Guardians of Eden

by Matt Roberts

  Owyn took up a new approach – a bluff. It was risky; if Rodriguez saw through it he’d know he still held the upper hand, but it was the best Owyn had. “We’ve got men in every corner of this estate. Do what we say, and you can avoid a whole lot of mess.”

  “You really think it’s that easy to sway me?”

  “So you’d rather see your home burned to the ground – yours and your family’s reputation destroyed? If that’s what it takes that’s what we’ll do; we’re getting through this door however much blood we need to spill to do it. Give us what we want we’ll go quietly.”

  Rodriguez was the sort of man who valued his image as highly as his life, even if only Owyn paid enough attention to realise that. This affair had done enough damage already. Threatening a riot might be enough to sway him.

  Rodriguez took a deep breath. “Fine, fine,” he conceded. “But you won’t find what you’re looking for, whatever it is.”

  Even Owyn hadn’t expected him to give in so quickly, but it seemed his bluff had done the trick. A few seconds later the wooden panel slid aside to reveal a silver door with an access panel at its centre.

  Rodriguez pushed his hand into place to begin the scan. Miller took O’Brien’s place at the top of the stairs and ordered her over to join Owyn. Shaw, meanwhile, was continuing to keep watch from the tower balcony. He had his crosshairs fixed on the back of Rodriguez’ head but out of the corner of his eye he caught a glimpse of activity on the courtyard. Coming across it was a squadron of armoured men, every one equipped with a heavy assault rifle and wearing a belt laced with grenades and ammo.

  “Move this along, Miller. We’re on the clock,” he hurriedly informed the team leader. “I’ve got a dozen men moving across the courtyard. These guys aren’t fucking around.”

  All of a sudden Miller was beginning to breathe a little more quickly. His finger twitched on his trigger. Owyn glanced towards him. He was visibly uneasy. What had gotten into him? Sure, they hadn’t expected reinforcements, but Miller was easily capable of adapting to the situation. He wouldn’t have made it this far if he wasn’t. What was he so concerned about?

  “How long?” Owyn asked as Rodriguez continued to go through the arduous identification process.

  “Why does it matter?” Rodriguez asked back. “You have the whole building on lockdown, don’t you?”

  Owyn didn’t answer. Rodriguez was already suspicious and was stalling, but he was still playing along. As long as that was the case there was no benefit in pushing him and endangering that. Owyn looked back at Miller. The footsteps from downstairs had stopped, but that only seemed to have intensified the Lieutenant’s discomfort. He looked afraid.

  Finally, the door opened. “O’Brien. Carter. Take him inside and seal the door,” Miller ordered.

  “What?” Owyn said, raising his voice sharply. “The plan was to get the data and get out.”

  “That’s an order, Carter.”

  “Are you insane? There’s no other way out.” Owyn was incensed.

  “What’s happening?” Rodriguez asked.

  The switch in Miller’s head had already been flipped. There was no reasoning with him now. He raised his gun and aimed it right between Owyn’s eyes. “You always think you know better, don’t you Carter? This is your last chance. Follow the order or I put you down.”

  “What the fuck’s going on in there?” Shaw said as he saw Miller’s gun raised towards his teammate.

  “Stand down, Carter,” O’Brien urged. Even her composure was being rattled by Miller’s spontaneous actions.

  Sensing his options were limited Owyn shoved Rodriguez inside and without giving a glance to Miller he followed. O’Brien looked back to see the Lieutenant unmoved. She stepped through and sealed the door behind her.

  “We’ve been compromised,” came the frantic cry of Sergeant Anderson over comms. “The rest of my team have made evac but I’m trapped inside the grounds.”

  “Rendezvous with Shaw at the tower on the eastern side of the estate if you can, Sergeant. We’ll organise evac from there,” Miller answered, feigning an air of calmness.

  “What the hell’s happening down there?” Sully joined the chaos. “The whole place is swarming with these guys. There’s no chance of me getting in without being shot out of the sky. Who even are they?”

  Miller didn’t offer an answer. The armoured squad were on their ascent, leaving only a few seconds until they closed on his position. He checked his ammunition and stood ready. “Shaw. I’m transferring command of the mission to you,” he said.

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “You know the consequences if they take me, Shaw. Do what’s necessary to survive.”

  “Fuck you, Miller.” Shaw refused to accept the command. “Just get the hell out of there.”

  A grenade landed nearby Miller and filled the corridor with smoke. He fired a shot down the stairs in retaliation, but it was no use. The bullet missed everything and harmlessly collided with the far wall. Given no time to react he was charged down by a pair of soldiers. His gun tumbled to the ground as he was struck across the head and pushed up against a window with his hands clasped behind his back.

  Shaw could see the whole episode unfolding in the centre of his scope. If Miller was taken alive then the risk of ISO being unveiled became all too real, and there was no way of telling how serious the consequences of that could be. As far as he knew only four, maybe five people outside their ranks knew they existed. The cost of exposure, most likely, was termination – and they all knew exactly what that entailed. The choice still remained. Pulling the trigger would mean eliminating that risk.

  “What’s necessary to survive, Shaw,” Miller repeated through his struggle, trying to tilt the balance. Shaw then took aim, breathed and fired.

  ***

  O’Brien pulled shut the door, silencing all sound from outside, then stood guard beside it with her blade in hand. The room was tightly packed and cramped. On one side was a row of packed bookshelves filled largely with ancient looking books, all surprisingly well preserved. On the other side was a small, intricate wooden desk atop which sat a computer console. Undoubtedly that was what gave access to Rodriguez’ isolated database, whatever it contained, but that was no longer Owyn’s concern.

  “What was that?” Rodriguez pressed, himself breathing a little more heavily now.

  Owyn ignored him and instead placed his gun down on the desk, pulled the chair from beneath it into the middle of the room and instructed Rodriguez to sit. After a brief moment of reluctance he did as he was told.

  Owyn calmed his anger and spoke softly. This was his only shot to get Rodriguez on side. He had to make it count. “Who are you?” he asked.

  “What do you mean who am I?” Rodriguez replied, letting his own fury ring out loud and clear. “You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t know the answer to that.”

  “All we know about you is what we’ve been told, and I’m starting to question how much of it I can believe. You have no reason to lie to us so I want to hear it from your mouth.”

  “Let’s just get the files, Carter,” O’Brien said, making her way over to the console.

  “And then what?” Owyn raised his voice suddenly. “The mission’s gone. Miller fucked us. Those men won’t leave until they get Rodriguez so the only way we’re getting out of here is by turning ourselves in.”

  “He’s right. It’s over.” Rodriguez smirked.

  Owyn turned his attention back to Rodriguez, undeterred. “So you have nothing to lose, right? The quicker you answer my questions the quicker you get out of here. All I’m asking for is clarity.”

  “You took me hostage, held a gun to my head, threatened to torture me and now you expect me to answer to you?”

  “That isn’t who we are. That was Miller.” The resentment was clear in his voice even without trying to force it. “It might look a lot different to you, but we aren’t criminals. If we were I’d have put a bullet in your brain the moment you opened
that door. Until now I thought we were on the right side, but I won’t know unless you tell me the truth.”

  “Fuck you.” Rodriguez spat in Owyn’s direction.

  Owyn’s patience was beginning to waver. He kneeled down and looked Rodriguez straight in the eyes. “We aren’t going to hurt you, Mr Rodriguez. All I ask is that you answer my questions and we can all walk out of here. You’ll go free and we’ll rot in a prison cell.” Rodriguez remained stubborn. “Alright.” Owyn sighed. “We’ll go at this from a different angle. What is Installation 3?” he asked.

  The question immediately drew a reaction from Rodriguez. The colour drained from his face. “Installation 3?” he asked back, although lacking his previous conviction.

  “The first time I heard your voice was from an audio recording in an underground facility on the edge of the Tajari desert,” Owyn explained. “I want to know what that facility was and what you had to do with it.”

  O’Brien, who had been biting her tongue since the start of the conversation, suddenly found herself being drawn in by curiosity. She knew nothing of what Owyn had seen in the Tajari and this was the first time she’d heard a mention of Installation 3.

  Rodriguez’ expression turned to disbelief. “How can you possibly know of that place? Who are you people?”

  “I can’t answer that question, and I’m willing to bet it that ’s for the same reason you can’t answer mine,” Owyn replied. His mood had brightened a little as he sensed he was getting through to Rodriguez. “Let’s go for something a little easier then. Who do you work for?”

  “The Department of Planetary Defence,” Rodriguez said tentatively.

  “We were told you were an independent weapons manufacturer for the DPD. Is there any truth in that?”

  “No, no,” Rodriguez quickly replied, shaking his head. “I’m a researcher – a scientist. I oversee high level scientific projects for the DPD.” He hesitated. “…Installation 3 was one of the facilities I worked with.”

  “That can’t be…no,” O’Brien stuttered, unwilling to accept the truth she was putting together in her head.

  Owyn turned to her. “That base didn’t belong to rebels. It belonged to the DPD.”

  “Rebels?” Rodriguez jumped in. “There aren’t any rebels. Everything on this planet is so heavily policed and regulated that there never could be.”

  Owyn was hardly surprised by the latest revelation. “We were told that you were a weapons supplier for those very same rebels. Interesting, isn’t it?”

  Rodriguez’ expression suddenly transformed again as he had a moment of realisation. “Good God. You’re ISO aren’t you?”

  This time it was Owyn’s turn to be struck with shock. “How the hell do you know that?”

  “You were the people who destroyed the facility, yes? At Installation 3?”

  Owyn had given up on keeping secrets. “We were,” he answered without hesitation.

  “You’re starting to see how little secrecy counts for on this planet,” Rodriguez said with venom in his tongue. This time, however, his anger wasn’t directed towards Owyn. “I first heard of ISO months ago. Even then I suspected you were going to attack Installation 3, not that I had any idea who you were or what to expect. I tried to evacuate the facility and save our work, but they refused to listen. I had to send soldiers to remove the personnel by force in the belief that the facility could be protected. I was wrong.” He dropped his head and rubbed his eyes. “After that I had no desire to find you. The damage was already done. I’d lost more than six months of work and with it several dozen DPD soldiers’ lives. I nearly lost my own life as a consequence of that attack.”

  “How did you know about us before?”

  “The facility had a few…system breaches, let’s say. The plans of the above ground compound were compromised along with the co-ordinates of the facility. As well as information being taken, two encrypted entries were added into the security system. I couldn’t get close enough to fully decrypt or delete them, but I managed to extract a small amount of information from one.

  A bit of digging through my colleagues in the Diamond Tower connected it to a top level classified section of the DPD’ personnel database linked to an organisation called ISO. Further investigation yielded nothing, but you must understand; that system was virtually uncrack-able – almost impossible to locate let alone infiltrate. The only way it could have been more secure was to isolate it from the network, but that would have prevented us from exchanging data with the Diamond Tower. To break in once is unbelievable, but three, four times. We knew something was coming, we just couldn’t do anything to stop it.

  I couldn’t even report my findings to those above me. Doing so would have admitted that I had been digging through highly classified sections of the Diamond Tower database –not just on one occasion. The consequences of that would have reached much further than myself so I couldn’t allow it.”

  “Why did we attack that facility?” Owyn asked. “What were you doing there for us to take interest?”

  “There isn’t much I can tell you. You should know the sorts of consequences I would be subject to if I did. What I can tell you is that your ranks are rotten to the core, as are mine. This world isn’t what it was made out to be. It never was. You have been kept as blind to it as everyone else – perhaps even more so.”

  “What was the piece of data you extracted?” Owyn asked. “Maybe we can make more sense of it.”

  “It was nothing more than a simple code,” Rodriguez recalled. “A08A if I remember correctly.”

  Owyn took a deep breath. “Ambrose,” he said out loud.

  Rodriguez raised an eyebrow in question.

  “Lieutenant Ambrose, the former Commanding Officer of ISO,” Owyn explained. “He was the one who got me into that facility. A few hours later he vanished without a trace.”

  Owyn had wished with all his might for it to be anyone else, but there had only ever been one answer. Everything had stemmed from Ambrose’ last mission and departure. It couldn’t be anyone else.

  “What did I destroy inside that facility?” Owyn asked. “Was it a weapon?”

  “A weapon? No, no. It was far, far more valuable than that.” Rodriguez stopped. He pulled a pendant chain up from beneath his shirt and presented it to Owyn. “You’ve seen this symbol before, yes?”

  Engraved upon the pendant was a circle with three lines cut upon it; exactly the symbol Owyn had seen on the canister in the facility. He nodded.

  Rodriguez lifted the pendant over his head. “Find your Lieutenant and show him this,” he said, holding it by the chain for Owyn to take. “I can’t give you your answers but he may be able to. I can’t promise you’ll like what you hear, but at least then you’ll know what you’ve been fighting for.”

  “Then what should I do? Put a bullet in his head?”

  “There’s no use in that anymore. Whichever side you fight for you’ll lose. One way or another this world will burn.”

  “How the hell are we supposed to find Ambrose while we’re stuck here?” O’Brien intervened. “You said it yourself. The only way out is turning ourselves in.”

  “This is my safe room,” Rodriguez replied. “Why would I make it a prison?” He gestured to be allowed to access the computer. “May I?” Owyn agreed and O’Brien made way.

  “Why help us?” O’Brien asked. “Nothing changes the fact that we took you hostage and held a gun to your head. If what you said about your facility is true then you have even less reason. We almost cost you your life.”

  “The loss of that installation destroyed my reputation and left me trapped in my own home by Bauer and his men, but it may yet be my salvation. I’ve known the truth for years but never been able to tell it. If I had then they would have killed me and my family and incarcerated everyone who had ever known me. I no longer fear for my own life, but I won’t allow others to suffer because of me. You can find the truth and tell it in my stead. The people of this planet deserve to know what it re
ally is.”

  “Thank you,” Owyn replied.

  Rodriguez looked back at him with a grave look in his eyes. “As I said, this world will burn either way. I would just rather the people responsible burn with it.” He activated the console and entered a few security codes before coming to a list of the floors of both his estate and the building below.

  “A moveable safe room,” Owyn said, impressed at the ingenuity.

  “As I said, I’m a scientist. I’m paid to solve problems – even those I’m yet to face. You were the only problem I failed to solve.”

  Once a destination had been selected the whole room began to creep silently downwards.

  CHAPTER 9

  WAR

  Shaw’s bullet shattered the window before nestling in the throat of one of the men holding Miller. Shards of glass sprayed into the faces of the others allowing Miller to wriggle free. With nowhere else to go he toppled helplessly over the edge, involuntarily pursued by two of his captors. They hurtled downwards and smacked against the stone paved floor below.

  “Shit,” Shaw cursed under his breath. He peered over the edge and saw Anderson coming around from the back on the building en route to his position.

  Having collected his drop he was now kitted out in his full combat suit with a stocked belt and pistol in hand. Originally the plan was for just one fully equipped Operative to be sufficient to move Alpha Squad to evac, but given the force they were now up against that wasn’t going to be the case.

  “Hold your position, Sergeant,” Shaw instructed.

  Anderson acknowledged the command, coming to a halt before rounding the final corner. “On your order.”

  Leaving his rifle behind Shaw leapt back onto the ladder and slid down to ground level. He stood up against the door. “Cover me,” he told Anderson.

  Shaw burst through the door and rushed over to the side of the manor. Miller was lying still on the ground a few feet ahead of him. One of the other men was flat out on his back with eyes wide and blood trickling from the corner of his mouth. The second was desperately struggling to lift himself up through the agony of two broken legs. Shaw dealt with him first, planting a boot onto his chest and cracking his skull against the paving.