ONSET: My Enemy's Enemy

by Glynn Stewart

  “Unclear from the calls,” Leitz replied. “But the sun went down just before you left New York and we know he was running weapons for vampires.”

  “Do we have surveillance?”

  “We had it earlier when you were supposed to be here,” she warned. “We’ll have a satellite in position five minutes after you hit the ground, but there’s been no surveillance in place for the last seventy minutes.”

  “Damn.” He shook his head and checked that his rifle was loaded.

  “We’ll see what happens. Watch the warehouse, Cynthia,” he ordered. “If he’s going to run, it’ll be by tunnel to his work site.”

  “Eye in the sky is on it. Good luck, Commander.”

  #

  The helicopter set down in the middle of the cul-de-sac, the houses on the side street still with a strange quiet David rarely saw in residential neighborhoods. It was the calm after the storm, the silence of people sheltering in place after gunfire had torn through their quiet suburban lives.

  “Pell, get back in the air and sweep thermals,” he ordered as he jumped out the side of the chopper. “If Deveraux runs, put him down.”

  The Pendragon’s suite of machine guns was loaded with silver shrapnel rounds. Werewolf or not, if Pell shot Deveraux with them, he was not getting back up.

  David felt more than saw Stone and Hellet spread out behind him as he approached Deveraux’s plain house. It was a larger home but still very much of a style with the other homes around it. A modern suburb, but still a mass-planned, mass-built one.

  The question of which house the gunfire had been at was answered almost immediately as he approached. The door had been kicked in, a glint of metal in the wreckage suggesting both frame and door had been reinforced beyond merely human ability to break through.

  Bullet scars marked the wall around the front door as well. David’s enhanced senses suggested they’d been small-caliber rounds, but again, the damage exposed armored paneling that had been built into the wall underneath.

  Deveraux had been paranoid.

  Reaching the door, David pressed himself against one side, sweeping the open-plan main floor with his gun camera and his other senses.

  More gunfire had shredded the once-luxurious furnishings, and it looked like at least two claymore mines had gone off. There was surprisingly little blood for the amount of damage, which suggested unpleasant possibilities.

  “No sign of Deveraux,” he reported over his radio. “Moving in.”

  Part of him lived half a second into the future as he swept into the empty house, watching for traps and threats.

  “Watch the kitchen,” he ordered as his team followed in behind him. “Claymore mine mounted under the dishwasher; IR beams across the floor. He must have turned them on when whoever busted in the house arrived—that would make chores difficult.”

  There was nothing on the main floor except debris now, and David shook his head.

  “Stone, check upstairs,” he ordered. “Look for documents, computers. Watch for mines; I’m not reading anything but there could still be something sneaky. Hellet, with me. We’re going downstairs.”

  The door to the basement was perfectly normal white-painted wood. Halfway down the stairs, however, was a heavy security door that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a bank vault. It had been partially cut with an enchanted blade, likely very similar to the backup knives his own team carried, and then physically torn the rest of the way open.

  “Upstairs is just bedrooms,” Stone reported. “One has furniture; the other two are empty. No damage up here, either.”

  “We’re moving down; join us,” David ordered. “Someone broke into the basement. Someone who makes me look weak.”

  His gunner snorted. David could probably have broken through the hatch with the same tools as the attacker, but he’d have had to do more cutting and less tearing…though tearing steel wasn’t entirely outside of his options.

  They stepped through the destroyed door, and the stairs led them down into what had clearly been Deveraux’s main workspace. A server rack along one wall had fed a set of four monitors, an impressive computing setup for the werewolf’s illegal and legal businesses.

  Those computers likely contained all kinds of incriminating evidence of illegal arms deals hidden under the man’s legitimate business of distributing firearms to gun shops across the northeastern US.

  Or, at least, they had contained that evidence before several dozen bullets had been fired into the rack and the wreckage had been smashed to pieces with Deveraux’s expensive orthopedic office chair.

  “There goes our evidence,” he said quietly. “Pell, are you seeing anything?”

  “Thermal suggests there’s a tunnel coming out of the basement, but I’m not seeing any movement, and eye in the sky is showing the warehouse is dark and quiet,” his pilot reported.

  The tunnel wasn’t immediately visible, but as David focused on his senses, he could see the slight difference in warmth in the wall where it had to be. While the auras and energy signatures of the basement were a mess—combat tended to do that—he still managed to trace Deveraux’s path to a recessed panel in the wall.

  It pushed inward with a soft click, and the wall swung away from him. The smell of blood almost immediately overwhelmed his senses and he sighed as he saw what he’d expected.

  Alan Deveraux had made it far enough to try and escape, but he’d turned to defend himself there when his attacker had caught up. He’d been halfway through his transformation when they’d shot him at point-blank range with silver.

  “Deveraux is dead,” he reported flatly. “Recent. Thirty, forty minutes at most.” He studied the body carefully. “Two submachine guns, close range. Full loads of silver; they knew what they were doing.

  “Entry was forced with Empowered strength. Records were destroyed.” He sighed. “Timeline places the attack after nightfall. Almost certainly, one of his Familias clients decided to shut him up before we could execute the warrant.”

  “There was no one else to send, David,” Warner reminded him, the Major apparently back on the channel. “We knew this kind of…thing was going to happen with us short-handed. Sweep the warehouse; we may still learn something tonight, then return to the Pennsylvania facility for debrief. You’ve had a long day.”

  Chapter 3

  The Pennsylvania facility was a bunker concealed under a hangar at the edge of a small airport that also hosted helicopter tours. There was enough traffic that the helicopters coming and going didn’t attract too much attention and fuel and supplies could be easily shipped in, while they were far enough from the main terminal that no one really interfered with ONSET operations.

  Pell neatly slid the Pendragon into the hangar, where an elevator promptly whisked it away beneath the surface while David regarded his team levelly.

  “Rack out as soon as we’re in,” he ordered. “At last word, we’re still days from relief.”

  He got a trio of weary nods back as the elevator slowed to a halt and a ground team trotted out to take over the helicopter. Local support staff like these were about the only part of ONSET that hadn’t been hammered in the Incident, and their grim resolution to do their job even as the teams they supported were spread thinner and thinner made him proud.

  A uniformed middle-aged Asian woman, the commander of the ground team there, gave David a crisp salute as he exited the chopper, waving him over to one side as his team headed for their quarters.

  “Echelon has our zone clear for the moment,” Charlotte Wu reported. “We’ll have the Pendragon fueled and cleaned in twenty, though I hope things are quiet until morning. Long day?”

  “Long day,” he confirmed. “Any other news?”

  “Major Warner said to throw you in the shower and then get you on a videoconference,” Wu told him with a small smile. “I’ll pass on the throwing, if you don’t mind—I’m not sure I could and I know you can break me—but you get the gist.”

  “Tell you what, Charlot
te,” he replied. “You make sure there’s a burger waiting for me once I’ve rinsed off, and I’ll tell Warner whatever you want me to.”

  David was stronger and faster than a regular human, and while he knew his metabolism hadn’t sped up enough to fully account for either—magic was an odd game and one humanity was still learning the rules of—he still needed upward of six thousand calories a day now.

  “I’ll make that happen,” she promised.

  With a firm nod, he took off for the showers. It was past twenty-two hundred hours and he wasn’t sure when he was going to get some sleep. The shower and meal would have to hold him for a bit.

  #

  Showered and dressed in a clean armored bodysuit, David made his way to the bunker’s communication center while eating the burger Wu’s people had made for him. While his team was on active duty at one of ONSET’s bases, they slept and ate in their gear.

  There was normally a three-week cycle that would see them in that status for only a week at a time, but the only member of David’s team who hadn’t been going since before the Incident was Stone…and Stone had spent two weeks undergoing magically supported healing after being shot up badly enough to shatter even his granite flesh and bone.

  Closing the door behind him, he grabbed the seat in his office and brought up the videoconferencing software. Linking to Major Warner’s office, he found himself facing one of the Major’s ubiquitous suited young men.

  “Commander White,” the bodyguard greeted him. “The Major will be available shortly. Can you hold on a couple of minutes?”

  “Of course,” David replied, leaning back in his chair and blinking to stay awake. He found it rather reassuring, all things considered, that his need for sleep hadn’t changed since his supernatural abilities had woken up. He could heal from any non-silver injury, bench-press a small car, and move vastly faster than any human…but he still needed six to eight hours of sleep a night to remain fully functional.

  He didn’t have long to wait before the petite redheaded officer appeared on the screen.

  “Commander White,” she greeted him. “How’s your team?”

  “Unconscious, hopefully,” he told her. “Long day.”

  “We’ve got people running around all over the place,” Warner admitted. “I have some good news for you, though.”

  “Oh?”

  “ONSET Seven landed this morning,” she explained. “With them back from the Middle East, I’ll freely confess to poaching a third of Commander Havel’s people to bulk up some of the other teams, and that brings Commander Mason’s ONSET Fifteen up to minimum strength.

  “Her people will relieve yours at oh nine hundred EST tomorrow,” Warner told him.

  “Thank you, ma’am,” he said with a sigh of relief. “Do we go on active reserve or…”

  “Until we have ONSET back to something approaching full strength and manage to rebuild OSPI’s tactical police for our mid-weight option, active reserve is going to be a thing of the past,” ONSET’s second-in-command told him bluntly. “That means we’re going to be training up a lot of supernaturals in the field, which nobody likes, but we don’t have a choice.”

  “That…sucks,” David said mildly. He’d had weeks of training in the main ONSET campus before being committed to the field, with the knowledge that any weaknesses that showed up could be easily addressed in that week of training in active reserve.

  “We’re pursuing a…political solution,” Warner explained. “As the man who killed Ekhmez, you’re going to play a part in that, which is why we’re sending you and your team on a four-day leave.”

  “I just want to do the job, ma’am,” he pointed out. “Being trotted out like a dog at a show…”

  “David—” She sighed, paused, then continued. “We just confirmed this afternoon that an executive order we’ve been trying to get overturned is going to stand. The President has informed us that we will not be permitted to actively recruit mundane personnel who have no prior exposure to the supernatural.”

  He was silent for a long moment as he considered the consequences of that. They’d lost fifteen hundred mundane tactical police wounded or dead in the Incident, plus about the same who had either received psychological discharges or had been under Ekhmez’s control and were in custody until Omicron could work out if they were safe.

  “We’re short OSPI’s entire central processing and administration staff,” he pointed out slowly. “We’ve been poaching people from the three-letter agencies to cover our shortfalls, but that’s not going to let us replace losing the entirety of OSPI HQ and all but a dozen mundane tac teams and a couple of companies of APs across the country.”

  “Colonel Ardent assures me that he has made that argument to the President in detail,” Warner said sadly. “Most of the Committee is on our side, for once, but not enough to override the veto the Prez would drop on us.”

  The Special Committee for Supernatural Affairs, informally the Committee of Thirteen, wielded the full power of Congress in affairs of the supernatural. Two thirds of the Committee could overturn a veto, but getting nine members of the Committee to agree on anything would be an impressive feat.

  “No one can make us give back the analysts we’ve poached from the CIA and the rest,” she continued, “but we’ve been warned that further poaching would be frowned upon. The Committee is hoping to have Director Anderson’s replacement picked by the end of the week, but whoever gets the job of running OSPI is going to have their work cut out for them.”

  “No exception for Anderson, huh?” David asked.

  “He was in the building, he was under Ekhmez’s control, he stays in observation,” Warner confirmed. “Given that it’s his damned signature on the op plan that fed everyone into the Incident, he wasn’t going to stay Director either way.”

  “So what do you need me to do?”

  “For now? Keep the northeast from exploding for about another ten hours, then crawl into bed for four days so you don’t get hurt on vacation,” she suggested.

  “You have no idea how tempting that suggestion is,” he told her.

  “I’ll see you on the Campus on Tuesday,” Warner ordered. “Keep your head down until then.”

  #

  The night passed calmly, or at least without a supernatural incident requiring deployment of an ONSET team. When oh nine hundred rolled around the next morning, David was drinking a large cup of coffee and inhaling a breakfast that would have fed any two other people in the bunker, and reviewing the overnight reports on a tablet.

  Twenty-five regular police calls had been escalated to OSPI Inspectors after triggering the right keywords in an Echelon filter. Those calls had been fielded by fifteen different Inspectors from the regional offices, eight to a state there in the densely populated northeast. Only three of those Inspectors were supernaturals, which put even more weight on the President’s order against recruiting mundanes.

  Of those twenty-five calls, seventeen had actually been supernatural occurrences. Nine had resulted in arrests and six in individuals being placed in “protective custody to allow for education.” Those people would be released after an Omicron officer had run them through the spiel of how supernatural law worked in the United States and how it applied to them.

  If they were lucky, said officer might even be able to give them a pamphlet on their own supernatural circumstances. Omicron tried, but even the US government couldn’t keep up with every new type of supernatural that popped out of the woodwork!

  “They’re late,” Stone announced in his oddly pitched voice, pacing back and forth through the cafeteria.

  “They’re flying up from Colorado,” David reminded him. “It doesn’t take much in terms of weather to throw a delay into that kind of flight. Besides”—he shrugged and smiled as his Empowered hearing picked up the sound of rotors—“they’re here now.”

  Gesturing for his team to follow him, he strode toward the one empty elevator helipad, watching as it rose to the surface to receive
ONSET Fifteen’s helicopter.

  A few moments later, Commander Kate Mason jumped down from the aircraft as it descended back into the underground bunker. Like David, the Mage was a former member of ONSET Nine, and had been present when ONSET had assaulted OSPI’s HQ to end the Incident.

  She was tall and slim, clad in the same black armored bodysuit as the rest of the teams. Today, her long blond hair was tied up in a braid that wrapped around her head like a crown—and would fit under her combat helmet.

  “David!” she greeted him cheerfully, wrapping the shorter man in a tight hug. “How are you holding up?” she demanded.

  “Been a few rough days,” he admitted, smiling back at her. Mason had an infectious cheer to her; no one could stay mad around the woman. “Glad to see your team.”

  Nodding, she stepped back and crisply saluted him.

  “I relieve you of the Pennsylvania Command, Commander White,” she said formally.

  “I stand relieved,” he replied. He turned back to his team and gestured them toward their helicopter. “You three, get going. I’ll join you in a moment.”

  “You know Samuels and Tsimote,” Mason told David, gesturing toward her team getting off the chopper. Half of her new team had gone through training with David. Bella Samuels was a tiny redheaded Mage, where Hiro Tsimote was a painfully thin Asian man, a flame elementalist.

  Her fourth team member was last off the helicopter, an absolute giant of a man broader than David and over a foot taller. David’s aura Sight happily informed him that the man was Empowered—and probably an excitable, if friendly, individual.

  “This is Pierre Dupond,” Mason introduced him. “He was in the Middle East until last week and got yanked out of ONSET Seven to stiffen my team up.”

  Dupond offered his massive hand and David shook it firmly.