ONSET: To Serve and Protect

by Glynn Stewart

  “You called me here about the recruit?” he said finally.

  “Yes,” Warner said slowly, and glanced at her computer, then slid a blue paper file across the desk. “He called in this morning. We contacted his PD and spoke to the Chief. He’s an Outreach officer, former OSPI Field Inspector First Class.”

  “Which makes our life a lot easier,” Michael observed.

  “Exactly,” the Major agreed. “I got an earful, by the way, about poaching his ‘right-hand man’—White apparently led his tactical squad as well as being his third-ranking officer, and he’s not overly enthused with losing him.”

  “If he’s Outreach, he knows the need,” Michael replied simply.

  “Which was basically what Chief Hanson said,” Warner told him. “White has technically not returned from medical leave, so the Chief has agreed to let him transfer immediately. As of an hour ago, David White is enrolled on ONSET’s book as an Agent-Trainee, with clearance Omicron-Bravo.”

  “I’m assigning you the pickup since you recommended recruitment,” she continued. “We told him he’d be met at his house at nine in the morning tomorrow.”

  “Pendragon or normal flight?” Michael asked.

  “It’s not an emergency, so you just get government-paid flights once you’re out of here,” she told him. “To speed things up and keep with the normal obfuscation, you’ll be lifted by Pendragon to Salt Lake, and from there you’ll take civilian transport. Bring him back the same way.”

  “All right. How much of a bug do I put in his ear along the way?” Michael asked.

  “Public transport,” Warner replied, which was a reasonably complete answer in itself. “Give him a briefing at his house and help him close it up—you know how long training takes.”

  “Understood,” Michael confirmed. “I’ll be on my way, then.”

  “Fly safe,” Warner told him.

  #

  The hacker had spent days tracking down the identity of anyone she’d had in that insane tape from the Charlesville warehouse. Finally, she’d managed to ID the cop as a senior local officer: Lieutenant David White.

  She’d called in a quick favor, and she soon had a bug quietly planted in the cop’s front hallway. Barely in time, too—the cop came home the very next day, though he apparently had been gone for a while.

  The next couple of days had passed quietly. White had puttered around the house. Today, however, he’d started packing for a trip, and the hacker was keeping an eye on the bug in a side window on her computer screen.

  Curiosity may have killed the cat, but the hacker hadn’t found it fatal yet. This meant she was watching the door to David White’s house when the large man in the black suit came calling.

  #

  David answered the knock on his door with a feeling of trepidation. His quiet, small townhome had been disassembled over the course of the day. Not sure how long he’d be gone, he’d packed several weeks’ worth of clothes and covered all of his furniture with dust cloths. He had no close family and had never really been willing to deal with pets, so there was not much else to worry about.

  He opened the door slowly to see an immensely large man in a perfectly tailored suit on the other side. Despite the suit and the careful combing of the man’s short blond hair, there was a sense of feralness around the six-foot-plus man.

  “David White?” he asked.

  “I am,” David responded. “You are?” Something about this man twinged a warning sense deep in the back of his head. His size didn’t intimidate David, but that didn’t stop the police officer wanting to take a step backward.

  “I’m Commander Michael O’Brien,” the man responded. “We’ve met before, but I doubt you remember it. I was with the team last week.”

  “You’re from ONSET?” David somehow doubted anyone else would know about last week, but he wondered about this man.

  “I’m your pickup,” Michael replied wryly.

  “Come on in,” David said finally, stepping away from the door and allowing the larger man to step through.

  The ONSET agent moved with brisk efficiency, stepping inside and closing the door behind him. David eyed him carefully, wondering just what to expect of a full ONSET Commander. This was a man who not merely knew about the supernatural but did battle and commanded others in battle against its darker side on as a day job.

  “Nice place,” he commented, glancing around the sparse furniture and decorations. “Very ‘young bachelor.’”

  David wasn’t sure how to respond to that, so he gestured for O’Brien to sit. “You were in the warehouse?” he finally asked.

  “Yes,” O’Brien confirmed. “I lead ONSET Nine—one of twenty-one teams operational across the country. We’re currently on a down week, so Warner asked me to come pick you up and answer any questions you had.”

  “Are you…supernatural?” David asked carefully, not sure if the question was offensive or not.

  O’Brien chuckled. “Don’t say it like it’s a dirty word, kid,” he told David. “All of ONSET’s field agents are supernatural. But, since you ask, I’m a werewolf. Like that gives you any more peace of mind,” he finished with a wink.

  “I don’t even know where to start with questions,” David admitted, trying not to lean away from the man who’d just admitted he was a creature from myth and legend. “I’m not even sure how long I’ll be gone from here.”

  “A while,” O’Brien said bluntly. “Once you hit the Campus, you’ll be locked in for four weeks of training. Then we clear you to actually know where the base is, and allow you to go home.” He shrugged. “Our teams work on a schedule of two weeks on duty followed by one week on leave. Most of us just live on the base, but transport is certainly possible if you want to come back here that third week.”

  “I’m…not sure yet,” David told him. The thought surprised him, but he knew it was true. He was comfortable there. It was home. On the other hand, he was moving into a new life he wasn’t comfortable with yet, and he wasn’t sure how much he’d change.

  “Good choice,” O’Brien assured him. “You can’t know how you’ll adapt to the realities of ONSET until you’ve had a chance—it’s like no other job in the world. Most of us find it difficult to hide ourselves among mundanes once we’ve lived among supernaturals.”

  “What happens if I’m not actually supernatural?” the younger man asked, voicing another of his many worries at this change in his life. “What if I go through your four weeks of training and flunk it?”

  The werewolf looked at him appraisingly for a long moment. “Kid, I saw the tape from the warehouse,” he said finally, and David found himself horrified at the thought that there was a tape of that night. The thought of someone like his father—or worse, someone who’d known his father—seeing that scared him. “You don’t have much to worry about. If, somehow, we’re all wrong and you’re really a mundane—or if you aren’t empowered enough to keep up with an ONSET team—you’ll still be one of the few in the know, and there’s always a shortage of those.”

  “So, what? You find me odd jobs around the office?” David asked. Somehow, the thought of being the paper-pushing desk clerk at somewhere like ONSET didn’t appeal, compared to helping run the slowly expanding police department of a booming small town.

  O’Brien barked a laugh. “Not really,” he replied. “Most likely, with your experience, we’d send you over to OSPI to join the Inspectors and deal with the less violent or outright evil of the things that come through the Seal.”

  “I see,” the cop said quietly. Even as the werewolf made him nervous, he also somehow felt that he could trust the larger man. For all the feral air around him, the man was calm, collected and determined to make sure David made this transition as easily as possible. It was reassuring.

  For a long moment, the two men sat in the cop’s living room in silence. Eventually, O’Brien huffed.

  “Warner told me to help you pack up and get ready to go,” he said into the silence. “Anything left you n
eed to set up?”

  “No,” David told him, with a shake of his head. “I’ve packed a few weeks’ worth of clothes, and most of the furniture is covered in dust cloths.”

  “I’ve got a government car outside,” O’Brien told him. “Let’s cover what’s left for you, and then get your stuff out. The sooner we get you to the Campus, the sooner you’ll get adjusted to the world as it really is,” he said kindly.

  Chapter 5

  The trip back to the Twin Cities airport at Salt Lake was as prosaic and boring as the trip from there back home had been. David hadn’t been much inclined to talk, and Michael had been even less inclined to answer questions about ONSET in public.

  Finally, the last plane came to a landing in the middle of a thunderstorm, and the two men disembarked to the smell of stormy air. Before even leaving the arrivals area, Michael calmly told David that his bags were being taken care of, and headed over to a security door.

  “Where are we going?” David asked.

  “Secured helicopter pad,” Michael told him. “We have a Pendragon waiting to take us to the Campus.”

  “Do I dare ask what a Pendragon is?” David inquired dryly as they reached the door and Michael opened it with a swipe card.

  “You rode in one before,” Michael told him. “I’ll tell you more later.”

  The arrival of a security guard into the unmarked corridor behind the security door had distracted the werewolf from his answer.

  “This is a secured area,” the guard said bluntly, his hand resting on his sidearm. “I need to see your IDs.”

  Michael pulled a black travel folio from his trouser pocket and looked the guard over. The guard looked back at him calmly, his hand tapping the grip of the pistol at his hip.

  “Today, please,” the guard snapped, and David wondered just what was going on with Michael.

  Michael opened the folio and removed a single piece of plastic, handing it to the guard. “These are classified IDs,” he said calmly. “Can I see your authorization?”

  The guard took one look at the piece of plastic and slowly nodded. His hand moved away from his gun and into a half-salute.

  “OSPI Security Detail 4, Salt Lake,” he reported crisply. “Sergeant John Lewis, sir.”

  “So, you are Omicron,” Michael said dryly, and handed over the rest of the folio. “That was my major concern, Sergeant.” He gestured to David. “I’m bringing a recruit with me. He doesn’t have ID yet, but his travel papers are in the folio.”

  The uniformed guard quickly and efficiently skimmed through the folio, and then passed it back.

  “Apologies for the difficulty, sirs,” he told the two men, and gestured for them to continue down the corridor deeper into the secured zone of the airport.

  “Your job, sergeant,” Michael replied, somewhat begrudgingly. “Carry on.”

  He led David past the guard and through a second door, into a windowed corridor looking down into a fully enclosed helipad with a jet-black helicopter sitting on it.

  It was a weird hybrid of a vehicle, just like the one David had ridden in before, but he hadn’t had a chance to look at that one as they’d hustled him aboard. It was a long and narrow vehicle, with an entrance just behind the cockpit, and another under the tail rotor where passengers could enter and exit. Where the side doors would be on a normal helicopter, a pair of short wings with almost-hidden intakes stretched out from the aircraft.

  “That,” the werewolf told his recruit, “is a Pendragon. They started as a prototype for a new Black Hawk-based jet-helicopter with limited supersonic capability. Then we took it apart, enchanted the bits and put it back together.”

  “It’s a…magic helicopter?” David asked, disbelievingly. Somehow, monsters from myth and legend, along with vampires and Mages and a branch of the US government dealing with magic and the supernatural had managed to get hammered into his world view, but an enchanted helicopter still stretched his disbelief.

  It was a feeling he was starting to get used to.

  “Yes,” Michael confirmed. “Get used to it. We mix magic and technology a lot for our work. Anything that isn’t silver or used to fire silver bullets tends to be enchanted. The only reason silver escaped is because silver does to enchantments what nukes do to butter.”

  “So, I’m walking into Wonderland,” the new agent said dryly.

  #

  A presumably different storm was raging as the Pendragon finally drifted in for its landing at the ONSET HQ Campus. With the windows once again blacked out to prevent his learning the Campus’s location the trip was…uncomfortable. After feeling the helicopter being thrown about like a toy for the last few hours, he could hear the pilot’s sigh of relief even from where he was as the rotors were finally switched off.

  Michael slid the door open and waved David out into the driving rain.

  “Come on,” he shouted over the wind. “The ground crew will deliver your things—you have an appointment with Warner.”

  “I do?” David shouted back.

  “Yeah,” the ONSET officer replied, stepping aside to let David exit the helicopter into the rain. “Actually, you’re late for it, but I think she’ll understand,” Michael continued as the pair sprinted for the shelter of the nearest building. From there, they dodged from building to building until they reached one of the four tall buildings that anchored the Campus.

  Entering the building, David found himself in a surprisingly adorned lobby. A stretch of blue carpet led to a security checkpoint flanked by marble pillars. Four marble pillars, spaced about two meters apart, lined each wall. The security checkpoint held the center of the far wall, and a close look revealed the armored weapon slits and the almost-unobtrusive machine gun barrels centered in the side walls above the dark leather couches.

  The security guards in front of the checkpoint gave the pair about ten seconds to catch their breath before asking for ID and thumbprints.

  “I don’t have ID yet,” David told them, glancing quickly over at Michael for reassurance.

  “That’s alright,” the guard told him, and David relaxed. Somewhat. “Warner told us you were coming. We have your ID, but we have to check your thumbprint first.”

  The guard led them up to the checkpoint and presented the two men with a fabulously modern-looking set of biometric equipment. Hesitantly, David pressed his thumb against the scanner the guard indicated, and felt a line of warmth run over the panel. After a moment, the machine beeped, and the guard in the checkpoint gave a thumbs-up to the one standing with David and Michael.

  “Confirms that you are David White, Agent-Trainee,” the guard told him, and then passed him a black folio identical to Michael’s. “Here are your ID cards for the Campus, sir. You’ll be issued an agent’s ID once you graduate. Good luck, sir!” He finished with a salute.

  “The security guards are mundanes?” David asked once they’d cleared the checkpoint into a simply but comfortably decorated second lobby. Doors ran off to the left and right, and two elevators in front of them flanked a door labeled stairs.

  “Yeah,” Michael replied as he led David into the stairs and started up. Like the rest of the building they’d seen so far, the stairs were functional but not ugly. The same blue carpet covered the steps, and the railing was varnished dark blue steel.

  “ONSET Security,” the ONSET Commander continued his explanation. “OSPI also has security forces. ONSET has also trained and equipped about two battalions’ worth of Marines for anti-supernatural combat—the Anti-Paranormal Companies. Between them and OSPI, there’s also the better part of a short division or so of security personnel.”

  “A division?” David asked, incredulous.

  “The Anti-Paranormals are the survivors of two divisions we deployed in Montana five years ago,” the werewolf told him, a slight distance crossing his eyes. “And spread across the entire country, eight-thousand-odd men and women start looking like nowhere near enough,” he finished grimly as they stopped at the top of a fourth flight of
stairs. Neither man was breathing hard from the climb.

  Michael led the way through a gray steel security door onto the building’s fifth floor, where the men faced a second checkpoint. No marble pillars marked this room, but it also lacked machine guns. A heavy oak desk with another suite of biometric equipment took up the center of the room, and three men with slung assault rifles occupied it.

  David presented his new ID folio to the men and gave his thumbprint to the machine. A few moments of processing later, and the guards passed them through.

  They traveled down a short corridor marked with the same blue carpet but also brass nameplated doors to where a single door sat in the center of the end wall. A simple brass plate next to the door proclaimed: Maj. Traci Warner. ONSET HQ Base Commandant.

  “It’s a standard induction interview,” Michael told him. “Nothing to worry about. I’ll be in the front lobby when you’re done, to show you to your quarters.”

  David swallowed at the realization that the werewolf, whose presence had been a comfort so far in his tumble into Wonderland, wasn’t coming into the office with him.

  “All right,” he replied, managing to keep his voice level. “See you shortly, sir.”

  It took the former police officer a moment to gather his courage and knock on the wooden door.

  “Enter!”

  #

  The office on the other side of the door was the first actual working space David had seen since his return to the HQ Campus. Filing cabinets lined the wall on his left, but the wall on his right was filled with an impressive collection of medals, citations and photos—what he’d heard called an “I love me” wall—above a set of low bookshelves.

  Major Traci Warner sat at an undecorated desk in the middle of the room, flanked on the right of the desk by the United States flag and on the left by the circled diagonal lightning bolt of ONSET’s unit flag. Behind the desk the wall held a painting of a large wolf, which seemed to glow with illumination from a hidden light source.