…and the man that led them all, which they referred to as the Primarch.
Five days later he was back in Atlantis while the rest of Green Team was out chasing down more targets that the Master had unwittingly given them. David had been telepathically interrogating him ever since capture, with Star Force techs going over the equipment in the castle ever so carefully and discovering the second, dedicated communications link that went straight to the other Masters.
Even now their locations were being plotted and their apprehensions planned, with the cellular nature of The Word’s structure seeming to insulate them from one another enough that they didn’t notice Master 7 having been captured, given the ongoing communications between them that Star Force was now able to monitor.
Eavesdropping on them and gaining what tidbits of intel they could, Star Force was in a semi-waiting mode while busy sweeping up a growing number of lower level operatives…with David eventually called away from his interrogations for a meeting with Davis along with Red and Blue Teams’ leaders.
He got there second, with them waiting on Andre-399 who walked up the central staircase in Davis’s office and over to the trio, flipping a data chip through the air at the Director who telekinetically dragged it through the air into his palm, then plugged it into a slot on his desk’s rim. A holographic status report on one of their most recent anti-Word missions in South Africa popped up and Davis skimmed through it, finishing with a satisfying nod before shutting it down as Andre sat down next to David and Drake on the other side of the desk.
“We’ve located the Word headquarters,” Davis began. “Thanks to David’s interrogation of the Master and some electronic backtracking, aquatics has confirmed the existence of the Primarch’s base under the seafloor of the Arctic Ocean. We’re assembling a drilling team for a direct assault, but there are also tunnels leading out to what we think are land entrances.”
“Our scanning ships are having to follow the tunnels at close range to work out a map and aren’t finished yet, but we’ve identified 3 leading out from the base with one of them branching off, so at the moment we have 4 potential entrances. Both the tunnels and the base are buried deep in the bedrock beneath the water, which was why we never detected their presence or construction. There’s not so much as a comm relay in the Arctic, everything is, we believe, transitioning through these tunnels.”
“We’re hitting on both fronts?” Drake asked.
Davis nodded. “Once we find the entrances we’ll coordinate the drilling and tunnel teams to hit at the same time.”
“We’ll need an aquatics specialist for the drilling team,” David commented.
“Rikku has already volunteered and is on her way up now,” Davis said, referring to the highest ranked aquatics Archon on Earth.
“What about the other Masters?” Drake asked.
“We’re going to hit them at the same time. The techs say their messaging system is linked to the headquarters as well, so if they send out an alarm the Primarch could be alerted and, potentially, bolt before we can get to him.”
“Same with the Masters,” Andre pointed out.
The Director nodded. “We need them to expose each of their cells, so if they go to ground when we hit the headquarters we’ll miss out on our opportunity, so we have to go
after them all simultaneously, and the sooner the better before Master 7 is missed. Yellow Team is going to handle the off Earth leads that we’ve been gathering, while Blue and Red Teams are going after the Masters. Green Team gets the Primarch.”
“We’re going to need more than 10 for that,” David pointed out.
“I know. Pull in whoever you need and coordinate with Rikku. We’ll have to get the drilling team assembled first in order to get them under the ice via water. I don’t want to fly a team up there if there’s a chance of The Word noticing.”
“How close are our cities?” Andre asked.
“300 miles, given or take. About 50 to one of the tunnels,” Davis said, referencing Star Force’s underwater colonies, which now totaled 2 billion in population on Earth alone, though only a handful were located in the Arctic Ocean.
“How long before we get the tunnel locations?” David asked.
“Another 24-48 hours.”
“Are we sure there’s only 12 Masters?” Andre asked.
“Fairly,” David answered. “They appear to be the only ones fully in the know, with the Primarch’s replacement being chosen from amongst them. When that happens he chooses a replacement from his own Agents, elevates them to Master and teaches them everything they need to know, then the new Primarch retreats to their headquarters, which they refer to as Mount Olympus, and never comes out again…same goes for any personnel they send up there.”
“No possibility of leaks,” Drake guessed.
“Exactly. Now it’s possible that there is another layer to The Word, with multiple Primarchs that only know the existence of each other…but I doubt it. The Master we’ve got says this guy is in charge of The Word, and he keeps in contact with the other Masters, so if there were operations taking place that popped up on the news and one of them couldn’t take credit for it…”
“…they’d figure out there were other fish in the pond,” Davis finished.
David nodded. “I’m 95% sure the Primarch is the big dog, but with Mount Olympus never having any of the roaches check out…”
“Have fun,” Drake said with a smirk.
“And take an army,” Andre added.
“We’re on it,” David assured them. “Just make sure you don’t let any of the Masters escape. They know enough to restart The Word from their own cells. We have to get them all, plus the Primarch, in order to decapitate the organization. The Agents aren’t in the loop, dangerous as they are, so we can miss a few of them and still kill The Word, but we have to get all the Masters.”
“Which is why we’re going after them simultaneously,” Davis reminded them. “We know where they are, and they don’t know we know. If we screw this up we’re not likely to get another shot at it for some time, if at all, which is why I’m splitting your teams up. This has to get done and done right the first time, and I don’t trust anyone else. Your teams have experience with The Word, Green Team more than the others, so if they’re going to get tricky you have the best chance of spotting it in the moment.”
“If they’re where they’re supposed to be,” Drake said confidently, “we’ll get them.”
“Ditto,” Andre agreed.
Davis nodded. “Get on it.”
2
February 28, 2451
Solar System
Earth
David stepped off the dropship’s lowered ramp and sunk into the snow nearly a foot, barely able to see the other five dropships that had landed in a circle on one of Canada’s northernmost islands in the middle of a raging snowstorm. It was daylight where they were, but the cloud cover and blowing snow was so thick it appeared dim lighted, with only the interior illumination from the dropships visible in the near distance as they too lowered their ramps and disgorged some 32 Archons in total.
David trudged out into the snow, feeling a chill sink into his armor, but one that he quickly dissipated with a touch of Rensiek heat produced throughout his body as he activated a waypoint for the coordinates that his team had been given for the tunnel endpoint he’d assigned himself to. The aquatics scanning track had led one of the tunnel spurs directly to this island and had calculated its upward trajectory to reach the surface somewhere near where they had landed, though the water craft obviously couldn’t track the tunnel once it crossed over onto land.
The island was a large one, so the best they could do was narrow down the area, which they’d pinpointed to within a 500 meter radius…which David thought was pretty damn good, though satellite reconnaissance showed no structures or topography in the area, just a flat, snow covered mass of land surrounded by ice-locked ocean.
The other members of Green Team weren’t with him. Jet and Nathan had gone with the aquatics team, while the other 7 members were each heading up their own tunnel team, given that aquatics had found a total of 8 tunnels spurs. David wanted to hit them all simultaneously as the drilling team began to chew its way down towards the base. That way The Word wouldn’t have any escape routes, plus he didn’t know what kind of tunnel defenses they might have.
He’d brought along some reconnaissance drones to probe for any booby traps, but first things first…which meant finding the damn tunnel entrance underneath all this snow and ice.
The waypoint marked a position some 700 meters to the north, so David started walking across the middle of the dropship formation and cutting underneath one of their long wings, getting a momentary shield against the thick falling snow that was obscuring his view of the others, though his HUD was able to keep track of their transponder signals just fine and give him position placements for them all.
Those closest to him were visible in their silver acolyte armor, with him being the only ranger amongst the group and no adepts. He’d pulled as many high level Archons as he could get from both Earth and the rest of the star system, giving him a potent, yet sizeable force to assault whatever defenses The Word may or may not have at their base. They were going into this blind, for the Master they’d taken had only heard about the facility while never having been there, nor having a hand in its construction. Those secrets, it seemed, belong to the Primarch alone.
“Everyone form on me,” he ordered over the comm. “Lateral line with spacing. We walk north towards the waypoint, report anything on or under the snow.”
The ID tags on his battlemap began to move his direction, so David slowly began walking out from under the Dragon’s wing and away from the dropships, which he’d brought along some Regulars to stand guard over. He commed them for a quick check, then turned on his Pefbar and focused it down into the snow and ground beneath, looking for any signs of the tunnel exit as he walked forward.
David got a brief headache as he suddenly was able to see every single falling snowflake in crystal clarity…but then his mind adjusted to the overload of data and he was able to ignore it as he focused on the ground, seeing his team’s signals beginning to stretch out on both his left and right into a shallow ‘V’ that gradually straightened into a flat line as they all trudged their way forward through the thick snow.
Below the recent snow was a thicker, denser pack that supported their weight…and below that was a sheet of ice covering the dirt. In some places David could see deep enough to encounter the bedrock, but if there was a tunnel exit nearby he shouldn’t have to look that deep, for The Word would need access through the dirt, so whatever they’d built here had to be shallow.
And whatever they’d built here either had to have its own vehicles or arrange for a pickup, because there were no roads nor any signs of civilization this far north, which made David wary about what they were about to butt heads with.
“Got something,” Harry-8334 reported.
David glanced at his position on the battlemap, for he couldn’t see more than two men down either side with the blowing snow obscuring his vision and now covering most of his own green armor.
“What do you see?”
“Subsurface structure buried in the snow. Nothing up top though.”
“Everyone, rendezvous at Harry’s position and give me a perimeter scan,” he said, heading his way. “And watch out for concealed turrets.”
David accelerated up into as much of a run as he could manage with his feet sinking into the snow up to his knees, and got over to Harry just after his own Pefbar penetrated down to the squarish vertical rectangle that the acolyte had discovered.
“What do you make of it?” Harry asked, knowing the ranger’s psionic skills were well beyond his own.
“I can see the tunnel beneath it. It dead ends here,” he said, trying to get as much information out of his senses as he could. “Nobody’s down there that I can detect.”
David set up three new waypoints heading north from his position along the length of the fairly deep tunnel that he just saw eeking off in that direction.
“I need psionic sweeps at and around these points. Mechanisms and minds.”
“On it,” one of the acolytes responded, with several more joining him as their dots on the battlemap repositioned.
“It looks like a lift shaft,” Harry commented. “But it looks incomplete, like they dug and built it here all the way out from their base and never finished it. It’s still got several meters of dirt overtop.”
“Nearly right,” David confirmed, dropping to a knee as he continued to mentally scan the area below. “There’s a flat top to it, but inside there’s a rotor assembly.”
“I…there, ok, I can just make that out. But what’s a giant fan going to do if it’s not connected to the air?”
“Not a fan, an auger,” David said, dropping all the way to his chest in the snow to get his head a bit closer. “It’s meant to drill the last bit up to the surface.”
“Emergency exit?”
“Possibly…which would explain why there’s no guards,” he said, switching to teamcomm. “Anyone find anything?”