ONSET: To Serve and Protect

by Glynn Stewart

  Very careful to ignore Kate Mason’s gracefully outlined athletic curves, the newest agent picked up the shoulder holster with the Silver-Mod M1911 pistol and his spare magazines.

  It said a lot about the reliability of OSPI’s original Silver-Mod design that ONSET hadn’t bothered to upgrade David’s firearm. While the sidearms the rest of the team were belting on were a newer, more advanced weapon, the actual per-round effectiveness was supposedly about the same. Of course, the sleek Omicron Silver caseless auto-loaders, with their extra gas vents and propellant-encased bullets, held a good fifty percent more rounds—but that was unlikely to matter in most circumstances.

  To balance the Silver-Mod 1911, David had hung the harness and scabbard for the mageblade knife on the other side of his body. Given the strict design constraints necessary to hold a weapon that would cut literally anything, the harnesses and scabbards the rest of the team wore were identical. A hard base locked around the guard of the blade, holding the blade suspended in a scabbard that was a minimum of a tenth of an inch away from the edge at any point. The base could be released quickly, though drawing the weapon was always an exercise in care. The rest of the harness was black Kevlar webbing, like the harnesses for the guns, designed to be slung on either side of the body.

  Over the two weapon harnesses went a third Kevlar harness, clipping on to both, carrying and protecting the fragile components of the armor’s core computing systems. It took only a moment for David to connect that harness to the fiber optic mesh linking the various sensors hiding in the bodysuit.

  Finally, with the battle harness complete, David slung on the heavy uniform jacket with its circled diagonal lightning bolt insignia. As soon as he was done putting the jacket on, Michael, who’d been fully prepared for a while, passed him the M4-Omicron carbine ONSET used as a combat rifle.

  The stock slotted against his upper arm and his hand gripped the barrel, just forward of the magazine that descended down a handful of inches in front of the grip and trigger. The barrel was larger than he remembered on the Army M4s he’d seen, but that was because the ONSET weapon had been redesigned for a heavy 7.62mm silver round instead of the original bullets.

  Glancing around the room, David realized that the small team was carrying a scary amount of firepower, and that was before considering the fact that Morgen and Kate could probably destroy battleships with their minds. Akono and Ix shared the M4-Omicron with him and O’Brien, but Bourque had a light machine gun cradled in her arms, and the two Mages lacked any conventional weaponry beyond mageblades and Omicron Silvers.

  “Seems a lot of gear to load on for a transport flight,” David observed. It seemed a lot of gear for anything to the police officer he’d been. Koburn had pounded home why it was necessary, but it still scared him to be loading up military weapons and body armor for what remained basically a police position.

  “It is,” Michael responded. “Two reasons, however. First, all of this adds up to a lot of cubage in storage containers. Space on a Pendragon is limited, so we carry it aboard. Secondly,” he continued grimly, “sometimes we get called in midflight. Like when we showed up in Charlesville. We need to be ready to kick ass and take names no matter what.”

  “Hoorah,” Bourque interjected. “We can’t predict when shit is going to go down. Get used to the gear,” she instructed firmly, “as we don’t take much of it off when on active duty.”

  “Wonderful,” David observed calmly, considering the consequences of six men and women wearing the same armor for seven days. Ix probably didn’t sweat, at least. “That’s going to be a pleasant smell.”

  “We shower and sleep in rotations,” Michael told him. “You can be out of harness doing those two things. Nothing else.”

  “Well, in that case,” David said firmly, slinging the M4 over his shoulder, “let’s get this show on the road, shall we?”

  #

  The flight down to Louisiana was the first time David had ridden in a Pendragon helicopter without having the windows blacked out. The rest of the team freely allowed him a window seat, which allowed him to look out over the ONSET HQ Campus for the first time ever.

  It was impressive. Settled into a small Colorado valley, the twenty-foot concrete walls surrounding the facility probably ran two thirds of a mile on a side. Four small skyscrapers marked the core of the Campus, but other buildings sprawled across almost a square mile of beyond-top-secret base.

  On top of that, David knew that he’d only scratched the surface of the subterranean facilities under the Campus. Somewhere under there was one hell of a gun modification and manufacturing plant. ONSET modified heavy weapons but manufactured its own ammunition, rifles and sidearms.

  Somehow, seeing the base from the air as opposed to being amongst the buildings drove home just how huge the Campus was. ONSET fielded twenty-one strike teams with a list strength of eight but an average actual strength of six, a total of over a hundred and thirty supernaturals, which now included David White. The security personnel, AP Companies, and general support structure for ONSET itself were easily fifteen or twenty times that number.

  The helicopter continued to rise over the facility, until the whole Campus became a tiny postage stamp behind them. Once they reached cruising altitude, the chopper’s stubby wings swung out and locked into place.

  Moments later, the floor of the helicopter shook as the jets turned on, and the Campus shrank even more rapidly behind them as the stealth aircraft shot southeast at just under Mach One.

  #

  From the moment the rotors folded in and the jet engines came on to when the pilot turned the jets off and turned north above the old Louisiana town of Alexandria was a tad over an hour and a half. The chopper slowly dropped lower, heading toward the farmland northeast of the town.

  The approach to the ground lasted a good five minutes, during which David started to wonder if ONSET put all their bases in mountains. Finally, however, the chopper dropped into a normal-looking farm field.

  It was normal-looking from the air, anyway. No sooner had the chopper hit the ground before the nearby three-story red barn disgorged a flatbed truck and an armed escort.

  ONSET Nine disembarked from the chopper, and the pilot turned the rotors back on for a momentary hop onto the flatbed.

  The leader of the three armed men watching over the truck, a tall blond man whose mannerisms matched his plaid shirt and jean overalls, waved the ONSET team forward, and revealed himself to be wearing the same ONSET black bodysuit as they all wore underneath his “Farmer John” duds.

  “I’m Lieutenant Alex Preston,” he introduced himself. “I run the facilities at this base and command the team of security personnel.” He gestured them into the large barn, which, while it looked like something out of a child’s storybook, turned out to be fitted out as a modern military hangar on the inside.

  Two more Pendragons held pride of place in the center of the hangar, but one wall held half a dozen cars of various makes and colors, only two of them with government plates. Other than the vehicles and the fueling equipment, the barn was completely Spartan. Concrete floors, fuel tanks and steel lockers were the only decoration. Not even a loose strand of grass marred the barn’s military cleanliness.

  Michael clearly knew where he was going as he walked confidently alongside Lieutenant Preston. The rest of the team followed the two men back into the barn and around behind the pumps.

  Tucked into a corner, hidden from view of the front entrance behind a large fuel tank, was set of steel elevator doors with a biometric reader suite standing next to it and a pair of guards armed with bullpup shotguns.

  “This leads down into the main facility,” Preston told them, then gestured to the biometric and card readers attached to the elevator. “If you ladies and gentlemen can swipe yourself in, please? ONSET Thirteen left about ten minutes ago, but things are already cleaned up downstairs. As soon as you’re all checked in on our system, I can brief O’Brien on our current situations.”

&nbs
p; One by one, ONSET Nine’s members swiped themselves into the facilities’ computers with their ID cards. Once Kate, the last person to enter her ID, had been beeped and cleared by the computers, Preston grinned at them all.

  “That’s the last immediate security procedure,” he confirmed, and gestured at the now-open elevator. “Welcome to ONSET Louisiana Command.”

  Chapter 10

  Louisiana Command’s amenities, David quickly realized, were relatively low. The facility was functionally an underground bunker. For the security personnel permanently assigned to the base, it wasn’t as bad, since they actually lived off-site in homes of their own.

  For the ONSET team, required to stay in the bunker 24/7, it was a different story. Eight small rooms, one common area with a TV and a single bookshelf made up the entire living space of the facility. A communications room, command center, and armory made up the rest of the tiny base. Unlike the Campus, not a scrap of blue carpet—or carpet of any kind—was to be seen covering the concrete.

  By the Wednesday, the third day in the base, the team settled into a routine of pushing off boredom as long as possible. The rest of ONSET Nine had clearly expected something like this, as their luggage had disgorged a wide variety of time-occupiers, from Dilsner’s PlayStation Vita to Bourque’s cross-stitch.

  David had settled for reading through the bookshelf. Most of it was trashy novels, but there were a solid two shelves of what he’d mentally begun referring to as “Secret Histories”—books on the events of the last hundred or so years nobody knew about.

  He was reading through a book on the history of America’s Vampire Familias, a brutal mix between blood relations and criminal syndicates that had become very good at hiding their true nature behind intermediaries. According to the book, between the various supernatural groups and organizations and the Omicron Offices themselves, the average lifespan of a vampire after turning was less than three weeks. If that vampire was turned by or recruited by the Familias, however, they dropped into an intricate network of deception and concealment that nearly guaranteed their survival.

  The thought that there were entire organizations of bloodsucking monsters like the punks who’d attacked Charlesville made David’s blood run cold. That these organizations were deep-rooted organized crime syndicates, devoted to causing more harm than their unearthly appetites would have caused anyway, made him very glad he’d joined ONSET.

  But, according to the book, the Familias were old, pre-dating not only ONSET but quite probably OSPI’s early-twentieth-century origin. They were Omicron’s most persistent enemy and, according to the book, weren’t likely to go away anytime soon.

  “All right, people,” Michael’s voice suddenly boomed across the ready room. David felt the rest of the group tense up as he dropped his book and looked up. For a moment, everyone in the room blurred a bit as his own tension activated his Sight, which started showing him the next few seconds’ worth of motion.

  Then he controlled his senses and picked the book up and put it away. With a wry thought, he wished his tension were as easy to control as his abilities.

  “It looks like we have a situation, people,” Michael told them. “An OSPI Inspector reported this morning that he was about to make an arrest in a case we’ve been watching for a while. That was eight hours ago, and we have not heard from him since.

  “As of now,” the werewolf continued, eyeing his people, “OSPI has advised us that he is presumed missing, and we are going in. This should not be a hell-for-leather run, and I want a team on site here. Ix, Bourque, Morgen,” he barked, and those three worthies looked up.

  “You three will remain here,” Michael instructed. “Keep an eye on that damned dimensional research project and the rest of our little babies. Mason, Akono, White,” he continued, turning to David and the others. “You’re with me.”

  David rose to his feet, replacing the gloves he’d removed to read and grabbing the jacket to cover his combat harness. He was surprised that Michael had chosen him—he was, despite his age and experience compared to half the team, the team’s newest member. He was also surprised, however, at how that simply made him more determined to prove Michael right to bring him.

  “I’ll brief you in the air,” Michael told them. “Let’s go.”

  #

  As the four agents walked rapidly from the elevator to the Pendragon that had been moved out into the field, David brought the computer systems in his bodysuit fully online for the first time since training. With the black display glasses over his face, the computer projected a heads-up display across his field of vision, including data gleaned from the suit’s sensors.

  The ex-cop stopped outside the helicopter to plug the lead hanging from the end of his right sleeve into the base of the modified M4. As soon as he plugged the lead in, a small image popped up in his display, showing the view from the camera mounted on the top of the assault rifle. Matching the crosshairs on the camera, a second set of crosshairs appeared in his main field of view, with a circle marking the error of probability where the bullet would strike, given current conditions and his grip on the weapon.

  The trained-in preparations soothed his uneasy mind and kept him from worrying about the fate of the OSPI Inspector reported overdue and missing.

  Akono and Mason followed Michael into the chopper before David could catch up. By the time David had taken his seat, Akono had entered the cockpit and taken over the controls.

  “Where am I headed?” the pilot asked.

  “You have a waypoint in the computer,” Michael told him. “It’s a small Catholic church in northern Alexandria. Take us there.”

  As the helicopter lifted off, two small pictures popped up in David’s HUD.

  “The picture on the left,” Michael told them all, “is OSPI Inspector Damien Riesling. He’s been investigating a specific case of a serial killer for about two months, ever since we were called in when one of the killings the FBI was investigating turned out weird.

  “He was pursuing a killer that seemed to keep popping up all over the country,” Michael continued, “and the only link between the victims was that they were all gay men and none had blood drawn in the killing. All the deaths were strangulation, suffocation or blunt-force trauma.

  “Riesling got a break about two weeks ago, when two more deaths showed up. Both were Catholic priests,” the Commander told them, “and they’d only recently confessed that they were gay lovers—in fact, we found out about that confession after the fact. Only a small number of people had known about the confession, even though it seemed to be shaping up to have them drummed out of the priesthood.

  “Riesling investigated the men who knew about the priests’ confession—about forty of them—and matched them against his other killings. The man in the right-hand picture was confirmed as being in the area of over seventy percent of them,” Michael said grimly. “His name is Rufus Carderone. At seven o’clock this morning, OSPI issued a warrant for his arrest on nine counts of murder, under the Supernatural Restraint and Enforcement Act. We have not heard from Damien since he informed OSPI he was headed to arrest Carderone. That was now nine hours ago.”

  “What do we know about this Carderone?” Kate asked.

  “He is a fully ordained Catholic priest,” Michael told them. “Which is going to raise a shitstorm all in itself, but we have more immediate concerns. Our evidence suggests that he is either a Mage or Empowered. We know he either is supernaturally strong or uses strength-enhancing magic, and there is evidence to suggest he is capable of at least short-range teleportation.”

  “How do we handle it?” David asked slowly, wondering what the answer would be. The thought of going up against a Catholic priest—the faith of his birth, his father’s faith—who wielded supernatural powers bothered him, but he was going to do his job.

  “Malcolm secures the rear entrance,” Michael said calmly. “Kate, you secure the front and call in local law enforcement. You know the drill; we’re federal agents.”
r />   “Yes, sir,” both replied.

  “David,” Michael continued, “you’re with me on the entrance. We call for him to surrender, and do not engage unless attacked. Understand me, David? You do not shoot unless I order you or it is in immediate self-defense.”

  “Understood, sir,” David confirmed with a sense of relief. He wasn’t sure he was the best man to accompany Michael, but he was glad that the assumption wasn’t that they were going in shooting.

  “Folks, we’re coming in on the church now,” Akono reported. “Let’s be glad it’s Wednesday afternoon—Carderone should be the only one home.”

  Kate didn’t seem to notice Akono’s comment, as she’d lowered her helmet over her head. Presumably, that was for its sound-deadening qualities, as it looked like she’d used the communication system to make a call to the local police, and the magically noise cancelling on a Pendragon didn’t work inside the helicopter.

  “We’ll go down by rope, and Akono will swing around in the air,” Michael instructed David, pulling the rope winch out. “You first,” the werewolf said, with a wicked grin.

  Chapter 11

  The fact that it was raining didn’t really help David as he hit the ground in the empty street outside the small church. Warm and soft as the drops were—so different from the cold driving rain of Maine—they failed to relax him. For the first time in his life, he was going somewhere with the knowledge that having to fight, quite possibly having to kill, was more likely than not.

  The rain fell in large drops, a regular patter of them hitting against the ground around David as he thumped to the ground, his more-than-human muscles absorbing the impact with an ease that still unnerved him.

  He glanced up and down the street, noting the quiet white-fenced houses, their driveways uniformly empty of vehicles. The early afternoon saw this suburb deserted, except for the two ONSET agents that stood in the rain, the helicopter whirring near-silently overhead.