A ROUNDERHOUSE Joint
A: You understand what you're being asked to do, yes?
B: No, not really.
A: What seems to be the issue?
B: How is this any different from what I've already been doing?
A: Ah. Yes. You were in Internal Security, correct?
B: Yeah.
A: Think of Delta-1 as an extension of that.
Warrant Officer Westerly cast a look at the new kid. He was sitting at his station, along the same wall as Westerly's own, monitoring his own array of digital dashes, screens, and displays. He looked young — early, maybe late 30s compared to Westerly's own approaching 45th birthday.
"So… where you from, huh? Name tells me China, but you never know these days, right?" he tossed out.
"Hm? Oh, yeah! Well, my dad was. Immigrated from Beijing, settled down in the states, met my mom. White picket fence and everything, you know," Sergeant Parker Liu responded with a smile. "You should've seen my mom when I told her I was joining the army."
Westerly laughed. "Yeah, I can.. I have an idea. Waterworks and everything, my mom was the same. I mean, my dad still thinks I'm in the Marines, but that may be the age talking. What about you, what do your parents think you're doing?"
Liu shrugged, setting his mug down on a coaster. It was white and plastered with the blue U.N. logo.
"They're not really sure. They just like telling people their son is working for the United Nations. Don't know anything else, and I'm in no hurry to correct them." He paused. "Even if I could, I mean."
Westerly nodded and returned to his own screens, adjusting his blue beret. The calendar on the wall marked the day, not that it mattered much to him. Every day was the same at Listening Station Carrero-India. Get out of the barracks, breakfast, and sit down at these screens to watch for intercepted communications. He was in week two of a month rotation here, and already bored out of his mind.
Liu seemed to read his mind. "You know, sitting around and watching spectrometers isn't exactly what I expected to do at a place called the Global Occult Coalition, right?"
Westerly groaned. "Tell me about it, my man. This is my seventh rotation here, makes you appreciate the amenities of the main base. I'd kill for a hot dog right about now." He cast a wistful look through the tiny window of the monitoring station. The blizzard outside continued to rage unabated. He sighed. "At least it's warm in here, I guess."
"What are we even doing here? They haven't really told me much, just to sit down and call you if there's any activity on the screen," Liu said.
"I, uh… I probably shouldn't say."
"Oh, come on. If I'm gonna be working with you here for two months it'd probably be good to actually know what I'm doing, right?" Liu offered with a gentle smile. The kid seemed nice enough. In the three weeks he'd been at the Listening Station, he'd been the perfect partner for Westerly, friendly without being overbearing. A nice reprieve from the average jarheads around base.
"Yeah, that's true, I guess. But…"
"I won't tell anyone if you won't. I'm just curious what's so important that we're listening for in… Finland."
Westerly sighed and dropped his feet from where they rested on the desk to the floor, motioning Liu over. "Yeah, okay, fine. Look at this."
He fiddled with the displays and readouts, opening and closing windows, until the screen showed a simple globe. It was covered in straight lines criss-crossing in every possible direction.
"So the Foundation, they've got this little thing called a Leyspace Communicator, right? Basically lets you send messages along ley lines. Audio, video, encrypted things, the whole shebang. It's like… a virtually lagless cellular network wrapping around the entire world."
Liu's brow furrowed. "Wait, ley lines?"
"Yeah, basically a map of lines drawn between various occult points of interest in the world. Channels of magical energy — and they're using them to transmit stolen information, secret communications. Bad shit."
"Huh. Okay. But what's the connection to us?"
Westerly smirked. "There's the ticket. See, the reason they use ley lines is because they transmit information without retaining it. There's no way to intercept it unless you're literally tapped into the ley line as the information is sent. And then you have to unpack and decrypt and all that, but the hard part is being five hundred meters underground at the exact right moment."
He switched screens. Now it was a simple two-color display, with a miniature representation of Listening Station Carrera at the top, and a long, long line extending straight down from it.
"So, we found a key point where these lines intersected… and drilled. This station sits on top of a diamond-tipped steel drill going half a kilometer straight down."
"But wouldn't you need—"
"A person to catch the message? Yup. And we have one."
Liu's eyes went wide.
"Wait, are you saying there's a person—"
"Nah, nah, relax. See, the drill's got a hard outer shell of titanium and an internal core of Ichium. It's a porous steel alloy laced with…"
His voice trailed off. Dramatically, he flicked his eyes in either direction of the otherwise-empty monitoring room before motioning Liu closer.
"…the live neural fibers of Type Blues."
Liu leaned back. "Jeeesus. That's wild. So that's how we listen in on Foundation comms?"
"Yeah, it's real classified shit." Westerly was relishing in the attention. His job didn't afford him much adoration, so having the kid was nice. "But you seem trustworthy."
B: Wait. I know that name. Delta Wave.
A: Yes. Yes, you would. It was a small task force of off-the-books… operators. Contracted out to do jobs the Foundation can't or wouldn't.
B: Like what?
A: Think stealing memetic warfare research from the Obskurakorps as Nazi Germany collapsed in on itself.
B: An anomalous Operation Paperclip. Lovely. How did that get past the Ethics Committee?
A: The Ethics Committee was formed in 1976 as a result of an unrelated incident. Delta Wave only existed from 1944 to 1962, and Committee purview did not cover closed projects.
B: You're saying it was swept under the rug.
A: Nothing quite so tawdry. We just didn't see the need to inform them of a matter that hadn't been relevant in fifteen years.
B: The way you talk about it now makes it sound awfully relevant.
A: Yeah, well… more and more often, we find ourselves in the need of the kind of services only deniable ops can provide. Delta Wave is dead; it's successor, Delta-1, was reestablished in 2005.
B: We're the Foundation. Our entire existence is deniable. What could possibly be more black ops?
The men in the forest stood silently around the bed of the pickup truck. They were dressed like local hunters: camouflage jackets, balaclavas, night-vision goggles. But they weren’t hunting tonight. One by one, they reached into the bed and retrieved their equipment. A light machine gun, suppressed carbines. They checked their mags, scopes, and everything else.
One of them checked his watch. The security around the forest cabin was tight — armed guards patrolling the perimeter, just beyond where the truck was parked in a thicket of trees. But they had resources, and in approximately fifty seconds, there would be a two-minute gap in the security perimeter. More than enough for a well-trained team to enter.
They counted down the seconds. There was no command to report to or ask for clearance, or even to confirm whether the operation was still a go. They had all received their orders separately, and had never met before today. Chances were they’d never meet again afterwards either. That was fine. They referred to each other by what were obviously codenames — Argo, Sage, Throne, Lake.
Three.
Two.
One.
Zero.
They moved with deadly precision. They swept out of the thicket into a meadow of knee-high grass, jogging across it and sweeping left to right with their guns. Their intel was sound; there was only one guard in the meadow instead of the usual two or three. He never had a chance; a single suppressed shot dropped him into the grass.
The treeline continued on the other side of the meadow, and they entered the relative safety of the undergrowth with minimal time spent exposed. The cabin was deeper in the forest. The uncertain footing didn’t slow them down a lick — winding around trees, under branches, and through brush.
This was the private cabin of a high-ranking PENTAGRAM general — one who had been quite loudly pushing for the organization to reconsider how much latitude it allowed the Foundation to have in American territory. Cranks like these were widely tolerated in all three major anomalous organizations, but this particular crank had gotten too powerful for someone’s liking.
After another minute or so of trailblazing, the cabin came into view; it was a nice, large place, right up against the lake. A few more guards were standing outside; three more shots took care of them. The suppressors were good, but they weren’t magical; by now, the rest of the security force would know something was wrong. All the more reason to hurry.
Argo kicked down the door. The other three rushed in, sweeping the building, room by room. They finally found the general in his underwear, revolver in hand, rushing for the panic room. The door was halfway to closing when Throne interrupted it, holding it apart just long enough for Lake to roughly grab the general by the neck and pull him out.
Babbling incoherently and alternating between righteous fury and desperate pleading, he promised all manner of things in exchange for his life. Argo assured him that if he showed them where his private papers were, they would let him go. He led them to his study, gun to his head, and dialed a code into a safe, revealing a cache of documents stamped with “TOP SECRET” that the team scooped up.
Then, still babbling for his life, Lake unceremoniously reached forward from behind him and snapped his neck.
A: Even in our world, there are rules. The House Accords bind us from from open hostilities with the GOC or PENTAGRAM. MC&D is too big to fail. Anderson provides too much of our technology to be provoked. Delta-1 exists to circumvent these rules.
B: You're holding something back.
A: Very well-spotted. I can already tell you'll be a great asset.
B: I haven't agreed to anything yet. What's the other shoe?
A: There are… situations, in which certain actions need to be taken against Foundation targets to protect the interests of our organization as a whole. I'm sure you understand, coming from INSEC. It's like—
B: Cutting off a finger to save the hand, sure, I've heard the spiel before.
A: There will be times where we cannot always requisition the anomalies you'll need to complete your duty. There will be times where you will need to take care of Foundation projects that are unknowingly threatening the comfortable status quo we now enjoy.
B: You're talking about raids and assassinations. On our allies. On our own people.
A: Yes.
Researcher Oltremari huddled under the desk, shivering.
She couldn’t hear herself think over the blaring of the klaxons. Every few seconds, a stern, calm female voice sounded out over Area-14’s PA system: “Code E13, large-scale security breach. All personnel report to their assigned emergency stations. Code E13, large-scale security breach. All personnel report to their assigned emergency stations.”
The vaguity of the message drove her insane. “Security breach” could mean anything. Maybe a bear tripped the perimeter alarms. Maybe a pathogen in the sublevels had mutated the ability to spread through language. Maybe a security officer’s radio ran out of battery and they failed to check in on time. Maybe reality was collapsing.
So while all and none of these things were happening, Oltremari sat with her knees to her chest in her emergency station: under a lab desk in an otherwise-empty bioresearch laboratory. She couldn’t see the door from where she was — but at least that meant no one could see her either. The gun in her lap felt like it weighed a thousand pounds.
Monthly emergency drills meant she had sprung cleanly into action when the alarms sounded, operating more on instinct than anything: lock the door, bar it, kill the lights, grab the security weapon from its cabinet, and hide.
She cursed herself silently for taking this shift. She was supposed to be taking her lunch, but Hussein had asked her to watch over the experiments so he could catch a seminar. Stupidly, she had said yes. Stupid, stupid.
She’d be fine, probably. They’d had a few of these before — everyone had always gotten out unscathed and none the worse for wear. But she’d always been on the upper levels for those. Not the deeper sublevels, containing endless secure laboratories, like the one she was in now.
Her breath caught in her throat when she heard the doorknob rattle. Her death-grip on the pistol got even tighter and her finger shakily flicked the safety. For the first time in 7 years, she prayed.
The rattling stopped. Her decision not to sigh in relief was vindicated when she instead heard the smashing of glass. The rattling as the lock was forced. Brisk but confident, unworried footsteps.
She slid out of her hiding spot, lifting the gun in both hands and aiming it directly in front of her while staying low to the ground, barely peeking over the lab table.
She was about to yell “stop” until her eyes settled on the figure and she gasped.
It was a man in generic military gear with no face — or rather, too many faces. His facial features were in flux, swapping between half a dozen different faces indiscriminately. He was Hussein, he was Site Director Lire, he was the janitor, he was Oltremari herself, and then someone she had never seen before. The undulating, writhing whirlpool of flesh and facial features.
She barely even managed to squeak out a gasp before he raised his suppressed rifle and popped her twice. She felt a burning pain in her shoulder and started to fall, and then she didn’t feel anything at all.
B: How would that even work? How would any of this work? There's a reason espionage is so difficult and specialized.
A: Well, this is where we return to the purpose of the original Delta Wave program. World War 2 was the golden age of memetic warfare. And not just the anomalous kind; propaganda and information control were key parts of the Allied war effort. Delta Wave's directive was to infiltrate and steal memetic warfare secrets from Nazi-occupied countries. The Foundation's now utter and total dominance in the field is due in no small part to that initial team of perhaps thirty men. Delta-1's directive is to utilize our knowledge to secure Foundation interests by any means possible.
(Pause.)
B: Oh, fuck. Memetic intelligence.
A: Yes. We already utilize it to some degree; Alpha-1 agents are given cognitohazardous identity-masking tattoos. But their sister MTF operates on another level. Elaborately constructed memetic masques to implant entire identities into the viewer and infiltrate facilities. Tools to reach into a mark's mind and pull classified sensitive information from them. Thoughtform weapons capable of annihilating entire concepts from the collective unconsciousness.
B: Jesus Christ.
A: Are you religious? Don’t worry. We can remove that too.
B: Hah. And here was me, wondering why we were never given more than the most superficial memetic tools at INSEC.
A: Welcome to the big leagues.
Westerly crept around the corner, sidearm drawn. He passed the body of another soldier — unceremoniously shot in the back of the head, red blood staining blue fatigues. He quickly knelt, checking for a pulse he knew he wouldn’t find while keeping the gun aimed down the corridor.
He didn’t know what was going on. He’d been in the barracks when the facility alarm went off — a sound foreign enough that he didn’t even register it at first. No one expects an attack at an isolated listening post in the Arctic Circle. Then the gunshots across the camp started sounding out.
The radio ordered him to stay put, that backup was on the way from the main base. But all he could think of was how he’d left Liu in the listening station while he went to go take a goddamn nap. The kid was probably fucking dead now, because of him. Probably. But maybe not.
It wasn’t a very big camp; the mess, barracks, and latrines on one side of the fenced-in clearing, the listening post on the other, resembling nothing so much as a small air-traffic control tower. So he dashed across, entering into the bottom floor.
The power was cut, and the emergency lighting bathed the passage in a dull crimson glow. One by one, Westerly cleared the rooms on the bottom floor, finding the same grim scene in all of them: analysts in their chairs, systematically shot in the head. Bits of brain and congealed blood decorated the equipment and monitors. Lewis, Angler, Caahn. Friends.
He set his jaw. There would be time to mourn later.
The top of the listening tower was accessible through an elevator, or a rickety staircase that spiralled straight up. Aiming his gun directly upward, he ascended the stairs, careful to make his boots land as lightly as possible until his eyes cleared the top floor.
Liu was there, leaning against the wall. The front of his fatigues were drenched with blood. He was gasping for breath, and a finger grasped Westerly’s collar when he was near.
“He took… the elevator…”
The older man swore, and grabbed the kid’s arms and legs, lifting him into a fireman’s carry.
“It’s okay. It’s good. You’re gonna be fine. You’re gonna be just fine. Here, hold this.” He practically forced his handgun into the kid’s hand. Then he set off, steadily circling down the staircase. They stepped past the bodies of the others on the ground floor.
“Who…?”
“I don’t know, kid. But we need to evac.”
Liu only coughed in response. Westerly’s shoulder was hot with blood, and he kicked the door open. The jeep was still parked at the exit to the fence, thank God. He laid the kid in the backseat and slid into the driver’s, starting it up and kicking it into gear. They only got a few feet out of the gate before the building exploded.
The entire jeep lurched forward with the force of the explosion. One second the listening post was there — then there was an impossibly hot, deafening flash, and it was a flaming pile of rubble. A thick plume of black smoke trailed into the air.
Westerly kept driving, only seeing the decimation in the rearview mirror. That was also when he felt the cold metal against the back of his head, and saw the figure in the back suddenly in a sitting position, all injury gone. They weren’t the kid anymore; Liu’s face sloughed off it like a wet clay, revealing a complete abyss of anything underneath. Like staring into a bottomless pit.
B: You keep calling this an MTF but this can't be. There'd have to be after-action reports, debriefings.
A: You're right. In every official way, it is completely divorced from the Foundation. We supply you through shells and fronts. There is no leadership structure; agents operate independently with handlers, usually never meeting fellow agents. There are no supply lines, no backup, and very little strategic support. In return, you are freed from the weight of regulation and oversight. Too important for that. We don't care how you get it done, as long as it gets done.
B: My kinda job, alright. But how does this remain a secret? I mean, even with antimemetics, even with coghaz, rumours spread through our world.
A: That's true, but as long as you follow your orders and hit the occasional Foundation facility, no one will suspect a false flag. Quite the opposite: they'll speculate and construct their own ideas for who you are. And those ideas will spread like the very memetics you use.
B: Outsourcing misinformation. Clever.
A: It is. If you agree, you're agreeing that your identity will end up being memetically suppressed for at least a few years until the impressions wear off.
B: That's fine. I've never had anything except the job here, anyway.
A: Excellent.
B: One question: no nickname?
A: MTF nicknames are for two reasons: group camaraderie and identification. You will likely never meet a fellow agent, so camaraderie is useless. And no one will ever know or remember you exist, so identification is pointless.
B: Damn.
(The sound of a door opening.)
A: But if it makes you feel better, our internal reporting name for it is the Insurgency.
B: Decentralized, behind enemy lines, and horrifically undersupplied. Fun.
A: Your handler will be meeting with you tomorrow; this will be the last time we speak. Have a nice day, Everett.
