Darkest Before The Dawn

by Michael Anderle

  Ugaki scratched the back of his head as he turned toward the SWAT truck parked at the gates. “Looks like they got away already,” he said, resigned to the inevitable cleanup that was going to have to happen.

  “Sir,” another voice said over the communicator, “we have found the emperor and some of his colleagues.”

  “And?” Ugaki responded. The agitation in his voice evident.

  “Dead, sir,” the voice on the radio reported. “They’re all dead.”

  Commander Ugaki paled.

  He walked away from the assembling camp of trucks and flashing red and blue lights to gather his thoughts. Pulling up his secret communicator, he tapped a message. You said you would leave them alive!

  SEND.

  Moments later he received a message back. “We did. Standby. Footage shows a second group.”

  The commander wiped his hands over his face as his second-in-command joined him. “Everything ok, sir?”

  The commander shook his head. “No. We’re in deep shit. Looks like our people weren’t the only ones to pay the emperor a visit tonight. We’re going to have to play this carefully if we’re to keep our secret.”

  Koga nodded his understanding and walked back to the yellow and black tape that was being used to seal the entrance to the building.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Kurobe Dam, Toyama prefecture, Northwest of Tokyo

  Ichika, Jacqueline, Mark, Akari, Haruto, and Riku stood overlooking the dam, taking in the view.

  The morning light spilled over the lake, christening it in gold and silver hues. Though the team had had plenty of time for shuteye, because Eve had waited until morning to conduct her scans of the area, the living conditions in the container had proven a little cramped for the number of people who were now on the mission.

  “I’ve never seen anything quite so majestic,” Akari exclaimed, her eyes wide in wonderment.

  Riku glanced at her. “Yeah. We’re a long way from Yokohama.”

  Mark shoved his hands in his pockets. “Well, I agree it’s impressive, but what about breakfast?”

  Yuko must have heard, because a second later she appeared at the door behind them. “Eve says her scans are going to take another couple hours,” she told them. “We have time to go into town for some food if you’d like.”

  Mark’s eyes lit up as he rubbed his hands together quickly. “Would I!” he exclaimed excitedly. Jacqueline eyed him carefully.

  Mark raised his hands in defense. “You’re kidding! You’re not jealous of food?”

  Jacqueline noticed her knee-jerk reaction and her face softened. “No. No, I’m not jealous of food,” she said, looping her arm into his and turning to face Yuko.

  “I suppose using those super-speedy Pods to get to the village would be out of the question?” she asked.

  Yuko nodded. “Afraid so. Eve is using all three of them to scan the area faster. The seismic devices we have are a little old and take more time to gather the data points.”

  Jacqueline shrugged. “No matter,” she said, looking up at the sky. “It’s a lovely day for it.” She glanced at Mark, who nodded.

  Yuko disappeared back into the box for a moment and then came out, closing the door behind her. “Ok, I’ve told Eve. She’ll let us know if she gets finished sooner.”

  There were excited mumbles as the group headed out, following Yuko off the tree-covered mound toward a trail. Yuko glanced around, getting her bearings before leading them more decisively in the direction of breakfast.

  —

  Three hours later the team stood on the same spot they had been admiring the view from. This time they had three Pods lined up, and were wearing waterproof suits that smelled like they’d been in storage next to a beer keg for the last two hundred years.

  Jacqueline pulled at the suit’s material. “Tell me again why you have watertight suits but no helmets?”

  Yuko sighed. “I believe that they were prototypes developed by Team BMW for some side project they were working on, in case they needed to check water storage tanks. The helmets were probably re-engineered for space, though.”

  Mark wrinkled his vampire nose. “And they smell of stale beer because?”

  Eve closed one of the Pod’s storage units. “That’d be because Bobcat had a beer fetish,” she joked, her face deadpan.

  Akari glanced at her, unsure how much of this to believe. Their new teammates had just been talking about space and beer fetishes. She had known there would be surprises on the way and Sensei Kashikoi was never one to share all the details, but assuming she had misheard was just a simpler option at this stage.

  “Ok,” Yuko called to the six wet-suit garbed warriors. “Here’s the plan… Eve and I will remain up here to make sure you find the point of ingress. From Eve’s data, there is a cavern you can breach. This means you’ll need to take the Pods into the lake and go deep enough to find the bunker. The entrance is completely flooded, but there is an air pocket just beyond it, and our guess is that beyond there the bunker is water-free.

  “The difficulty is going to be getting access to it, though. You’ll take these charges,” she said, holding up two small devices. “You need to plant them, then use the Pod to get away fast enough. Once they have exploded, you can head back in.”

  Mark raised his hand, a look of concern in his eyes. “But what’s to say that the explosion won’t break the seal on the rest of the bunker and cause the water to flood in?

  Yuko looked at Eve for the answer. “In my modeled simulation, there was a .011 probability that something like that might happen,” she said dismissively. “But for the most part, it is held in stasis mechanically, meaning the arrangement of the air and blocks of concrete are arranged such that you should be ok. It was likely designed to prevent a single breach from overcoming it.”

  Jacqueline frowned. “Well, if that was the case, why didn’t the Japanese already make this trip to salvage their servers?”

  Eve looked at Yuko for the solution. Yuko frowned. “Perhaps they didn’t know. This was built a long time before the earthquake hit, and I suspect they just accepted what previous generations had held to be true. It seems quite common in most civilizations.”

  Mark looked thoughtful for a moment. “Unless someone decided that the intel on those servers was better left buried.”

  Ichika nodded enthusiastically. “That would make sense. It’s pretty much what Sensei Kashikoi has been advocating since I was old enough to understand the stories he told us about the legend.”

  Yuko registered the insight from Ichika but then turned to Mark. “You think you’ll be able to pull the information we need?”

  Mark looked over his shoulder at one of the Pods, gesturing toward a rusted metal box wrapped in a clear plastic bag on the seat. “Yeah. If Eve’s reading on that battery is correct, it should give me enough juice to tap into the mainframe and make the transfer. If your patch works, it shouldn’t take too long to locate what we need no matter where it was stored. Then we should just be able to download it through a single server port onto this.” He held up a dongle which looked high-tech but foreign, clearly from another time and place than the tech he had been exposed to.

  Everyone else's eyes had glazed over. Mark turned back to Eve, slipping the dongle back into his suit pocket. “How on Earth did you get hold of a compatible cable, though?”

  Yuko glanced at Eve. Eve responded. “We have friends in Tokyo who are collectors and, for the right price, they can find almost anything tech-related from since before…you know.”

  Mark seemed satisfied. “Well, as long as your friends’ research is correct. Just a few years from now we might find that our cable or interface is incompatible, and then there won’t be anything I can do down there.”

  Jacqueline noticed a tinge to his voice which she hadn’t heard since he became a vampire—anxiety. Over tech, which was his bag. She looked at him, wishing there was some way she could reassure him, but the details were just a little beyond her area
of expertise.

  “Ok,” Yuko said, looking at each of the six team members. “You know what you need to do. We’re ready to go as soon as you get down there. We’ll control the Pods remotely, but if you need to take control just use the voice command to flick it into manual.”

  There were nods and murmurs of acknowledgment as they headed for their Pods two by two.

  “Feels a little ark-like,” Riku mentioned to Akari as they jumped into their shared Pod.

  Akari didn’t understand the reference, but she chose to ignore the comment and swung herself in next to him with her game face on.

  Moments later the Pod doors were closing. After they sealed shut, the Pods lifted and dropped elegantly off the side of the cliff toward the lake.

  Yuko moved forward to peer over the edge and watched the three barely visible Pods move into formation and level out before they hit the surface. They skipped in the direction of the dam before hopping effortlessly over it to the lake’s natural side and plunging to the depth at which Eve had defined their point of entry to be.

  Yuko looked at Eve.

  Eve recognized the concern on Yuko’s face. It was the same look that she had observed on Akio’s visage on more than one occasion before he sent them on a mission. “They will be ok,” she reassured Yuko.

  “It’s not just them I’m worried about,” Yuko confessed. “We need to find out who hit the embassy after we left, and see if there is a way to keep our commander out of harm’s way.”

  Eve nodded and followed Yuko into the container, where they would control the mission together. “We have to assume they know what we know,” she added as she followed Yuko up the steps.

  Frankfurt, Germany

  Sabine’s third try amused Michael. “If we go into the sewers, you will get your beautiful new hat dirty.”

  The three of them were walking past a grocery store, following directions Michael had lifted from a man in a three-piece suit.

  “If we don’t go into the sewers we might miss William and this other group looking for him and myself,” he replied.

  She does not know yet that the Sewers is just a euphemism for the technology underground, Michael sent Akio.

  That would make two of us. There was a pause. I can’t say I was looking forward to going through filth either.

  This is William, Michael responded. He wants to be protected, not inconvenienced.

  There was another pause from Akio before he replied, I am ashamed I missed the obvious.

  Michael stopped, and waited for Sabine to realize she was about to bump into him. “What?” she asked, looking up into his face. “Am I whining too much?” She saw the corner of his lip curl. “I am, aren’t I?” She looked to her left. “Dammit.”

  “It is ok, Sabine,” Michael told her. “The Sewers is not a place of pipes and disgusting water, it is a name for a place you can live here in Frankfurt.”

  Her eyes tracked back to Michael. “What kind of place?”

  “It is something they built after the fall. It is underground, and it is large. There are places for the rich and places for the roaches to hide, and in the middle is a zone where they agree to do business. William has a residence at the bottom. You can get to it from the rich side or the roach side.”

  “Which side will the mercs be coming in from?” she asked, keeping up with Michael as he and Akio took off walking across the street toward some steps that led underground.

  “They only know about the rich side,” Michael replied.

  “Why—” she started before Akio answered.

  “There is always,” he said as the three swung around the wall and started down into the subway area that held the entrance to the Sewers, “a back way out.”

  “Or in,” Michael finished as they took a left into a less-than-clean-smelling hallway.

  The fluorescent lights buzzed and hummed as the three walked through the passageways. Sabine was trying her best not to become overwhelmed thinking about how deep underground they must be as they descended their seventh flight of stairs.

  On the eighth level, her body reacted while her mind was still contemplating being stuck down here for the rest of her life.

  One moment Michael was in front and Akio behind her. The next Michael had downed two attackers in front, Akio had taken out one behind them, and she had another’s head pressed into the wall, her pistol shoved against his skull. “MOTHERFUCKER!” she screamed at him. “I WAS BUSY WORRYING HERE!”

  The guy—no, just a kid—was watching her pistol as best he could. Her finger was on the trigger and his eyes kept trying to see how hard she was squeezing. The noise in the landing came back to her in a rush. She could hear some moaning. “Kill him or what?”

  “No!” The boy tried to get his nerves under control. “We weren’t sent to kill you.”

  Michael walked up next to the young man and bent down. “Name?”

  The teenager swallowed. “Erich.”

  You can put your pistol away, Sabine.

  She brought her pistol down and holstered it.

  “Well, Erich.” Michael allowed his eyes to flash red a moment, mesmerizing the boy when he realized what kind of being he was looking at, “I need directions to a certain area down here in the sewers. Are you available?”

  Erich’s head jerked up and down.

  “Good.” Michael straightened up. “I expect you to provide the necessary signals so that we are allowed safe passage, or you will be my first kill of the evening.”

  Michael turned and headed toward the door. Erich called, “Herr…uh…” Michael turned and raised an eyebrow. Erich pointed. “There are more on the other side.”

  “You will do,” Michael told him and waved him to the door. “There are none at the moment. We need to go to the Dark Corners area.”

  Erich stepped over the prone body of Frederic and grabbed the door handle. Yanking it open, he called, “It’s me, Erich. Safe passage, and if anyone can hear me, we have three down.”

  No one responded. He stuck his head through the door and looked both ways. Stepping in, he was confused.

  The man in the coat and hat walked in behind him. “Don’t worry, they were scared and ran. They will be back later. Your friends live, and we don’t have much time. The way, Erich?”

  Erich turned to Michael’s left and started walking down the passage. The walls were lined with white ceramic tile and the floors were concrete. There were LED lights every ten feet that lit the hallway enough that even Sabine could see very well.

  “The Dark Corners,” Erich started chattering, “have a bad reputation for people disappearing.” He chuckled. “I think it’s just someone trying to keep others away.”

  “Oh, it’s probably true,” Michael responded.

  “Which part?” Erich asked as he turned and pushed on a door. It opened into another set of stairwells. “This will drop us another three levels to the main concourse. I’ll get us through the toll there and then we have one hallway and another five levels to go down.”

  “Both parts,” Michael read the instructions and directions from Erich’s mind. “People probably did disappear, and it was so others wouldn’t go there.”

  “But why?” Erich asked as they descended to the third level. He grabbed the door and opened it. Stepping out, he turned to his right and jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Aren, Burk, these three are with me.”

  Aren was a big guy with blond hair and hazel eyes. He looked past Erich. “Are you playing with me?”

  “What?” Erich turned around, but there was no one behind him. He stepped back over to the door to the stairway and pushed it open, then stuck his head inside and called out.

  Aren’s smile dropped when he saw the look on Erich’s face. Reaching for a pistol and placing it in his waistband, Aren asked him, “What’s going on?”

  Erich saw him grab the pistol and shook his head. “You don’t want to make them angry.”

  “’Them’ who?” Aren asked as he waved to Burk to get his o
wn weapon ready.

  “I swear I’m not making this up.” Erich looked down the way he had told the man to go. “His eyes glowed red, and he wanted to know how to get to the Dark Corners.” Erich pointed back the way they came. “He and his two people took out the team I was on to require toll.”

  “Dark Corners?” Aren turned to the hallway that went in that direction. “Well, let’s go lock the doors. If they got ahead of you somehow, that will stop them from coming back. They will have to bang on the doors to get us to open them.”

  “I don’t think doors are their problem,” Erich whispered.

  —

  Michael looked at the three doors in front of him. “Well, shit.”

  “He didn’t show any doors in his mind, did he?” Akio asked. Michael had turned to Myst, grabbed the two of them, and gone down the hallway and into the correct stairwell.

  Unfortunately, after five levels it stopped. There were three doors and each one was going in a different direction.

  “Nope,” Michael agreed.

  “It’s easy,” Sabine told them. She walked over and grabbed the left door and pulled it open. “After you two gentlemen…”

  Michael raised an eyebrow. “What?” She pointed to the floor. “No foot traffic like the other two doors. This one isn’t used much anymore. Trust men to not see dirt.”

  Michael resisted the urge to pet her head as he walked into the hallway beyond. She was right; this hallway still had light, but it wasn’t used.

  Akio was behind him. “Left or right?”

  “Left,” Sabine answered as the door clicked shut behind her. “and no, not because of dirt. It just feels creepy.” She looked at both men, who looked back at her. “You guys don’t feel it?”

  Akio chuckled. “Sabine, we are the ones who make people feel creepy.”

  “Oh, right.” She shrugged. “I guess I’ve acclimated to your version of creepy.” She stepped around him and started walking down the hallway, muttering to herself, “What’s that say about me?”

  —

  The security guard was standard-sized. Which was to say huge, Noah thought, looking up at him. The scar on the guard’s face just missed his left eye and ended up somewhere under his brown hair. “We are here to meet our boss,” Noah responded to the guard’s question. “His name is William, but he goes by Duke.”