His lover was silent.
“What are you thinking?” she asked.
“Can you reach out to him somehow?”
“I don’t know the layout of the tunnels well enough,” Mason admitted. “I could project my voice, but only a specific distance.”
“I could find him down there, but I can’t project my voice,” David replied. “I need you to watch Ix. Keep Nine and Fifteen together; don’t let the Sigma troopers take Ix away. I don’t trust them. O’Brien warned me about a program, Seraphim he called it, of troops equipped with drugs to allow them to fight supernaturals.
“I doubt Sigma Force shares the same initial by accident.”
“What do we do?” Stone asked. “We can’t let them kill Charles.”
Stone’s blunt statement of what they were trying to prevent laid a new chill on the conversation as David surveyed the room. The main doors were guarded by Sigma Force troopers. The access to the stage was closed, with Major Warner standing guard next to it. For the first time since he’d met her, he realized she didn’t have her ever-present suited bodyguards.
Like the rest of them, she was about to be unemployed.
She met his gaze levelly, holding his eyes for a moment, then jerking her head toward the door next to her, and he sighed.
Warner wouldn’t stick her neck out too far for Charles…but she clearly recognized that David knew what was going on and was willing to enable him to screw himself over.
Or she was going to give him enough rope to hang himself. He didn’t care which. The only people on the Campus who could actually stop him reaching Charles were in this room.
“Chris,” he turned back to Stone. “I need a distraction…and we can’t risk Ix or Akono at this point.”
“And lady vampire is about as vulnerable as Ix,” the big Empowered agreed genially. “How long do you want before I throw a fit?”
David chuckled, nodding his thanks to his always-eager subordinate.
“Let me get to the stage.”
16
“This is ridiculous! You can’t keep us penned up in here like cattle! Even if you’re firing us all, we have goddamned rights!”
Stone’s bellow was just as oddly pitched as his speaking voice, if more hoarse and pained-sounding than his normal somewhat squeaky tones. The four Sigma Force troops guarding the door seemed taken aback by both the sudden emergence of the massive man and the strange sound of his voice.
“We are processing everyone in seq—”
From harsh experience, David could tell that Stone had pulled his punch. If nothing else, the Sigma Force trooper was still alive when he hit the wall. A solid hit after the Empowered had converted his fist to granite was easily lethal to a regular human.
The other three soldiers, in a gesture too synchronous to have been practiced as such, pressed a spot on their left arm and moved. Their motions were jerkier than a true supernatural…but far faster than a regular human.
Stone wasn’t much faster than a mundane, but he was a lot tougher, and even if he was pulling his punches, he wasn’t fighting fair. Fists slammed into stone, and he smashed the Taser one of the troopers produced into pieces before they could use it.
That was all David could watch of the fight. He was sneaking through the distracted crowd to the door off the stage, where Major Warner was very specifically not looking at it or him.
“I’ll make sure he doesn’t get penalized for this,” she hissed out of the side of her mouth as he stepped up to the unlocked door. “I’ll cover your ass if you get caught, too.
“Try not to get caught.”
With a wordless grunt, he slipped out the door into the hallways, letting his superhuman senses and prescience check the corridors ahead of him as he made his way away from the auditorium.
The entire Campus was deserted. ONSET had manned it with a thousand support personnel and several hundred supernaturals. If General Purcell had more than three hundred Special Forces troopers in the base, David would be stunned, and they’d apparently moved the support personnel out before they’d called the ONSET teams themselves back.
Teams of three were moving through the corridors on a patrol pattern, but his senses let him slip past them until he found an access to the underground tunnels.
It was locked. His Commander’s codes, however, were apparently still in the system as the nine-digit sequence unlocked the door. There might be an alert, if SOCOM was playing smart…but he didn’t have much choice.
With a final glance around, he entered the underground portions of Omicron’s Campus.
Normally, the tunnels were well lit, with maps and similar directions all over the place. At least a third of the rooms and most of the workshops on the Campus were underground, after all. General Purcell’s people had apparently removed their occupants and shut them down, however, as all of the lights were down.
Without his AR gear, David was relying on his memory of the tunnels’ layout, but even with his ability to see in the dark, they looked different without lights. It took him at least five minutes just to find an intersection he recognized.
Fortunately, Charles’s lair was close to the main administration building. Once he’d worked out where he was, it only took him a few minutes to reach the vault-like space.
Vault was a good description. He’d seen the heavy security doors around the space before, but he’d never seen them fully closed and sealed.
His prescience warned him that even touching the keypad would trigger an alert—and more importantly, even his override codes wouldn’t open the doors. Charles was well and truly sealed in, and David couldn’t help but wonder what they’d told the dragon.
Containing a thirty-foot-long magical flying lizard with effectively unknown capabilities was not, after all, a reliable or quiet process. They had him cooperating so far.
David scanned the futures and cursed under his breath. Whoever was responsible for the Beowulf Protocol was too smart for any easy solutions. Everything to do with the security doors was alarmed. He couldn’t hotwire it, override it, or even cut through it without triggering an alarm that would have Sigma Force troops swarming the area within minutes.
There were enough cameras around that so long as someone had a reason to look he was already screwed. The time for subtle was past.
Well past.
He drew his sword.
The door was several inches of solid steel, but Memoria had been forged by a demon and was made as much from enslaved souls as it was from iron. The blade stabbed clean through the door and David started to cut himself an accessway.
The sword was able to cut steel, but it wasn’t a fast process and he’d only finish cutting one side of the square he’d need when dragon claws stabbed out through the door. Between Charles’s claws and Memoria, they had the door hacked to shreds in under a minute.
Which was good, because the alarm had gone off somewhere in the first thirty seconds.
“David,” the dragon brogued at him. “Ai was hoping someone would keep faith. Somehow, Ai’m not surprised it’s ye.”
“You have to get out of here,” David told him quickly. “They’re shutting down ONSET and you and the other Awakened are in danger.”
“Beowulf Protocol,” Charles replied. “Damn. Ai was hoping.”
“You knew about it?”
“Ai ran systems security for ye lot,” the dragon pointed out. “They didn’t hide it nearly as well as they thought. They told me there was a system glitch today. Ai suspected, but…”
“You need to go,” David urged him, but as he looked past the dragon at the comfortable space ONSET had provided Charles, he realized he wasn’t sure there was an exit. “…Can you even?”
“There are tunnels Ai can fit through,” the dragon confirmed. “They’ll have activated the mines by now, though. Ai disabled the charges in my quarters a long time ago, but they can prevent me leaving.
“By the paths they know, at least,” the dragon added.
“They’re coming,” David told him. “I can hear them.”
“Ai’m not afeared of the Seraphim,” Charles replied. “Ai want them to have look me in the eye and tell me why,” he hissed.
“They’re just following orders. The Army troops don’t know what’s going on any more than we do,” the ONSET Commander told him. “Please, Charles, if you can run…run.”
The dragon rose up, unfolding his wings to fill the entire space he’d lived in for the last David-didn’t-know-how-many-years.
“Ai swore an oath,” he told David. “But yer right. What about ye?”
“I made my choice, Charles. I’ll deal with it. Go.”
The dragon’s face was suddenly on his shoulder, a soft leathery pressure as Charles gave him the closest equivalent he could to a hug.
“Someday, my friend, ye will learn to bend,” the dragon murmured. “But today Ai owe ye. And tomorrow. Call, and Ai will answer. Look to yer own safety now, Commander.
“Ai have never told your masters everything.”
With a wide feline grin, the dragon disappeared.
Six of the Sigma Force troopers rounded the corner moments later. David started to raise his hands to surrender—and then his prescience flared, warning him that they were going to shoot him regardless.
He dodged behind the remnants of the vault door as a fusillade of gunfire echoed in the contained space. They were through the wrecked entrance a moment later, all of them moving with the jerky speed he was learning to associate with the Seraphim.
David had already sheathed Memoria as he came to meet them. He wasn’t trying to kill them. Hell, he wasn’t even trying to hurt them. If they were going to let him surrender, he’d have surrendered.
Now he just wanted to leave.
He tried to run past them, but whatever enhancing serum they were taking was enough to block that. Two of the soldiers got in his way with a series of blows that sent him dodging away. More gunfire echoed in the tunnel, but the Seraphim’s enhanced speed wasn’t enough to let them hit David.
There was no demand to surrender. No claim of authority or orders. They gave up on the guns and came at him with knives, the stereotypical blackened KA-BAR knives of US Marines and Special Forces. They made sure to keep at least two of them between him and the tunnel at all times, and the rest charged in.
Their movements might have been jerky and slow compared to him, but they knew how to work as a team, and he quickly realized they were better fighters than he was. He’d been trained by Sages who magically implanted muscle memory.
These men had learned their craft in the deserts of the Middle East and the jungles of Africa in deathly seriousness. He was holding back because he didn’t want to kill them.
They had no such hesitation.
Steel scored across his arm as he failed to dodge fast enough, and he grabbed the arm of the trooper who’d cut him. He broke the other man’s limb with a snap and flung him across the room, leaving him facing only five soldiers.
While he’d been neutralizing one trooper, however, three more had been surrounding him. Knives stabbed into his flesh and iron-hard hands slammed onto his shoulders, combining to hold him in position for a few deadly moments.
One of the two guarding the door raised a weapon—not the guns they’d shot at him earlier—and fired.
David had just enough time to recognize an Omicron-issue injector rifle, usually loaded with an aqueous silver and tranquilizer solution, before the darts hammered into his unarmored chest. He managed to fling the men holding him free and try to grab at the tranquilizers.
Then darkness overcame him.
17
David woke up uncomfortable and headachy, an unfamiliar sensation now that his body tended to regenerate all injuries in a matter of minutes to hours. He was familiar with severe injury still—but this felt like a hangover.
“Hey, take it easy,” an unfamiliar voice told him. “I’m told that tranq hits you lot hard.”
David blinked, slowly rising in an uncomfortable bed and looked around what appeared to be a cheap motel room. A skinny black man in a white shirt and dark gray slacks sat in a chair next to the door, with an injector rifle and an M4-Omicron carbine leaning against the chair he’d slung his suit jacket over.
The sleeves of the shirt were rolled back, revealing an object David had assumed existed but hadn’t actually seen before: a metallic armband with a series of gold-looking capsules. Presumably, the device was the injector for the Seraphim’s drugs.
“Who are you and where am I?” David demanded.
“Motel, Reno,” the Seraphim told him. “You can call me Kay Seventeen, or just Kay.”
“That a serial number or a nickname?” David asked.
“Somewhere in between,” Kay admitted. “I’m from Task Force White, your transition officer.” He grinned, exposing bright white teeth. “In your case, that’s a bit more like parole officer than for most people.”
“Wonderful.”
“You’re in less trouble than you would’ve been if it was up to Purcell,” Kay continued. “Your old bosses still had enough swing to cover your ass for your stunt.” The big man shrugged. “Plus, well, outside the heat of ‘holy shit, someone just broke the dragon out,’ the guys who brought you in had to admit you were trying to surrender.
“Left us with a pile of egg on our face, which Ardent used as a hammer.” He shrugged again. “From what little they told me about you, we owe you enough to let you walk anyway.”
Kay rose and pulled a briefcase from under his chair, dropping it on the dresser.
“My orders were to give you the sword,” he noted. “All the rest of your gear was property of the US government and has vanished into SOCOM’s storage warehouses. Your clothes and furniture are in storage; details are in an envelope in the case.
“So’s the sword and your contract for this motel. It’s booked up for a week.”
Kay smirked.
“Officially, you never worked for the US government, so there’s a limit to how much we can really demand you keep in touch,” he said dryly. “Your severance payment is deposited. I suggest you go buy a phone.”
David sighed.
“What happened with Charles?” he asked.
“The dragon?” Kay Seventeen laughed. “I don’t know what you said to him before he teleported out of that cave, but, speaking as someone who was in the Campus, thank you.”
David waited.
“Apparently, you guys were crazy and had nuke-tipped antiaircraft missiles for dragons,” Kay said. “Purcell ordered them fired before he knew they had nukes, and nobody on the site was arguing with him at that moment.”
“How bad?” David asked, horrified.
“Your scaly friend grabbed them out of the air, disarmed the nukes in mid-flight, and basically hand-fucking-delivered them to the Major General after carving leave me ALONE on the side of the chassis,” the Seraphim said with a chuckle. “I know almost nothing about the lizard, but I suspect I could like him.”
Kay rolled his sleeve down over the vambrace of drugs and put his jacket back on.
“Anyways, that’s my part in your day done,” he concluded, shuffling the two guns into a duffel bag. “I was asked to warn you that it’ll take a few days for the silver to work its way out of your system still. Be careful.”
“How long was I out?” David asked.
“Three days.” Kay shook his head. “Check the news before you do much of anything. It’s a whole new bloody world out there.”
The briefcase the Seraphim left David contained exactly what Kay had said: Memoria in its pocket-dimension scabbard, and several envelopes with details of assorted services that had been prepaid on his behalf.
The room was paid for a week. Storage for his stuff was paid for six months, with a voucher for transporting it anywhere in the United States from the Denver facility they’d stuck it in. Two garment bags were hung up against the motel-room bathroom door, containing most of his immediate cl
othing needs.
There was also a neatly typed memo at the bottom of the briefcase from Warner:
You owe me, White. SOCOM screwed up pretty badly, but they wanted to pin the blame for the mess with Charles on you. We got that covered and got you out, but where the rest of us are under NDAs, you’re basically on parole.
Any infraction, any excuse, they’ll send Task Force White or Sigma Force to bring you in. Keep your head down.
Even I don’t know where they’re going to dump you. Probably wiser if we don’t keep in touch. You are officially persona non grata with the transition team.
Good luck.
Warner.
It could definitely be worse, he concluded. On the other hand, he had no idea where Kate had ended up, and if there was one silver lining to this mess, it was that they no longer needed to keep things quiet.
From the sounds of it, he wasn’t going to get a job with the new agency post-transition, so it was time to consider other career options. His stomach was also reminding him that he’d been unconscious for multiple days while his regeneration fought the most direct attack a supernatural’s body could suffer.
He felt better than he would have expected after seeing how Michael O’Brien had reacted to the same weapon, but he still felt like crap. He needed to eat.
Changing into clean clothes from the garment bag, he mentally listed out what he needed: food, a phone, a computer, and a car.
In roughly that order of priority, too. The motel wasn’t going to be able to help him with any of those, which meant it was time for him to get moving.
Several hours later, with a rental truck parked outside the motel room and three bags of takeout piled up on the table next to him, David dove into the process of setting up the new laptop and phone and linking them to his emails.
He’d barely used his personal email since joining ONSET, but at least a few key people had it. Including, thankfully, Kate Mason. There were several increasingly worried-sounding emails from her over the last few days.
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