by Aer-ki Jyr
1
February 18, 2451
Solar System
Earth
David walked through the tethered crates in the back of the heavy mantis as he watched the countdown clock inside his helmet pass under 30 seconds as he headed for the far end of the gigantic aerial craft. Nowadays most flight traffic was accomplished via dropships, with the mantises having become more or less obsolete…except for on Earth and Corneria. There the atmospheric-only ships had seen numerous design modifications over the centuries, with the ‘heavy’ version that David was walking through being more than 4 times the size of a Dragon-class dropship, the largest version in the Star Force fleet.
Using a combination of wings and anti-grav, the huge haulers were a common sight in Earth’s skies, hauling Star Force cargo and personnel across the planet on a regular basis…so much so that David had chosen this particular flight to hop a ride on, for it was already scheduled to pass over his target, allowing him an unnoticed approach into French airspace.
When the ranger reached the back of the mantis he triggered the primary boarding ramp in the aft end to begin to lower as he grabbed hold of a handle on the wall as a swirl of turbulence forced its way inside the hold and buffeted his green armor around a bit. The cargo pallets were unaffected, and aside from the pilot no one else on the combination passenger/cargo ship noticed the activity as David timed the lowering to within three seconds of the elapse of his HUD’s countdown…with him running off the back and dropping into free fall as a tone sounded, signaling he’d reached his drop zone.
The mantis was traveling at high altitude and considerable speed, giving David some maneuvering options as he fell. Using his arms and legs as maneuvering veins, he angled his way towards the waypoint superimposed on his faceplate that marked his target coordinates in a remote area of the Pyrenees Mountains.
The Archon feathered his jump pack’s controls a bit to adjust his descent into a more lateral approach, gaining a bit more distance while still dropping fast, wanting to get over the target before coming down to ground so he could have a purely vertical attack vector.
His target was a castle that he’d scouted out the exterior of previously, finding it little more than a sturdy stone structure that had been reinforced with great care…including a subsurface barrier wall installed to make tunneling efforts more difficult. Every crack in the exterior had been sealed up, every window likewise secure, and there was a small security presence to keep out unwanted visitors, though this particular region of France had been preserved in an anti-urban fashion, with the large, interconnected cities far away, leaving only a privileged few the anonymity of their private retreats dotted across what little remained of the wilderness.
Thanks to Sander Rennold’s assistance, Green Team had been able to locate the source of the Master’s codes on various public publications, such as fanfiction and photo posting sites, where they found a handler inputting the messages. Using surveillance only, they had backtracked where he was getting his messaged from…which was another handler, who was receiving secure comm signals across a nearly obscure landline that was broken up with a series of short range wireless transmitters that made it very hard to follow, unless you knew where and how to look.
Messages were infrequent, so it took some time to follow the private message system across the French countryside, bouncing from building to building in the cities and tree to tree in the forests until the electronic bread crumb trail had led to the castle. Upon studying it for several weeks, including some up close inspections in the dead of night probing the external security systems, David was relatively sure that the Master was inside, hence his current drop on the castle while Green Team was hitting other Word facilities across the planet in conjunction with Red and Blue teams in one massive surprise attack using the intel and leads Rennold had provided over the past year as he played his part and let Word operatives infiltrate Star Force.
They were being cleaned up today as well, and with luck David and the others would gather enough intel from their raids to fold up the Word altogether, with the most critical mission being his. Bagging the Master was their top priority, and if his reconnaissance was correct, the castle was all but undefended…relying on anonymity as its shield and very atypical of all other Word facilities they’d encountered to date.
Either that or this was a wild goose chase.
David held off on his jump pack’s power right up until the last few hundred meters, decelerating quickly to land in the central courtyard where he pulled his stinger rifle off his armor’s back rack and shot a man and woman in civilian clothes that didn’t even notice his approach until his feet hit the cobblestones.
They dropped hard to the ground as David stretched out his Ikrid sense to maximum range and began picking up the location of nearby minds as he ran towards the guard house. When he got there he felt two inside and disabled them both with a pair of Fornax blasts through the wall before he opened the door and shot them on the ground where they’d fallen out of their chairs. The Archon took a quick glance at the bank of monitors blanketing two walls in the room, seeing that the castle’s denizens were milling about calmly, meaning no alarm had been sounded yet.
He took off across the courtyard and, with the help of his jump pack, leapt up to a second story window on the west wing and punched his way inside before going on a stunning spree, bypassing numerous rooms that his psionics told him were empty and going straight for the personnel. He worked his way around to the south wing, then the east, before finally getting into the much larger north wing that made up most of the castle.
There he burst into a large communal lounge and mowed down some 8 more people, one of whom was in a wheel chair and all of which were unarmed. None of them even had so much as a Word uniform on, and for all intents and purposes seemed to be regular French citizens as David left them where they lay and headed off after the few remaining others, not wanting the Master to have a chance to escape.
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 th
ere 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.
