by Aer-ki Jyr
“We still have questions that need answering so we can save at least some of the lives you’ve put in harm’s way,” Davis added. “After that your solitude will begin, and you won’t see another living being for the next millennia. So if you feel like talking, now’s the time.”
“Despite your assertions that the Masters have been captured, I only have your word for it,” the Primarch said defiantly, though Davis could detect a bit of trepidation in his eyes. “I won’t give you anything to compromise them…and through them The Word will continue. I am not the first Primarch and I will not be the last. You may have weakened us, but others will continue forward as we fall. That is the nature and structure of life. You can kill the individual, but the commonality will continue.”
“We’re not killing you.”
“So you say. I have yet to experience your interrogation techniques. If you have any skill with them, you would know that survival isn’t guaranteed. Then again, you do have this magical medicine. Will it be used to repair my mangled body?” the Primarch taunted.
Davis stared back at him, then a small smirk tugged its way onto his face. “You think that because I admitted to the existence of ambrosia that you can extract information out of me. You are mistaken. You are still a rookie, and rookies don’t get access to the higher levels of Star Force’s collective knowledge…at least not until you’ve earned it. Prerequisites and all that. Until you master the basics you don’t need to be distracted with the complexities.”
“You delude yourself if you believe I will become one of your initiates.”
“Oh, that won’t be happening. Even if you survive your millennia you won’t ever be allowed into Star Force. I was merely pointing out that your status as our primary enemy, here on Earth at least, doesn’t afford you any special privileges. You’re not our peer. You’re just a twisted kid, and as the days go by that point is going to grow more and more obvious.”
“Years do not necessarily beget wisdom,” the Primarch countered as Davis motioned to David, who hit the energy field release, dropping the blue barrier between them.
“We won’t meet again, so this is me saying goodbye,” Davis said, stepping forward into a short lunge and driving his left elbow into the man’s chest.
The Primarch flew backwards and bounced off the wall, tripping on the bunk that he then fell down onto, unable to get his balance as David sent a weak stream of Fornax energy into him, making him feel far more affected by the hit than he should have been.
Nice form, David commented telepathically as Davis turned his back on the Primarch and casually walked out.
All yours.
The ranger left his perch against the wall and walked over to the Primarch, who he was still feeding a bit of Fornax to keep his body wobbly, and helped him sit up, leaving his hand on the man’s right shoulder with a couple of fingers reaching over and brushing the skin on his neck.
“Packs a punch, doesn’t he?”
“A taste…of what’s to come?” the Primarch asked, his breathing heavy as Davis began hacking into his nervous system and subtly beginning the interrogation.
“No, no…if I hit you I might kill you. Why are all of you guys so pathetically out of shape? You can barely sit up right now.”
“You have unnatural strength. More so than I estimated, or is he as strong as you?”
David smiled, both at the question and the workout thread he identified in the man’s mind that gave him access to the Primarch’s daily routine that included some light running, weight lifting, and yoga…typical ignorant workout fluff, especially the weight lifting. David got a slew of memories from recent lifts, as well as him tearing a quad a couple months ago.
“Not even close,” David said, sending a bit more Fornax out to make the man slump over…all so he could help him sit back up, giving him an excuse for keeping a hand on his neck. “You and I are going to get to know each other very well. My name’s David.”
“Yes…I know. And if you don’t already know my name I’m not going to give it to you.”
As soon as the man said the words his name popped up inside his conscious thoughts, basically handing it to David.
“Do you prefer Jameson, James, or Jim?”
“Jameson will suffice.”
“Alright, Jim. Let’s get you over to a more comfortable room,” he said, pulling him up off the bunk with ease and practically dangling him like a puppet with the wobbly legs the Fornax was giving him. “Then we can start our very long chat. I’ll make sure they bring us some donuts.”
7
March 25, 2451
Solar System
Earth
David sat at the computer console in his room, typing out a report on his interrogation findings for the day while they were still fresh in his mind. He was handling the Primarch while the rest of Green Team was out with Blue and Red teams hitting Word facilities as fast as David and the rest of the interrogators could identify them. Those hits were likewise bringing back with them more prisoners to be interrogated, along with the 11 Masters they already had, which had prompted them to call in all the highest Ikrid-rated Archons within the system to assist with the mass of interrogations.
David and the others knew the faster they could hit The Word operations the more of them they’d be able to sweep up before they had a chance to respond. The cellular nature of their organization, which in the past had always been an advantage, was allowing the Archons to take out one Agent’s operations with the others more or less unaware, for the raids weren’t making the news vids.
Part of him wanted to be out there busting heads, but he knew the interrogation of the Primarch was the highest priority and wanted to get it finished as soon as possible so they could pass him off to a Star Force prison and wash their hands of him. Problem was he had a huge amount of intel, and digging it out of his mind was not a straightforward process…especially when David had to hide the fact that he had the ability to delve into the man’s mind through physical contact.
That said, he was making considerable progress and wanted to get the most recent finds into the computer records before he headed off for his second workout session of the day. He’d gotten all of his core workouts done in the morning before saying hi to the Primarch, but he wanted to get some skill work in this afternoon before he headed back over to assist with the interrogation of Master 2.
Today he’d dug out The Word’s origins from the man’s mind, finding that it had began back in the 2290s in direct opposition to the changes that Star Force was making on Earth…meaning the organization had operated in the dark for years before Davis had picked up on their illicit activity. What their ultimate goals were David hadn’t gotten to yet, but his prying into the Primarch’s mind clearly indicated that the man felt he was but one piece of an ever growing puzzle…a puzzle that Star Force was in the process of putting an end to before it could fully take shape.
David was keeping track of Green Team’s operations in between his interrogation sessions and workouts, all the while tagging new missions for them as he oversaw the collective data files being assembled piecemeal by all the Archons involved in the mass interrogations…which was why he needed to get his latest findings down in a report before the slew of facts he dealt with on a daily basis washed away some tidbits of information that may or may not prove useful in the long run.
‘Type now, think later’ had become his habit, and it allowed him to disassociate one activity from another. Once today’s sessions were over, both his training and the interrogations, he’d thumb through the other recent interrogation reports, as well as the ones from the field missions. From there he’d make adjustments to Green Team’s assignments while throwing others to Blue and Red teams for the insystem work, while Yellow and Orange Teams had already been dispatched to other systems to hunt down Word facilities there.
Purple Team was still standing by, waiting for a different system assignment when the interrogators had weeded out another cell from either the Ma
sters or the Primarch, though from what David was learning the vast majority of The Word’s operations were here in Sol. The other star systems didn’t afford them a great many opportunities to establish independent bases, and with most of the extra-solar colonies being Star Force owned the security was tight enough to constrict Word operations minimal activities.
Where there appeared to be pockets of The Word in other systems was, of course, the national colonies. They were few, meaning most of Star Force’s interstellar empire was untouched by the taint of The Word, but where there was a colony, station, or ship not run by Star Force personnel, The Word would try to insert its people, extending their network of operatives out into previously untouched segments of Humanity.
Those had to be eliminated, but given the distances involved David and the special Teams were going to be hunting down Word fragments for several years to come, but most of their activities were right here on Earth, which took priority for Green Team. Only Antarctica and a few tiny territories across Earth were under Star Force control, the rest of the planet was a conglomeration of nations, and even those allied with Star Force, such as Brazil, were not immune to Word infiltration. In that way Earth had been a weak spot as far as Star Force’s intelligence division was concerned, and The Word had done well to exploit that advantage, leaving a lot of cleanup to do on the planet.
Already they’d hit 118 Word facilities, with another 52 on the to-do list, with more being added by the day as they discovered their locations through the interrogation of the Masters and Primarch, along with the tech work being done at captured facilities, giving them electronic trails to follow to even more hideouts.
The size of The Word was far larger than David had expected, and he could imagine what they’d been up to their first 100 or so years. They’d needed to establish their own infrastructure, off the grid, in order to keep Star Force from using the economy to locate them. Doing so must have been a long and tedious task, and David found it surprising they could have been so patient. Usually philosophical zealots needed to be seen and heard, but The Word had been a ghost for such a long time David wondered what else they might have been up to, and had only begun to interrogate the Primarch concerning such things.
He had discovered that anti-Star Force wasn’t their driving mandate, for they sought control and/or influence over all factions, and with their primary focus being here on Earth they had a lot of dealings with the local governments as they pried here and there. It was always clandestine, up until Davis had outed their existence, with the public swell of support being a new factor the Primarch had to work his way through.
This one, like his predecessor, had kept The Word independent from the social movement that bore its name and manipulated it as they did other threads within Human society to get the outcomes they desired. That way, nothing could be backtracked to expose the organization, though the Primarch was still wondering if it somehow had, for neither David nor anyone else had informed the prisoner how exactly he’d been exposed.
Which worked well as an interrogation technique, for the man kept running possible scenarios through his head, effectively giving David a rundown of Word facilities and operations where the breach in security might have occurred. As far as he knew, for he wasn’t monitoring the man constantly, the Primarch had never considered the possibility that an Agent might turn.
He’d considered the possibility of other personnel being captured and interrogated, but they knew so little that there wasn’t anything they had access to that could have led Star Force to the Masters or Olympus, so every time David questioned him in a way that brushed upon a new idea, the Primarch would unwittingly run it through his mind for the Archon to see, showing more memory threads for David to backtrack then or later.
All in all, it was tedious work, but it had to be done and there was no one more equipped for it than him, which was why he didn’t shirk the task. Even though he didn’t have complete control over the various operations within The Word, the Primarch did have a wealth of knowledge that no Master did, for he saw the organization as a whole while they saw merely their own slice of the big corrupt cake.
But what he didn’t know was the identity and location of all their operatives. He knew the Agents and their assignments, but who they recruited for their assignments wasn’t always known, even to their Masters, meaning there was a lot of leg work being done at the raid sites, grabbing up as many personnel as they could, bringing them back to Atlantis for the big interrogation party, and identifying who was where and doing what, though so far only a handful of Agents had been taken captive. Most of them had enough of a heads up during the assaults to get to their kill pills first.
Those cells were being rolled over by the Teams, for each Agent knew every aspect of their operation, making them the most valuable captures in finding all the rats, but in the case of those who had died it meant that those cells effectively died with them, for they could no longer function. David assumed some of the operatives would continue to carry out their orders, and perhaps even try to set up their own organizations when it became clear that their superiors had disappeared, but they wouldn’t be the threat that The Word was, given their lack of leadership, training, and resources.
That didn’t mean they weren’t dangerous and didn’t have some nasty toys in their possession, but their long-term sustainability was now gone, making this less of a clandestine war and more of a cleanup operation. The biggest threat they now faced was in missing cells and leaving an Agent in play, creating an opportunity for a new criminal organization to spawn if the Agent was so inclined to do so, making it important that David and the others find all the Agents, or at least identify them, so they could make a clean sweep of The Word leadership and eliminate their knowledge from the equation.
One thing David had been able to get from the Primarch was the total number of Agents in play, which was an astounding 2493. Each Master recruited and trained their own Agents, and as such they had varying numbers of them, with each report filed by them being filtered up to Olympus for the Primarch and his staff to keep track of.
And his staff didn’t do the lion’s share of the work, for the Primarch really did lead the Word. He was a statistician that recruited his staff from Word members in order to assist him with an insane amount of data analysis, most of which wasn’t even Word related. He had some basic security staff to safeguard Olympus, but most of the people they’d captured along with him were the data hounds that gave The Word such impressive intelligence capabilities.
That brain trust was being interrogated simultaneously, though David wasn’t directly involved, but he was seeing the reports coming out from them and used that data as interrogation points for the Primarch, spurring specific memory threads that he could then follow to new and often obscure facts that hadn’t passed through the man’s conscious mind in months, if not years.
The entire interrogation party was a team psionic effort, and David was a bit freaked out to think how hard and damn near impossible it would have been to root out The Word without psionics, now that he could see how big and professional the organization was. Star Force was a monster organization, and as such it cast a huge shadow that many could hide within, and The Word had been doing just that with extreme efficiency.
Still, if Sander Rennold hadn’t happened The Word would still be active and operating despite the Archon’s psionic interrogation techniques, underscoring not only how skilled their opponent was, but the limits that Star Force had. The larger their population grew the easier it was for individuals to hide…so long as they had proper ID. Learn where the security cameras were and weren’t, and you could hide conversations off the grid, arrange clandestine meetings and other activities, all of which there was no way Star Force security could track…not because of a inadequacy on their part, but due to the simple fact that the bigger you got the harder it was to keep track of it all.
But therein lie the disadvantage as well, for as soon as The Word or anyone else took
any action of note they’d be on the grid and invite scrutiny. The Word had done well to stay off the grid, but aside from some sabotage, kidnappings, and other ‘small’ activities they’d kept quiet. Tyr was an example of a larger operation, but it was part, not of a Star Force colony, but another nation where security wasn’t so robust.
From everything David had learned from the Primarch and other prisoners, he had not seen a way for them to hobble or even slow down the mega corporation, meaning either there was some grandiose plan that he hadn’t gotten to yet within the Primarch’s mind or The Word simply didn’t have one. They survived because they hid well, but in order to take Star Force down they had to stop hiding…at which point they were doomed. All they could do was preserve the status quo and try to make tiny alterations, which Star Force had shown an almost impervious resistance to.
Even if The Word took full control over every independent nation and colony they still wouldn’t have the power to take on Star Force, militarily, economically, or even in manpower, for the majority of Humans lived in Star Force territory. Only Earth was the opposite, which was why The Word had been focusing so much effort here, David had learned.
So in the end, David acknowledged, the confrontation between Star Force and The Word had been a draw, ended by the actions of an Agent who’d essentially turned to the lightside because he had seen through The Word philosophy and recognized it for the lie that it was. So philosophically Star Force had won the war, but it still bothered David that they hadn’t been able to get at The Word’s hierarchy without help. Maybe they would have eventually, if The Word had slipped up, but given the dynamics of how the organization operated, he really didn’t see how they would have gotten to the Masters and Primarch, short of stumbling across Olympus during some Arctic construction.
Call it ‘professional dissatisfaction’ on his part, but he was certainly happy that they made good on the opportunity Sander had given them. Luck was certainly a part of the game, and while he didn’t want to make the mistake of depending on it, using it when it came your way was something he’d learned all the way back in basic training when going up against an annoying challenge that he just couldn’t seem to beat. When it finally did happen, often unexpectedly, you took it and ran on to the next roadblock in your way.
