“Not unless that demon gets past the Stutters,” the soldier replied. “But we’ve got a lot of wounded in the building who are waiting for the second round of evacs, and it’s better safe than sorry.”
David ignored the rest of the conversation as Kate helped him to an undamaged armchair. Everything hurt, but especially his chest. But then, from what Ix had said and he remembered, he was healing from at least two gut shots, a theoretically fatal leg wound, and a punctured lung. Somehow. The pain was fading, too. Fading slowly, perhaps, but far faster than it should have.
“Are you all right?” Kate asked after he winced in pain.
“I should be dead,” he observed quietly, half-reminding himself as he explained to her. He knew that intellectually, but it was hard to accept. Even with the oh-so-clear memory of bullets ripping through his flesh.
“Given that, I’m laughing,” he told her, wincing as another surge of pain shot through his leg. A part of him wanted to think that the pain was being concentrated along with the healing, but he also knew better. If anything, even the pain was reduced as his body healed far too quickly from something it shouldn’t have been able to repair.
“We should have evaced you,” Dilsner told David, setting himself down in the chair beside David.
“The Apes had folks worse wounded,” Michael told the Mage, joining the collection of agents. “And Bourque was pretty bad off too—they’ve all made it to the hospital, though. I just got the status update.”
“And the demon?” David asked as Ix settled down on the floor with the rest of ONSET Nine.
“No news,” Michael said shortly. David waited a moment, but the Commander gave no further commentary. The junior agent opened his mouth to ask what Michael did know, but another massive surge of pain lanced across his chest as he did, and he fell back into his chair with a gasp.
Closing his eyes against the pain, nasty even as it faded, he felt Kate’s hand on his shoulder and appreciated the support. Neither Mage on ONSET Nine was a healer, but he knew he didn’t need one. His injuries had healed; he was going to recover. All he really wanted was a painkiller.
“We screwed up pretty bad,” David said quietly. “I screwed up pretty bad. I was the only one at the sanctum.”
“Shit happens,” Michael said bluntly. “None of us know enough about a ritual summoning to know what stage it was at. If it was at a point where anything you did triggered it, it was probably too late for us to stop it at all.”
Silence held for another moment, and then Morgen spoke up.
“What happens if SSTTR fails to capture it?” the Mage asked softly.
“Then we find David another set of body armor and fulfill the mandate of our Office,” Michael replied, equally softly. “We kill the bastard.”
#
The first sign that anything changed was the guards at the windows perking up, checking their weapons and eyeing something approaching toward the door. One of them stepped over and swung one of the heavy doors open.
The familiarly large form of Leonard Casey stepped through the open door, his helmet off and his rifle slung. The SSTTR Empowered glanced at the machine gun sitting in the middle of the lobby and stepped carefully sideways, out of its line of fire.
He approached the ONSET team and saluted Michael crisply. “Captain Anderson sends his regards, Commander,” he said briskly.
“At ease, Sergeant,” Michael replied. David realized that his Commander had a point—hidden in the snow camouflage Casey was wearing were the chevrons of a Sergeant. Apparently, SSTTR still used Army ranks.
“What’s the news?” the ONSET Commander continued, and David looked back up at the tracker’s face.
“We got him,” Casey said flatly. “Herded him into a pit trap and dropped a containment coffin on the bastard. The captain sent me to advise you as soon as we confirmed the seal. Doesn’t matter how strong the bastard is when he’s inside two inches of pure silver.”
David pursed his lips in a silent whistle as he met the former ONSET aspirant’s eyes and gave the man a nod. Casey looked back at him in surprise, taking in the bullet-ridden state of David’s armor and clothing.
“You look like shit, White,” he said harshly.
“I’m still breathing,” David replied softly. “Congratulations.”
He didn’t need anyone to explain to him that this kind of coup for the SSTTR team was going to cause problems for ONSET down the road—interoffice rivalries worked that way. Casey was a friend, though, and the big grin on the man’s face suggested he had been in at the catch. David couldn’t begrudge him his accomplishment.
“Your people are playing with fire,” Michael said grimly. “You have no idea what you’re getting into.”
The grin faded to a flat line, and Casey’s gaze turned to Michael. “SSTTR is capable of taking care of ourselves,” he said coldly. “Ekhmez’s containment unit has been loaded onto a transport chopper and is on its way back to OSPI Headquarters. An OSPI cleanup team is on its way here to go through the computer records we recovered.”
“There were a lot of those,” Morgen said quietly, and part of the tension diffused. “We got in there before they could even touch the computers. Their servers, their workstations…it’s encrypted, but it’s all there. Every piece of information this cult collected.”
Casey whistled, and he wasn’t the only one surprised. In this day and age, information was a deadly weapon. Capturing the complete files of a hostile organization was almost as big a coup for ONSET as capturing Ekhmez was for SSTTR.
#
Information overload. It was a major problem with hacking, especially when you were successful beyond your wildest dreams and had only been digging for curiosity’s sake in the first place. Majestic had no goal in ONSET’s system, no target pay data to steal for an employer.
Context was everything, and she was only slowly building that. She had decent access now, and she was pretty sure ONSET’s IT security wasn’t going to find her. Files, programs, wireless networks, all of it opened before her, and she had only the slightest inkling of how it all went together.
She needed a target. Needed a place to start her search and come back to—a data point around which she could build her context.
With a grin, Majestic looked at the directories in front of her and warmed up her search tools. She had a data point.
His name was David White.
Chapter 34
“Walk with me, David,” Michael said quietly, and David looked up at his Commander questioningly. The junior agent had only just returned to the main floor of ONSET Nine’s barracks after changing into civilian clothes.
“What is it?” he asked. They’d returned to the Campus above Colorado Springs barely an hour before, the helicopters delivering the unwounded ONSET and AP men and women into a surreally twilit mountain scene.
“Just walk with me,” the werewolf repeated, and gestured for David to head outside. The rest of ONSET Nine looked at them curiously, but no one said anything. They still had no news on Alexandra—no one on the team was even sure how badly she’d been wounded beyond “badly”.
Wondering what was going on, David grabbed the blue canvas duster he’d picked up in Denver the week before. Michael was already wearing a black leather bomber jacket.
Michael led the way out into the campus grounds in the darkening twilight, and David breathed deeply of the fresh mountain air. ONSET Campus had the population of a small town, but there weren’t many vehicles coming or going, which allowed the air to retain a clean mountain crispness.
Dead leaves crunched underfoot. The trees around them looked skeletal, with only a few leaves still hanging on. The air smelled odd to David’s Maine-bred nose, with a scent he wasn’t sure of but suspected meant snow.
This late in the year, he was surprised that somewhere as far up into the mountains as the Campus hadn’t had snow yet. It was cold, though, and David shivered as it bit through the duster.
“I’m going to be wri
ting my report on the Cult tonight,” Michael said finally. “There were some things I needed to say to you before I do, though.”
“To me?” David asked. He hesitated, wondering if he was in trouble for having failed to stop the summoning.
“You should have died, David,” the werewolf said bluntly as he removed a pack of cigarettes from his jacket. The younger Agent looked at them askance. He hadn’t known that Michael smoked. “Three rounds through the abdomen. Two through the left lung. Clipped femoral artery. You shouldn’t have died instantly, but your life expectancy was less than the time it took you to wake up.”
“You make it sound like it’s a big deal,” David observed. He suspected that Michael, for example, had survived worse in Montreal.
“Until yesterday, I would have said only two members of my team could have survived that injury,” his Commander replied, continuing to lead them away from any of the buildings on the campus. “Myself, and Ix. Cigarette?” he offered
“No, thank you,” David replied. “Those things can kill you,” he added.
“Take the damn smoke, David,” Michael snapped, and David slowly took the white cylinder from his boss. “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” he continued as he lit his own cigarette and inhaled. “It won’t kill you.” He lit David’s cigarette.
David breathed in the smoke and found himself disagreeing strongly with the statement as his lungs tried to claw their way up his throat.
“A fully trained Class 2 regenerator could have survived your wounds,” Michael continued once David had finished coughing. “You are not fully trained. Until yesterday, we didn’t even know you were a regenerator.”
Now that the realization had come up, David could think of a few times he’d healed faster than he should have. The first time on Campus, when he’d put it up to ONSET’s medical and magic capabilities. The broken ribs from his fight with Dresden. He’d been regenerating all along, but until he’d been repeatedly shot, it hadn’t been this obvious.
“It’s that big a deal?” David asked, holding the cigarette away from him, even as his enhanced nose twitched at the acrid smell.
“Minor regeneration isn’t,” Michael said quietly. “It’s relatively common among supernaturals, actually. But that’s just faster healing. To survive what you survived, without training in focusing the healing energy… There is a high likelihood that you are a Class 1 regenerator, as able to regenerate as I am,” he concluded.
“Our level of regeneration is generally the province of vampires, werewolves and a handful of Empowered. That’s growing back limbs and recovering from near-fatal wounds almost instantly. That and not aging.”
“Not…aging?” David repeated, suddenly beginning to realize why they were so far away from everyone.
“Minor regenerators will live a long time,” the werewolf said quietly. “Akono, like most elves, is one. He has a life expectancy of around a hundred and eighty healthy years.”
“And major regenerators?” the Empowered cop standing next to him asked.
“How old do you think I am?” Michael asked suddenly.
David eyed the other man. He knew Michael was older than him. He’d heard rumors of what the werewolf had got up to in the past, and knew him to be older than he looked, yet…he wouldn’t put O’Brien over forty.
“Forty-odd?” he guessed finally.
“I was twenty-five when I volunteered for the very first tour of duty in Vietnam,” Michael said grimly. “I was born a year to the day before the Pearl Harbor attack. I’m over seventy years old, David, and have spent more than forty of those years in the service of the American people, one way or another.
“I am a werewolf, a major regenerator,” he continued. “I barely age, as the regeneration sees it as damage and fixes it. Mostly.”
“Mostly?”
“We don’t have a lot of evidence, but we think the major regenerators do age over time,” Michael told him. “But it’s so slowly, it may as well not be happening. I probably have another thousand years in me.”
“Damn,” David said softly, looking at his Commander in a new light. “You’re telling me I can expect to live for over a thousand years?”
“Yes,” his Commander told him bluntly. “You can die. Wounds inflicted by silver will kill you. Disease…maybe. Enough physical damage can do it—but we’re talking instantly fatal injuries—complete destruction of the brain, being blown apart, that kind of thing.”
“Decapitation?” David asked, thinking of a certain TV series, and Michael laughed.
“More likely than not,” Michael agreed. “But the only reliable ways to kill men and women like us are silver and magic. Anything else and the odds are weighted in your favor.”
“So, I’m…” The younger man trailed off.
“Close to immortal,” Michael said bluntly. “There are maybe two thousand men and women in the world who share that status with us. Our bodies will tolerate no long-term damage—not cancer, not age, not even tar from cigarettes in your lungs. Smoke up,” he ordered, “because goddammit, David, you’ll outlive everyone here regardless.”
#
David followed Michael blindly across the barren ground of the ONSET Campus in late fall, lost in his own thoughts as a chill wind swept over the wall and blew his duster in waves around him. His Commander said nothing to him and the pair smoked their cigarettes down to the filters.
The younger man still didn’t like the taste, but he saw Michael’s point. Just this once, today, as he faced a future that stretched for a very long time, he was willing to try it. It was starting to look like he should be willing to try anything.
The sky continued to darken above them, and the lights along the main paths began to flicker on in groups, their pools of light illuminating sections of the stark buildings and pathways. The trees had finished losing their leaves, and the grass was brown, waiting only for the first snows of winter to definitely claim the campus.
Like the summer and the trees, David knew he’d reached the end of a phase in his life. Whatever happened now, things had changed forever. How did you face the world when you knew you’d live to see most of it turn to dust? How did you accept that everything you saw would turn to dust while you lived on? What kind of monster could accept that?
“How do we deal?” he finally asked Michael as they stepped onto one of the lit pathways. “You tell me I’ll outlive all of this”—he gestured around at the buildings—“but how am I supposed to accept that?”
“You’re not,” Michael replied softly, stopping and turning to look at David. “Don’t worry about the future; don’t plan based on the knowledge you’ll live long past this place and these people. I think, for us more than for any other, it is essential that we live in the present. If we take the long view, it will kill us.”
David stopped alongside the werewolf and looked at the brooding darkness of the Campus’s buildings. Lit windows scattered across the upper floors of the structures marked where parts of the organization worked far past regular hours.
“The easiest way for a regenerator to die is suicide, isn’t it?” he said quietly. Most enemies wouldn’t know how to hurt a regenerator, let alone kill them. Most regenerators, though, would know how to hurt themselves. They would know that a silver bullet to the head would end any of them.
“Yes,” Michael said flatly, then gestured along the lit pathway toward the slumbering bulk of the Campus’s main administration building. “We should get moving. You have an appointment with Major Warner.”
“I do?” David questioned, surprised.
“That’s what I was sent to tell you,” his superior told him. “I needed to talk to you first, though. We regenerators try and keep a lot of the details of what being one of us means to ourselves. Traci has different things to tell you than I did.”
The younger man nodded, and looked at the admin building. He began to walk toward it, then stopped and turned back to Michael.
“What happens now?” he a
sked, softly.
“We live,” the werewolf replied. “For as long as we live—not one day more or one day less. Go talk to the Major, David. Whatever the future holds, we have a job to do today.”
#
David passed through the security checkpoints in the Campus’s Administration building with the blasé air of past experience. While he had not been up to Major Warner’s office since that first meeting almost three months before, similar security measures took up every non-residential building on the Campus, as ubiquitous as the deep blue carpeting.
He reached Warner’s office at the end of the short corridor with its brass nameplates and knocked once.
“Enter,” she ordered immediately, and David stepped through the door. Unlike his last visit, the single chair on his side of her desk was a comfortable armchair, not a straight-backed wooden terror. The filing cabinets, the flags, the low bookshelves, they all looked the same.
This time around, David noted the aura of the painting behind the uniformed Mage as soon as he entered, and winced slightly at the memory of the first time he’d seen that bright white aura.
“Have a seat, Agent White,” Major Warner instructed, gesturing him to the armchair. Sitting behind the desk, the redhead’s small size was easily missed, and her calm green eyes seemed much more authoritative.
“Thank you, ma’am,” David replied, sinking into the surprisingly comfortable leather chair and facing the day-to-day head of his organization. “May I ask what this is about?”
“I know that Michael gave you a long regenerator-to-regenerator talk before he sent you up here,” she told him softly, “so I won’t bore you with the details of what this change means. Given how quiet the regenerators in our ranks keep some of the details, you probably now know more about the long-term consequences than I do. You’re here so we can discuss some more…short-term consequences.”
“Like what, ma’am?” he asked, wondering what she meant.
ONSET: To Serve and Protect Page 28
