ONSET: To Serve and Protect

by Glynn Stewart

#

  “So, what do we think of our little ex-lieutenant?” Warner asked Koburn, watching David on the monitor in the training center’s surveillance hub. A massive multi-CPU server sat under each of the three desks splitting the room up, and the walls were covered in monitors. Right now, an entire wall of those monitors was showing the shadowy tunnel they’d dumped David White in.

  The craggy trainer shrugged. “I’ve seen the video clip,” he said quietly. “He hasn’t shown anything like that in training or testing.”

  “But?” the Major invited.

  “He is one of the strongest non-Mage perceivers we’ve tested yet,” he told her. “We also put him on the resistance machine for bench pressing. He’s no Michael,” he continued with a nod at the werewolf Commander sitting quietly next to the guard who was normally responsible for the room, “but he was still benching a good six, seven hundred kilos with ease. Strength Empowered for sure.”

  “He isn’t what we thought he was,” Warner told them both.

  “But he is still a viable agent,” O’Brien interjected. “Perceivers are damned useful, and so is the ability to bench-press a Smart car. Not to mention that most of our recruits lack any qualification other than their supernatural abilities, and White was a senior police officer—and head of a tactical team, however part-time—without them.”

  “Plus,” Koburn said softly, “it’s more accurate to say he isn’t what we think he is…yet. We know he can be what we see in that video. It’s merely a question of what it will take to wake him up. I don’t think artificial training is going to do it.”

  “If anything we can do will, it’ll be his first meeting with Charles,” O’Brien muttered.

  #

  The sound of the almost-slithering footsteps was like an earthquake in David’s enhanced hearing, and his hand slid down to the Silver-Mod M1911 automatic that Chief Hanson had given him. Koburn had pronounced the weapon “old but still perfectly usable for our purposes” on seeing it, and they’d never even asked him to turn in the silver bullets the Chief had given him with it. He’d only barely had time to grab the weapon before being hustled into these tunnels, but he’d been keeping it loaded. Not so much paranoia as…caution. For all his own commitment to the agency, thinking what his father would have thought about ONSET still left him uncomfortable.

  The footsteps grew closer, and David drew the weapon, thumbing the safety off as he skimmed the massive shadowy tunnels for the source of the sound. He doubted there was a real threat there in the Campus’s basements—but it was still better to be prepared.

  The approaching sounds slowed and finally came to a halt, replaced by a sniffing noise. There was a clink, some kind of motion, and the sniffing sound repeated.

  Wondering just what the hell was coming, David knelt, raising the pistol in a two-handed grip, aiming toward the direction of the sound. His heart began to beat faster and he could feel and smell the sweat on his palms.

  He breathed evenly, calming his heart, and focused on the sounds—which had stopped.

  For a long moment, there was silence, and then the slithering footsteps started up again—very slowly.

  Taking a deep breath, David tucked one leg under him and rolled forward, around the corner toward the sound. He grunted with the impact, and then he came up, the gun training on the…dragon?

  A massive lizard-like creature reared back, and his newly trained senses took in details with a suddenly detached mind. The dragon was a scaled and spiked hexapod, with massive legs bunched underneath it and tiny arms tucked under the wings that now spread wide. Part of him realized the wings were to balance the long, sinuous neck that dove toward him. Fire flashed through his veins, and ever so calmly, David raised the pistol again, even as his enhanced senses allowed him to estimate where the neck would be when he fired.

  Even as he watched the physical dragon, he also saw the blurred outline of its future moments, as its jaws swung toward him and snapped shut—well clear of his head.

  Halfway through raising the pistol, David stopped. A second later, the dragon’s teeth snapped together, a good foot away from David, and the creature chuckled. The sound was surprisingly humanlike, coming from a creature twice David’s height and five times that in length, but echoed in the tunnel as the massive twenty-foot wingspan slowly folded in.

  “Yer supposed to be terribly a-feared of me and firing wildly,” the dragon observed, a thick Irish brogue rolling out from behind its half-foot-long fangs and long, trailing whiskers to make the whole situation seem surreal. “But then, Ai tole them nae perceiver was going to be fooled by li’l ole me.”

  “Nice trick,” David said, forcing his heartbeat down. “You’re a dragon,” he continued bluntly.

  “That Ai am,” the dragon agreed. “The name’s Charles,” he continued to brogue, “and it is my pleasurable task to inform ye that ye just passed your final test, barring the good Major’s approval, o’ course.” The massive creature shrugged. “Till we hear from the good lady, will you join me for a cuppa tea in my lair?”

  “Oh,” said David faintly. “Of course.”

  #

  “That was interesting,” Warner said quietly.

  “Not really unexpected,” Koburn reminded her. “He’s a perceiver, and some of them see a half-second or so into the future. He knew that Charles wasn’t going to actually bite him.”

  O’Brien was leaning in, looking intently at the closest screen. “You have this recorded?” he asked absently.

  “Of course,” Koburn told him.

  “Rewind it,” O’Brien ordered. “Show me when he reacted.”

  Koburn hit some keys on the computer, and the video skipped backward on the screen nearest Michael to the requested point. It ran for a few seconds and then O’Brien raised his hand.

  “Show me that again, slowly.”

  Koburn slowed down the playback, and the three watched as David’s gun rocketed up toward the dragon.

  “I slowed it down more than that,” Koburn muttered, checking the computer.

  “Yes, you did,” O’Brien replied. “But he was speeding up, until he realized there wasn’t a threat.” The werewolf turned to Warner. “Ma’am, knowing that Charles isn’t a threat is enough to pass him, but with that extra snippet…I am perfectly willing to sponsor Candidate White as a full Agent.”

  “If he manages to empower and learn to control himself,” Warner said slowly, “he will be an incredible asset. Until then, however, he only barely qualifies as ONSET-level abilities.”

  “I’ll take him on ONSET Nine” O’Brien told her. “Keep him under my wing, so to speak.”

  Warner looked at the screen for a long moment and finally nodded.

  “Very well,” she said firmly. “He’s yours.”

  #

  David followed Charles through the tunnel. Sooner than he expected, they reached a large open metal door, leading into a spacious, well-lit room. A quick glance around the room showed that, while myth may have had dragons sleeping on beds of gold, Charles slept on a twenty-foot-long hybrid of a couch and a giant dog bed.

  Facing the couch was a dragon-sized keyboard, linked to several large touch screens and a whole set of monitors, displays and other controls. Several massive power bars and Ethernet cables led back into the walls behind the displays, marking this as possibly the largest computing setup—in several senses—David had ever seen.

  What looked like a giant deep freeze ran along one wall, and a third was covered with bookshelves. A kitchenette, clearly sized to be used by a dragon, was tucked into one corner, and a small table and human-sized chairs occupied another.

  The floor was carpeted in a ridiculously deep version of ONSET’s ubiquitous blue plush carpeting, and an odd assortment of paintings and decorations marked the walls. A dragon-sized door that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a bank vault was half-hidden behind the couch,

  “Quite the setup,” David observed. “Surprisingly comfortable, I’ll admit.”

 
; “It’s all Ai have,” the dragon said quietly. “Ai made a deal with yer gov’mint a lang time ago. Ai didn’t show myself to the woirld, and they took care o’ me.” The dragon drifted over to his kitchen, where he began to delicately use the smaller arms—still as wide around as David’s legs—tucked under his wings to make a pot of tea.

  “They’ve kept their end,” he brogued softly, the long whiskers twitching as he spoke, “so Ai keep mine. There are days when Ai miss the sky under me wings.” The dragon shrugged his massive shoulders. “The world ain’t ready to see a dragon o’er their pretty skies yet.”

  The dragon brought the pot of tea over to the table and poured David a cup of tea, those thick, smaller arms surprisingly delicate and controlled at the scale of the pot and teacup. The porcelain was, almost unsurprisingly, an exquisitely decorated blue-and-green set that was likely worth more than David’s truck back home.

  David sat and sipped the tea slowly as he gathered his thoughts. Once again, Omicron had managed to present him with something he hadn’t been prepared for. Every time he thought he’d learned about everything and was ready to face anything, he was proven wrong.

  He was getting used to the feeling of being completely shocked, but the sheer sense of wonder he felt at the size and grandeur of the immense—and intelligent—being sharing tea with him was new.

  “They didn’t mention anything about dragons to me in training,” he told Charles.

  “That’s because there ain’t dragons,” Charles replied. “There’s me, and Ai’m all that’s awoken up this time ’round.”

  “And Charles here is one of ONSET’s best-kept secrets,” Warner’s voice interjected into the conversation. David looked up to find her and O’Brien stepping in through a door half-hidden among the bookshelves.

  Charles, as he’d said earlier, had been expecting them, and their arrival found him laying three more teacups on the table alongside his own bucket-sized one.

  “MI-Nought is the only one, even among our allies, who knows Charles is here,” Warner continued.

  “And the idea of an Irish dragon gives them the heebie-jeebies,” O’Brien observed as he took a cup of tea. “Thank you, Charles. For the help with the test, and the tea,” he finished.

  “They’re fools,” Charles said bluntly, with a growl that sent his spikes and whiskers to shivering. “Ai’ve no love for Patrick’s Irish. They’re the ones who kilt the Hibernia I loved.”

  “You’re the dragon of the Saint Patrick myth?” David replied, shocked. Of all the things he’d expected to meet in service with ONSET, the dragon who’d fought St. Patrick so long ago was not one of them. Of course, Patrick was supposed to have killed that dragon…

  Charles’s growl shook the entire chamber. “Saint,” the dragon spat. “Book-burner and murderer, that one was, nae better than the worst o’ the so-called ‘barbarians.’”

  Smoke trickled from the dragon’s nostrils as he inhaled, and then slowly exhaled deeply as his whiskers and spines slowly stopped shaking. “But wa’re not here to be talking on me ancient grudges,” he said, his gravelly brogue calmer. “Major,” he finished, gesturing to Warner.

  “Thank you Charles,” Warner said quietly. “For your help with the test, and, as always, for your eternal patience with the world that is.”

  Charles inclined his head to her, settling down on his couch without further words.

  Warner turned to David. “Agent-Trainee White,” she said formally, “over the last four weeks, you’ve demonstrated sufficient supernatural abilities that we believe you can keep up with one of our teams on an active-duty basis. While we would always prefer more training to less,” she continued quietly, “we are so short on people, we really don’t have a choice but to put you—and the other remaining trainees, if you were curious—onto active duty.” She offered her hand across Charles’s table.

  “Welcome to ONSET, David,” she told him less formally.

  David shook her hand and then O’Brien’s. The werewolf grinned at him.

  “You’ve been assigned initially to my team,” he told David. “Since that was to be the case, I had a talk with my team over the last week. My pair of Mages spent some time downstairs and made up this.”

  David’s new Commander extended a sheathed knife across the table. “Formally, this is an ONSET-Issue Combat Knife, comma, Aetherically Modified, comma, Mod Six,” he continued. “Informally, we call them mageblades,” he finished as David took the knife and drew it from the sheath.

  He handled the enchanted weapon with care, letting its internal glow and sparks of spells light its delicate lines and deadly edge. It was barely twelve inches long, including the grip, and no decoration or runes marred the blade. For all that, he could tell that there was more magic in this small blade than most people attributed to Excalibur.

  “They are highly effective at killing demons, werewolves, vampires, elephants and small tanks,” the werewolf told him dryly, “and pretty good at going through walls. The blade will cut anything you try to cut with it. Be very careful with it, and use it well. Welcome to my team.”

  David slowly and carefully sheathed the knife on his belt, and turned to face Charles as the dragon extended a claw for him to shake.

  “Welcome to a small but important world, me young friend,” he said simply.

  #

  The hacker hadn’t managed to track down anything about that cop for weeks, but she wasn’t exactly known for giving up. She’d posted on a few boards, conspiracy theorists and suchlike, seeing what would come up.

  A blinking icon told her she had a reply on one of them. Five clicks later, and it was on her screen.

  Interesting theory, Majestic, but really! We all know that the Grays control the government, and what use would they have for a supernatural hunting team? A magic department of the US government?! Hah!

  I’ve got plenty of info on the Gray control of the USG, if you want to know the real truth.

  CharDrake777.

  The hacker known as Majestic leaned back in her chair, running her fingers through her hair as she regarded the post.

  There had to be an answer; she knew that. There always was.

  She just had to find the right place and the right tool with which to look.

  Chapter 8

  David followed O’Brien into the common room of the residence—one of thirty-odd identical small buildings tucked into the southwest corner of the Campus—where ONSET Nine made its home with trepidation. While he’d seen O’Brien enough to make him mostly comfortable with the werewolf, the Commander’s team was the people who’d saved his life a month before. Now they were also the people he’d be working with for the foreseeable future.

  These were people he wanted to impress, but David figured it would take more than the two large suitcases he was carrying to do that. He’d surprised himself when he’d picked the cases up, as he knew from packing them how heavy they were. Every day, another little thing drove home to him the fact that he was just that little bit more than human now.

  As time went by and more of those little things occurred, the dull ache of knowing his father would have disapproved slowly faded. His concern about just what he was becoming, however, was still with him as he entered his new home.

  The common room was far nicer than he’d been expecting. Instead of the plainly decorated military austerity he’d encountered in the rest of the base, this was almost homelike.

  “One common area and eight apartments per building, plus a kitchen and armory,” Michael told him as David stopped and looked around the common room. “Most of ONSET’s agents live in the provided apartments, so we make them comfortable. And we certainly get paid well enough to do so.”

  The common room was large but still oddly cozy, with a huge TV screen—currently turned off—along one wall. Three large plush green couches filled the sitting area, with hardwood chairs around several smaller tables off to the side. While the carpet on the ground was the exact same shade of blue as the re
st of the facility, it seemed to be softer underfoot here. The room was occupied by the members of ONSET Strike Team Nine.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Michael said loudly, “I’d like to present the newest member of our prestigious team, Agent David White.”

  The nearest member of the team, a weedy young man with thin glasses, looked up at David from the laptop he was typing on and grinned.

  “You’re a lot prettier conscious and lacking vampire bites,” the man told him.

  “David,” Michael interjected, “meet our Mage and wannabe hacker, Morgen Dilsner.” The werewolf paused for a moment, considering. “Or is that ‘hacker and wannabe Mage’? I can never remember.”

  “Would you prefer I fail to delete the camera tracks or to shield your furry face from fireballs next time?” Morgen replied sweetly.

  “It’s ‘Mage, hacker and wannabe smartass’,” another member of the team observed. This was a sturdily built older woman at the other table along the walls. Gray-shot brown hair failed to detract from her impression of ironbound competence, reinforced by the disassembled pieces of what appeared to be a machine gun on the table in front of her.

  David smiled slightly at the woman, recognizing the bantering of a team that worked together often and well. If he was very lucky, he knew, he might be included in that bantering in a month or two. If he really screwed up, he never would be. He gave the older-looking woman a firm nod as Michael turned to her.

  “David, be known to Alexandra Bourque,” O’Brien introduced the woman with a gentle wave of the hand. “Formerly of the Marine Corps Special Operations Command, now ONSET Nine’s heavy-weapons specialist. Don’t get on her bad side; she’s Empowered and likes to carry guns the Army normally attaches to tanks.”

  Moving on, O’Brien gestured to a smaller man, somehow even skinner than Dilsner. The man looked like a stiff breeze would blow him away, and there was a vague look around his eyes, which coupled with his long, ear-covering hair and delicate features to give him a very effeminate look.