A ROUNDERHOUSE Joint
« PREVIOUS: HUMINT
0641
O5-2 reached out and wrapped his fingers around the guardrail next to his bed. He lay there for a minute, left arm outstretched, right clutched to his chest, eyes squeezed shut. He felt the barely-there weight of the sheets wrapped around his bare skin, and he heard the almost imperceptible sound of snow falling outside. He felt Ari's presence outside the door. He wiggled his fingers on each hand, and then acknowledged the absence of feeling in his legs. He took a moment to remember where he was, who he was, and why he was there.
Then he opened his eyes and faced the day.
0712
By the time he wheeled himself out of the bedroom door Ari was standing by the counter, tapping away at her tablet with her prosthetic. He'd noticed she'd taken to wearing a simple black glove over the hand. He hadn't asked why. She looked up and nodded in greeting, setting the tablet down.
"Schedule's been transmitted. Light day today. Nothing out of the ordinary."
He snorted, wheeling himself over. A light schedule for a Foundation Overseer — and the RAISA Director, to boot — was still an agenda that would make the President do a spit take. She pulled the tablet off and handed it to him, letting him take a look while she drifted off to her own bedroom to gather her things. The suite was a decently-sized living space with a bedroom on either end; even out here at the end of the world, having a bodyguard in close proximity was imperative for an Overseer.
Every personnel member aboard the Site was provided with a tablet locked into the facility's intranet and loaded with a suite of in-house software, including 7NET: a fork of the Foundation's standard personnel management system. Schedules, meetings, and tasks, all assembled and delivered every morning like clockwork. He looked at his own for the day; the daily senior staff meeting was in a few minutes, but at least that was just downstairs. The rest of his day would be spent traipsing around the other seven platforms. A meeting with the AIAD head about the Gen7 AIC rollout, a minor Council vote after that, another meeting with the engineers about power system replacement… then something jumped out to him.
"What's this at 1:00?" he called out.
Ari responded from across the room. "Chen wanted to get your input on something. 'Urgent, but not important,' he said."
"Move that up to after the Council vote." He tapped at the appropriate changes and watched the schedule shift dynamically. Excellent. He knew the little quirks of the program; he'd helped write it as a young code monkey.
"You're the boss, boss." Ari stepped back into view: an olive-green sweater over her tank top, a shoulder holster over that complete with her Uzi, and a thick black parka over the entire affair. She reached behind her head, tying her black hair into a ponytail. Wordlessly, she stalked over to the door and opened it as O5-2 followed. She sealed it behind them with her personal keycard, listening for the deadbolts locking into place. Then she turned to him and nodded.
0745
The biweekly senior staff meeting at Site-7 was a dreaded but integral part of running the sprawling facility. The heads of the various Offices and Projects hated dragging themselves awake at seven in the morning every Monday and Thursday, trudging through always-dark and usually-stormy weather to REDEYE, and sitting in a meeting to listen to their colleagues talk about stuff that didn't matter to them just to wait their turn to talk about stuff that didn't matter to any of the others. They hated it, they resented it, they complained about it before, during, and after the event. They hated it almost half as much as Ari hated it.
She leaned against the wall of the conference room on the ground floor of REDEYE. The leather seats surrounding the steel table were filled with some of the biggest nerds on the planet. Three weeks into her job, she had developed the ability to only half-listen to what they were talking about, letting the pertinent information in and the nonsense filter out. And there was a lot of nonsense. Right now, Rita was going on about an ongoing rework to the weather cladding on the PANOPTICON radome and a minor delay while O5-2 sat at the head of the table. After a few minutes of letting the engineer talk herself out, he waved her to her seat. All the other Office heads were looking at anything except each other, hoping no one would notice they were still half-asleep. Captain Gauthier, to his credit, was wide-awake — his annoyance had nothing to do with the time of day.
"Anyone else?"
"We couldn't have had this over a conference call?" Gauthier asked. Ari wasn't sure why he was complaining; the Head of Security literally lived on the same platform the meeting was on.
"Face to face contact is important. Some of you go the entire day without talking to another human." O5-2 cast a look at Evie, who was too engrossed in her tablet to register the dig.
"Evelyn?"
She looked up, red eyebrows furrowed. "We're getting some minor downtime from REPLICA-3," she said. "I'm trying to get them on the horn but it's two in the morning in Osaka and the guys at Three are about as punctual as high school seniors at the best of times. That's not true, you can force high schoolers to show up. Either way, I wouldn't worry about it."
Ari liked Evie. The redheaded Technical Subdirector had developed a reputation for being acerbic to people she didn't feel were up to par, but she and Ari respected each other's territory. The four guns she carried on her person certainly didn't hurt in the respect department.
O5-2 nodded. "Keep me posted. Everyone else, to your stations."
The relief in the room as the eight-odd individuals hastily got to their feet, gathered their folios and tablets, and shuffled out of the room without meeting each others' eyes was almost palpable. Finally, it was just Ari and O5-2. He was sitting in his wheelchair, unmoving, resting his head on one hand. She laid a metal hand on his shoulder. He looked up at her raised eyebrow.
"You okay?"
"Yeah." He nodded. "Let's roll."
1114
The pair rolled up to the entrance of the PANOPTICON station. It was uncharacteristically sunny for the season, another thing to chalk up to the faltering environment. There were a handful of analysts and technicians taking advantage of the sun and lack of snow, seated on benches and blocks outside with their terminals or tablets set in front of them. The crowd respectfully parted as the Overseer and his Secretary approached, some muttering out a few greetings.
"Five limbs between the two of us. We should hit Disneyworld if we're ever in Florida, they'd let us skip all the lines," he joked, working the wheels of his seat. Ari walked next to him. She didn't mind wheeling him, but he tended to trust in his own arms. Not that I can blame him, she thought dryly.
"You ever go as a kid?" she said, flashing her badge at the guard. Security guards on Site-7 wore a unique variant of the Foundation's winter camo pattern, marked with a black and yellow three-stripe pattern across the shoulderpads. It made for a distinct effect as they moved, rifles typically slung across their backs. This one — Jefferson, she believed — waved them in.
They wandered through the lobby, mostly-empty. It was the middle of the work day, and the critical mass of the analysts would be on the various levels of the building, ensuring PANOPTICON's uptime and analyzing the flow of data. A lot of the work was done by .AICs these days, but there was still a significant human touch involved. Speaking of .AICs, as they made their way across the lobby she registered the half-dozen hidden cameras in the ceiling analyzing their every move and facial expression, confirming their identity.
"As your HeadSec, I never understood why we keep a guard posted out here when our passive security measures would detect anyone who's not who they say they are."
O5-2 shrugged. "Couple reasons. Intimidation factor, to discourage intruders before they try. Because we've got guards and we should have them doing something."
She looked at his face as they walked across the spartan lobby. Tightened mouth, blue eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses. She shook her head. "That's not the real reason, though."
His mouth upturned at the corners. "Good eye. No, the real reason is quite simple: because humans fail in ways technology can cover for, and technology fails in ways humans can cover for. We use both, to cover all our bases. It's perfectly possible but ultimately inefficient to replace human pattern recognition."
Ari nodded slowly, following her boss into the elevator. Scanning her card again, she punched the button for floor 4, conveniently marked "SURVEILLANCE OFFICE." The elevator silently began to rise. A thought sprang to her mind.
"What was Evie talking about this morning? A replica?" she asked, fiddling with her windbreaker.
"Hm? Oh, right. We keep images — backups, basically — of the RAISA intelligence database and SCiPnet codebase at various strategic points around the world, at facilities called REPLICAs. If this place ever falls, Foundation facilities can fall back to using their regional REPLICA."
"And REPLICA-3 is in Japan and has gone silent. That sounds like an issue."
"I'm a little concerned, but more likely than not it's something trivial. Automatic shutdown protocol based off a flawed intrusion read or something. Still, tell Evie I want a briefing from her ASAP."
Ari nodded, pulling the tablet out, selecting Evelyn McKay from the contacts list, and typing out a quick message. Just as she hit 'send', the elevator doors opened.
The Surveillance Office was the picture of controlled chaos. It reminded Ari of those photos of the NASA control room whenever they landed a rover. Two of the walls were covered in a bank of dozens of monitors, each with a different stream of data or a graph or a satellite view of something. The sheer volume of information flowing through the four-dozen monitors was staggering, but the terraced desks were occupied by a small army of analysts, each tracking something else on their own workspaces. A constant, low buzz of conversation as they spoke into their headsets filtered over the endless tapping of fingers on keyboard keys.
They moved forward, into the bay. A lean middle-aged Asian man came out to greet them. Like most of the analysts, he wore simple slacks and a button-down covered with a Site-7 olive windbreaker. Thick black glasses rested on a crooked nose, but it was hard to notice them over his grinning face.
"Director! Glad to see you," Surveillance Chief Harry Chen jogged up to them and stuck his hand downward.
O5-2 shook it. "Always happy to visit the old stomping grounds."
Chen exchanged a curt but friendly nod with Ari. "Secretary Katsaros. I don't believe you've ever visited the Surveillance Office before?"
She shook her head. "Nice place, though. Very… busy."
He smiled again. Ari had a lot of experience with smilers. She wasn't one herself, but a lifetime of seeing other people do it gave her a pretty good barometer of when someone was faking it. Chen wasn't. Every time he grinned he melted a few years and wrinkles off his face. "Yeah, it's kind of a disaster zone, haha. But still!" Handing a tablet to the Overseer, he straightened his back, looking out over the bay of analysts. "All of the information that the PANOPTICON system gets is filtered down here, sorted by usability. We connect active investigations or concerns the Foundation has with new data — you wouldn't believe how many anomalies we've caught preemptively with our statistical models."
She raised an eyebrow. O5-2 cut her off before she could respond, still looking at the tablet. "Satellite photos of flow rate over the Ganges. Collapse in the South American mosquito fertility rate. The stock price of Lockheed Martin…" He trailed off. "I need a workstation."
"Take my office." Chen jogged back to his corner office, shifting his desk chair aside to allow the Overseer room to roll in behind it and log in to the computer. He looked up. "The two of you, give me a few?" Ari nodded and let Chen leave the office, shutting the door behind her. She wandered over to the railing by the stairway, looking out over the sea of workstations and analysts. She stared at them for a moment until she heard a voice behind her.
"Coffee?" offered Chen, holding paper cups. She nodded appreciatively, taking the steaming beverage. "There's creamer and sugar over here, if you—"
"Yeah, thanks." She walked over to the coffee maker, popping open plastic cup after plastic cup of creamer and dumping them in the coffee until it went from black to a pale brown. Chen watched her.
"Wow. Lot of creamer."
Ari poured more sugar in. "When you spend half your life drinking pitch-black MRE coffee, you learn to appreciate the Foundation's little luxuries." She gave a lopsided half-smile. "Like good coffee."
Chen nodded. "Military. Makes sense. Most Task Force folks are vets, right?"
She nodded, sipping from the cup. "Yep. Though I didn't start as a Task Force jockey."
"No?"
"Site Security picked me out of the Rangers, then I got transferred to a few Task Forces, then the Agents Corps. Had a little accident…" She flexed the fingers of the prosthetic arm, as if to underline the message. "And now I'm here."
Chen whistled. "Made a whole loop, huh?"
"Something like that." Another sip.
"Well, shit," he laughed. "My resume looks a lot less impressive now."
"What's that?"
"MIT for data science, got plucked out of my master's to work for the NSA. I guess someone in the Foundation took notice."
It was Ari's turn to whistle. "Impressive. Good head for numbers."
"Something like that." They exchanged wry looks. "Seriously though, nothing compared to the Director. You know he used to work here?"
"I mean, yeah, I figured he worked for RAISA."
"No, I mean he literally worked here, heading the Surveillance Office. The office he's sitting in used to be his own."
She looked over to the glass wall of the office. Through the semi-frosted glass, she could see O5-2 was leaned back in his wheelchair, chin resting on one hand while the other tapped away. His eyes were focused entirely on the workstation in front of him, but there was what could be mistaken for a smile playing on his lips.
"Huh. Didn't know that."
"One of those once-in-a-generation minds. Did you know Maria Jones?"
"Only by reputation. She died a few years before I joined up."
"Yeah, well, she was… Some people, like me, are good with data. But every so often you find someone that's— well, they live and breathe it. They draw connections you could never imagine from data you can't even understand. Maria Jones was one of those people. She had a near-eidetic memory of the Foundation database and every fact or figure or datapoint she'd come across. And the way she put them together— It's like magic."
She looked at him sharply. "Careful with that word around here."
He returned the glance sheepishly. "Yeah, yeah. Actually—" He lowered his voice. "There's an debate on whether it was an anomalous gift, or just, you know, regular brilliance. I mean, she accurately predicted the increasing frequency of anomalies in the ten-year period after 2000 in 1982. She once triangulated the location of a GOC airfleet by cross-referencing population drops in Prague with temperature increases in the Strait of Gibraltar. On nine different occasions she predicted a breach at -19 hours before it happened."
"Only nine?" she wisecracked.
"After the ninth, they started locking down the facility whenever she told them to."
"Goddamn. Sounds like a hell of a lady."
"She never stopped, either. Most old people dull in their old age. She died at 99, still razor-sharp."
"Wait, she worked here until she was 99?"
"No, she retired and spent the last years of her life in a cabin in Montana."
She blinked. "Huh. Good for her."
"Yeah. I mean, this place was always her real home. She built RAISA, and she built Site-7."
"What's this got to do with the Overseer, though?"
Chen grinned. "Only person I've ever seen analyze like Maria Jones did."
As if on cue, the office door opened and O5-2 wheeled himself out, tablet in his lap. He handed it to Chen. "Few things. Serpent's Hand planning to hit Site-78. We're going to want an uptick in funding directed to -69 — I'm thinking twofold. And 78% chance of the escaped 3199 instances is in the Ulaanbatari sewers."
Ari blinked, but Chen just smiled. "Thanks, boss."
O5-2 waved him off. "It's what I do. Ari?"
Shaking off the confusion, she grabbed the handles of his wheelchair and started pushing him back to the elevator. "How'd you do that?"
"How do you hit a target the size of a quarter from twenty feet away?"
"What?"
"We all have our talents." He smirked up at her.
"You enjoy not telling people, don't you?"
"Oh, you have no idea."
She was about to retort when the elevator doors slid open to reveal Evelyn McKay, out of breath, her red hair matted to her forehead and an unfamiliar look on her face. After a second, Ari realized it was worry. O5-2 spoke up first.
"Evie?"
"Something's wrong with the REPLICA."
1157
They spoke on the way to the helipad. Or, more accurately, they shouted to each other. Evie jogged and Ari ran, pushing the Overseer ahead of her. While they exchanged a SITREP, Ari whipped her radio off her jacket and whisper-shouted into it: "Rita? Hey, it's me. Listen, I need you to grab me something."
He spoke firmly and loudly, taking command of the situation like a duck takes to water. "When'd we lose contact?"
"Early this morning, about five hours ago, but half an hour ago we started getting all sorts of critical failure alarms." Evie tapped away madly on her tablet, barely even looking up. "Thaumic breach, temperatures rising, temperatures dropping, intrusion alarms, power failure, everything. Half of them are contradictory."
"Sounds like something's wrong with the alarm system."
"But then the team would get into the command center and send the greenlight." Finally, she made eye contact with O5-2. "Something's wrong, sir."
"No kidding."
A few minutes of running later, they arrived at the helipad. The green platform jutted out over the rolling sea and was currently dominated by a Condor, one of the Foundation's signature heavy-lift quadcopters. Almost sixty feet long, pitch black, and resembling the illegitimate child of a Chinook and an Osprey, two of them were stationed at Site-7 at any given time: one for general transport around the platforms, and one reserved for the Overseer. This was the latter, and the Alpha-1 guards milling about it only served to emphasize the point.
Ari grimaced. Technically she outranked them, but she was never interested in pulling rank. Alpha-1 operatives were experts in intimidation: red body armor over black fatigues and those impassive, reflective helmets. The effect was chilling, even to someone as practiced as her. She shook off the momentary lapse in reason and took control.
She pointed at three of them in turn. "You, you, and you help the Overseer aboard." They jugged over to where his wheelchair sat and began to drop the ramp from the open side of the aircraft. In the meantime, she strode over to the cockpit door and rapped against it harshly with her metal hand. The pilot inside turned to her, and she flashed him a thumbs up. He returned it, and began punching buttons on the dash. The four huge rotors began to cycle, gaining speed.
"Ari!"
She turned. Rita was rushing up the walkway toward her, hauling a canvas bag nearly as large as herself in her arms. Another Alpha-1 operative stepped out in front of her, handgun drawn defensively, but Ari waved him down. Rita came to a skidding stop on the snow and ice covering the metal walkway, sliding forward until she roughly collided with Ari. The only reason she didn't fall was the metal hand that shot out and grabbed her by the shoulder, the bag pressed between them, full of sharp edges and hard objects.
"Whoops, haha. Thanks for that!" Rita's chattering didn't skip a beat as she straightened herself. "Uh, you know what's going on? They had me scramble GRANITE-2 with like, no warning. If something's wrong or the Director needs help, I can—"
"It's fine, Rita. Thanks," Ari shouted over the growing roar of the rotors as she grabbed the heavy bag, quickly unzipping it and peeking inside. Rita blanched when she saw the collection of firearms and sealed boxes of ammunition. Whatever she tried to stammer out was cut off by Ari turning, slinging the bag over her shoulder, and clambering into the side of the chopper. The inside was slightly modified to better fit O5-2's wheelchair, where he was currently sitting, impatiently running his hand through his long blond hair. Somehow Ari was certain that if he could tap his foot, he would be doing so.
He beckoned, and she made her way to where he was seated near the entrance to the cockpit. He shouted something into her ear, and Ari nodded. She turned around, and hopped back out onto the helipad, scanning around until her eyes set on a familiar head of red hair. She yelled, straining over the Condor's rotors. "Evie! You're with us!"
If the woman could get any paler, she did. "What?"
"He wants you! Technical advisor."
"But I can't— I don't have any—"
"We don't have time for this! Just get in!"
Cowering and covering her head with both hands as if running from invisible rain, Evie duck-ran to the side of the chopper, up the ramp, and in. Ari looked around. The only people left on the helipad were Rita and a few operatives who were doing last-minute checks on the quadcopter. She made her way to the dimunitive engineer and leaned in.
"You and Pierre are in charge until we get back!"
Rita nodded, uncertainty still written on her face. Unfortunately, Ari didn't have time for uncertainty. She dashed back to the quadcopter again, whistling sharply and hopping in. Evie was strapped into one of the side seats, looking nauseous. Ari motioned for one of the masked soldiers to hand her a headset, which she fitted on. The radio crackled to life.
"On your go, Secretary Katsaros," came the static drawl.
She waited as the last two agents rolled in, working together to close the sliding door shut behind them ever-so-slowly. After a second or two she stepped forward, wrapped her metal hand around the bar, and slammed it shut. The operatives decided not to contest her decision. The small viewport in the door looked out over the helipad, where Rita and the rest of the flight crew was retreating to a safe distance. She cast another look at the Overseer, who nodded. She slipped into a seat across from Evie, strapping herself in.
"Alright. Yeah, we're gone."
1301
Ari was the first one out of the plane. The plane's stairs had barely unfolded when she stepped out, scanning the small airstrip. It was little more than a paved runway and a handful of small hangars clustered to the side, surrounded by a barbed wire fence beyond which lay a dirt road and green hills extending for miles in every direction. It was just about noon in Hokkaido, and the sun beat down from overhead.
They took the Condor in the opposite direction, to an Air Force base on the Alaskan mainland. She clambered out of the Condor's side door and was struck with a wave of nostalgia looking at the squat, low buildings and uniformed men marching about. She'd been Army Rangers, not Air Force, but at a certain point all military bases were the same. She didn't know what kind of arrangement the Foundation had with the Dee-oh-Dee, but the airmen marching around seemed trained to ignore their small party as they were escorted by a lieutenant colonel to an isolated hanger containing an unmarked white jet. It had an odd shape — angular, with a sharp nose and no tail.
"We… acquired some of the Tu-144s after the USSR collapsed," O5-2 explained as they wheeled into the cavernous hangar. It was designed for military transport craft, not the one tiny plane it held. "Russian competitors to the Concorde, capable of cruising at Mach 2. Got to retrofitting them for our own purposes. This is the result — no actual reporting name, obviously, but we like to call them the Chatters. Carries up to 50 passengers at nearly 1,500mph."
And in leather seats, she soon found. That was the Foundation M.O: all the efficiency of the military, with all the creature comforts of the private sector.
All told, they'd spent some two hours in the air. Ari was used to it; Evie wasn't. The woman was nauseous twenty minutes in, and struggled to deliver the briefing. "REPLICA-3 is our backup installation for the East Asia region. If— you know, if Site-7 ever went down and the REPLICA network came online, it'd serve everything from Japan to Kazakhstan. Including, crucially, China. It's uh, a small facility, not much more than one building and the… ten or so on-site personnel needed to maintain it," she'd explained, sitting in the padded leather sets of the jet with a barf bag in arm's reach.
"What happened?" O5-2 was flipping through the manila folder he'd been handed.
"At 1353 hours local time, I started getting interrupted service reports — every day, we do a pull at a random time and compare it against the mainlane SCiPnet database to compare for any differences. See if anything had been changed or altered, ensures everything's, uh, up-to-date."
"And something was changed?" Ari asked this time, twirling an unlit cigarette between her fingers. She was told she wasn't allowed to smoke on the plane, but her hands didn't feel comfortable without something to do.
"Um, no. No, that was the issue. Couldn't get a pull: the server was offline. Happens occassionally for scheduled downtime, but I couldn't see anything scheduled. Tried to get in contact with the team here. No dice. Figured it was a power interruption. These small facilities don't have dedicated power generators so it's known to happen."
"What convinced you it wasn't?" O5-2 raised a steely stare at Evie.
She met his gaze. "0600 local time is when the morning shift starts. I got a satellite phone call from the morning crew when they arrived at the facility and found all the doors sealed. Lockdown protocol."
This was Ari's department. "Are there any other exits?"
Evie shook her head. "No. The lockdown completely seals all windows and doors with magnetic metal shutters. You can lift it from the Supervisor's office with the appropriate security codes, but you can't even do that without the power."
"Then everyone's still sealed inside. Including anyone that shouldn't be there. Sounds like they didn't know about the lockdown protocol when they went in."
"Or that they weren't expecting to get caught." She turned to look at O5-2, who shrugged. "Could just be that this guy wasn't planning to leave anyone alive to raise the alarm. No chance this is a remote invasion, Evelyn?"
"No chance, sir. The power systems are kept separated from the main network specifically to avoid this kind of scenario."
"Hm." He leaned back in his seat. "I've already alerted the Japanese detachment of Epsilon-11. They're en-route from Sapporo to secure the facility."
Ari perked up. "I did a year rotation with Nine-Tailed Foxes. They mostly handle catastrophic containment breaches."
"Frankly, we don't know what this is right now, and I don't want to take chances. What's your experience with these guys?"
She shrugged. "They're good at what they do, for sure. One of the most high-risk Task Forces out there, right behind Mole Rats. Get the job done, but they have a tendency to shoot first and ask questions later. High collateral damage."
He nodded slowly as she spoke, lost in thought. "Cowboys, you're saying."
"Yeah, that's a fair way of describing them."
"Then I don't want them going in solo and wrecking the place. I hate to ask this, Ari, but—"
She cut him off. "You don't have to. I brought my stuff for a reason." She pulled away the front of her bomber jacket, revealing the Uzi in her shoulder holster. "I'll take point, make sure they don't blow the place up." The relief on his face was visible.
And now here they were.
The two Alpha-1 guards were helping O5-2 off the plane, and she patiently waited until he rolled up next to her, Evie walking alongside him. "What's in the bag, anyway?" he asked, nodding at the canvas duffel slung across Ari's back.
"Hardware," she answered tersely. He got the message. The jet taxied to end of the runway as they made their way down the strip to one of the hangars. A few people were clustered around a few tables inside — all Japanese, wearing slacks, button-downs, and worried faces. Evie stepped forward, shaking hands with one of them. They exchanged a few words in crisp Japanese, to Ari's surprise — she hadn't thought Evie spoke any languages besides the programming kind. Then both of them turned to O5-2.
"This is Supervisor Yamada, sir. He's the night supervisor of REPLICA-3, but he was off-duty last night. We're setting up a temporary command center for you here." Behind her, the other men — RAISA techs, she now realized — were arranging and plugging in monitors and cables on the tables.
Yamada spoke up, in English tinged with the barest hint of an accent. "It's nice to finally meet you, sir."
"Sure. If only it were under better circumstances." O5-2 wheeled himself over to one of the tables. His brow furrowed. "We'll be able to communicate with the away team without any delay from here? Why aren't we setting up outside the REPLICA?"
"Because I told them not to," Ari said, setting down her bag on the bit of the table not filled with loose cables and wires. "Security risk."
"You're heading in there, the least I could do is—"
"Needlessly risk your ass? That's not what you pay me for, sir." She shook her head. "You know I'm right."
Apparently he did, because he stopped protesting — or at least was distracted by a notification on his slate. "Epsilon-11's getting antsy sitting on their hands. You ought to head out soon. The REPLICA is half an hour out from here."
She looked down at herself. She'd stripped off the bomber jacket and sweater hours ago in the climate-controlled cabin of the plane. Now she was wearing a tank-top and fatigue pants, both damp with sweat. "I need a room to change."
Evie and O5-2 stared at her as she exited the back room of the hangar. She'd donned the body armor she'd packed in her go-bag. It was a modified version of the same body armor the Alpha-1 operators wore — a jumpsuit with pockets for hard ceramic plates, pitch-black with yellow accents on the sleeves instead of red. Protective without being bulky, flexible without being weak. A dark, faceless helmet completed the ensemble, and a Tavor rifle hung from her hip on a strapped sling that she'd "borrowed" from Pierre.
"What?"
"You look fucking terrifying," Evie said.
"I can take a shotgun shell to the chest and live. I'm okay with looking terrifying."
Her own breathing was deafening inside the helmet.
The heads-up display that bordered her vision was a constant barrage of information — heat signatures, radio communications, her own vitals — but it was fine. She knew how to deal with it. She calmed her breathing. It had been a long time since she'd done this, but it was like riding a bike. As soon as she picked up the rifle and pointed it at the door, it all came back to her.
"Ready, ma'am?" The voice was piped in from her helmet, and the top-right symbol changed to reflect who was speaking: Epsilon-11-ALPHA, Fireteam GIBRALTAR. She didn't know these guys personally, but they'd exchanged greetings in the parking lot before suiting up. They seemed experienced enough; no greenhorns, thank Christ.
The office building was gray and nondescript, three stories of mostly-concrete with tinted black windows. Metal shutters pressed against the opposite side. The main door was their way in — save for the thick metal bolts running across them.
She was taking point, the four fireteam members in a box behind her. She lifted her Tavor and spoke. "Ready. Evie?"
Her voice trickled in, edged with static. "Rolling back the lockdown order on the main entrance, E-023."
For a second, nothing happened. Then the bolts retracted, disappearing back into holes in the concrete. A metal shutter on the other side of the glass door pulled upward like a garage door. Delta broke off and stepped next to the door.
"Going in."
Delta yanked open the door and the other four funneled in, boots hitting the linoleum lightly, rifles sweeping up and down. It was dark — the lights were out, and the shutters blocked any natural light from creeping in. They'd expected that; Evie had warned the power would be cut. Their flashlights were bright circles in the dim. They spread out across the lobby. Ari peeked behind the reception desk and the other four checked out the other nooks and crannies.
"Clear."
They reformed into a box, heading down the main hallway extending from the lobby. There was no one in sight. Doors lined the hallway and they slipped into each, methodically scanning and clearing every room, followed by an echo of staticky "clear" on her earpiece. Most of the rooms on the first floor were storage rooms — spare computers, keyboards, server racks, cable, all arranged in haphazard messes. They made the crisp white light from the the flashlight attachments spread and dance across the dark, dusty rooms.
It took about ten minutes to fully clear the first floor. "All clear," she breathed, letting her hackles relax for a second. "Elevator's cut, right?"
Evie's voice chimed in. "Affirmative. They require a keycard to operate, so they're useless without power. You'll have to use the stairs. End of the hallway, last door on the left before the elevators." Ari turned and moved, the rest of the squad skulking behind her. The door was a thick slab of metal, with a magnetic bolt keeping it shut. Turning the handle did nothing; shoving it did even less. One of the team members stepped close to it and kicked it, full-tilt. It didn't move an inch, and the shrill metallic echo filled her ears for a few seconds.
When it cleared, Alpha was speaking into his mic. "We have anything in the truck as a battering r—"
She raised three fingers and stepped forward, cutting him off then tightening her metal fingers around the handle. She gritted her teeth. The metal crumpled like soft butter, and she wedged her fingers into the new gap between the doorframe and door. She pushed, strained, grunting — and then, the door caved in on itself, the lock crushing under the immense pressure. She shoved the deformed door forward, and it swung loosely on its hinges. She couldn't see the team's faces under their helmets, but she had a good idea of the faces they were making.
"Disregard, Command. We got it. "
They raised their rifles and swept up the stairs quickly and quietly. The second floor landing had no stairs leading up to the third, but the door was ajar. Evie's voice crackled through her earpiece again, as if she read her mind. "Stairs to the third floor are on the other end of the second, past a security barrier." Ari pushed the door open, peering in first with her rifle then stepping inside.
The first thing she noticed was that it was cold. She didn't actually feel much colder — the suit was insulated — but the heads-up display indicated the temperature had slipped noticeably below room temperature. She heard Delta report as much. "Weird. The emergency power is set to keep the servers on safe mode and cool down the third floor for them. Means emergency power is live, at least, but I have no idea why it would be cooling down the second floor. Proceed with caution."
So they did, flashlights sweeping across the hallway before penetrating through glass door-windows into the offices. These were more standard technician offices — desks with knicknacks, laptops, desktop computers, the wires yanked out of each but otherwise undisturbed. The first two offices were like that.
The third wasn't.
"Body." The declaration was sharp and immediate. The rest of the team flowed into the room after her, guns pointed at the corpse crumped up against the wall. A smear of blood decorated the wall behind it. Ari knelt to inspect the body, freshly illuminated by the flashlights. It was a younger man, Japanese, his features marred by the bloody mess of a gunshot wound. A lanyard hung around his neck, but the badge was missing.
She heard Evie's sigh through the microphone, then indistinct Japanese in the background. "Yamada says he thinks they're one of ours, a technician. Keep moving."
She rose from her position, and spoke to the rest of the team. "Safeties off." The click-click that sounded behind her was the affirmative.
The bodies came fast after that. They were all killed in their offices, save for one found sprawled on the bathroom tile. All executed with a bullet to the head, turning their faces and surroundings into a gory mess. She knelt by each one, inspecting the bodies. The cold made it hard to tell when any of them had died, but the blood had long congealed into a rust-red. In all cases, the lanyard was either missing its badge or simply gone altogether.
"We're gonna need a team in here to identify the bodies, Command. I count eight so far."
"Of course." This time it was O5-2's voice — but with an unfamiliar, steely edge to it.
They came to the security barrier. It wasn't much: essentially a walk-in closet-sized metal detector and antistatic chamber with a thick sealed door blocking entrance. A waist-level display outside indicated it was in safe mode and operating off emergency power.
"Okay, hold on." Evie again. "I'm extending your suit's network reach. Did you know you're basically a walking secure hotspot right now? Anyway, I'm overriding the security barrier. Ordinarily it needs facial and retinal scans of an authorized technician, but apparently that didn't stop our guy."
Experimentally, she ran her suit glove under the scanner. The display turned green and changing to read "SECRETARY ARIADNE KATSAROS: CLR LVL RAISA/5". The door slid open. The metal detector didn't appreciate their presence, but its screeching turned off after half a second. She mentally thanked Evie.
The stairs to the next floor were ceramic white, presumably to avoid static discharge. The temperature dropped further; this time, Alpha's shivering from behind her alerted her. Her suit was insulated, theirs were not.
"You're good?"
"Yeah. We're good."
They marched in, sweeping up the stairs until they found another two bodies sprawled out, red on white. These two were dressed differently: one was wearing a labcoat with a yellow armband — RAISA issue — and the other was in Site Security gear. The security officer's submachine gun was lying on the next step up, and the other body held a .38 pistol. The Epsilon-11 team picked up the weapons. "Clear." They arrived at the door. It was closed, but unlocked. She took position by the side of the doorframe. "Go."
Delta yanked it open from the other side and she slid deftly in, aware of the others following behind her, guns sweeping in different directions. The room reminded her of the SCiPnet servers at Site-7 — logically so, it was basically the same labyrinth of metal grates and server racks. Little LEDs blinked from inside the servers, and a low hum filled the entire room. It was actually warmer in here, owing to the heat from the servers, even though they were at minimal power. The only light came from the red emergency lights from under the floor grates, bathing the maze in crimson.
She moved quickly through the turns and corridors of the servers, peering out from behind a corner before moving forward, Tavor held at the ready the whole time. She could hear from the footfalls around her that the others were doing the same. This room stretched the width and length of the entire floor, and searching it as a team would leave ample opportunity for the intruder to take an alternate exit. She tried not to think about that as she danced through the server farm.
Then she rounded the last corner. The far end of the room had a few terminals and monitors. There was someone in dark clothes standing in front of them, their back to her and their fingers dancing across the keyboard.
"Stop. Hands up." Her rifle was pointed squarely at their back.
The figure froze, raising their hands. The red lights made it hard to discern anything about them — they seemed fuzzy, indistinct.
"Turn around, slowly."
She could hear the others had heard and were now bolting to her position. The figure turned, ever-so-slowly, and she caught a good look at their face.
There was nothing. They weren't wearing a helmet — at least she didn't think so — but there was the absence of a face. No identity. The features were there — eyes, a nose, a mouth. It was like staring into an opaque black painting. Nothing but the void, reflecting back at her, over and over, until she felt herself tumbling forward. She narrowed her eyes, planting her feet and steadying herself.
Then they raised a hand and peeled the mask off.
Her eyes widened. She didn't know what she saw — she caught the edges of a symbol scalded onto olive skin, across what she had mistakenly assumed was a face. It was no more a face than was the shell of a hermit crab. A disguise, a camouflage. The symbol burned in her vision without her even seeing it. Her brain exploded in blinding, white-hot fire, and she didn't even feel her finger tightening until it had curled the trigger back on the Tavor.
Through the indistinct agony, she saw the not-person's mouth smile at her before their chest exploded.
Three shots. One in the chest, knocking the figure stumbling backward and crashing into the monitor. The next two blew up their face, turning it into the same gory mess she'd seen on the first body, a blooming red rose of flesh and blood, any symbol buried under it.
She stood there, gun raised, chest heaving. The stink of gunfire filled her nostrils, and slowly, the burning deliriousness faded. She flexed her finger experimentally as the rest of the team flowed out around her, guns aimed at the fallen corpse, kneeling down to check their pulse, quickly shaking their heads at their commander.
Why had she shot him? He was unarmed, she didn't want to fire, but it had just happened. It didn't just happen to people like her. Trigger-happy cops were one thing — she'd been in the Rangers, the MTFs, the Agents, and she had never once shot like this. Like it was out of her control. Like someone had reached inside her from the eyes, gone around the brain, and tightened the ligament in her hand.
She breathed slowly, stepping over the body and staring at the monitor they had been using. The bullets had clipped it, leaving the screen intact. It was some kind of database, structured information in rows and columns. At first, it was a mess of numbers, but as she stared at it, a pattern began to emerge.
Flight logs. For a Foundation jet. Telemetry from the cabin blackboxes.
Then something caught her eye. A yellow lanyard attached to a card, sticking out of a slot in the terminal. She grabbed it and pulled, reading off it.
In the following three seconds, a number of thoughts went through her head.
Yamada was waiting for us at the airport when we arrived.
Hishiro Yamada. Off-duty supervisor at the airport. This is his badge.
Body up the stairs in a labcoat and an armband with a gun. Only people allowed to carry are supervisors and security officers.
Yamada was waiting for us at the airport when we arrived.
Lanyards all ripped from the bodies. Faces disfigured. No accident. Can't identify bodies.
Flight logs. For a Foundation jet.
Yamada was waiting for us at the airport when we arrived.
She shouted into her mic. "Command? Evie!? Do you read?"
Static.
The Epsilon-11 boys were still turning to face her when she turned on her heel, slick with blood, and bolted back towards the stairs.
The drive in the Jeep from the airstrip to REPLICA-3 had been about fifteen minutes on the way there. Ari made it back in seven. It was a dependable 'dumb' gas car, none of the safety features of the newer electric models. She was free to ignore speed warnings and stability alerts, which she did with wild abandon. The green hilly landscape whizzed by through the cloud of dust the Jeep kicked up.
The whole time, she continued trying to hail Command, Evie, David, anyone on the earpiece. All she got in return was static. She'd ditched the helmet on the off-chance it was the suit's comm systems that were compromised. She was practiced enough to compress the terror in her stomach into a small, dense ball to deal with later — right now, she focused on driving. After too long, the fence of the airstrip came into view.
She made a sharp left turn as she came up to the gate, sending the car into a skid around the gate and turning onto the airstrip. The hangar was at the other end. She gunned the engine, ducked under the left wing of the jet and shot down the airstrip.
She couldn't see what was happening inside from her angle, but — Evie dead, O5-2 dead, the Alpha-1 security detail slaughtered. Yamada gone. — the thoughts were bouncing around her head. The Tavor was slung on the passenger seat, where she'd tossed it so she could fit in the driver's. She made the split-second decision in her head; too long, leave it. Instead, her hand went to the shoulder holster in her armpit, pulling the gun stowed there. The car jumped as she took it off the runway at an angle, approaching the hangar.
She threw the handbrake as the car pulled up a few meters away. The force shoved her forward, which she used: she tucked and rolled out, landing on her feet with her Uzi pulled and the stock extended. She squinted through the iron sights at the crowd in front of her.
They were all still there. And alive. The RAISA techs looked up when they heard the car brake, then stepped back with wide eyes and raised hands when they saw the woman levelling a gun at them. Even Evie's reaction was coupled with a frightened, shocked step backward. The Alpha-1 detail, to their credit, immediately pulled their own handguns and aimed at her. Only O5-2 didn't move — he didn't even look shocked or scared to find a gun trained in his general direction, a raised eyebrow the only reaction he offered.
The security detail shouted at her to drop the gun. She didn't, scanning the crowd of unfamiliar RAISA techs for — there. Yamada. He had the same shocked face as the rest, but his physical reaction betrayed him. He didn't step back with both feet as though out of fear. He pivoted one leg backward, bracing himself. Then she saw the subtle bulge under his dress shirt.
The gun turned square on his chest. She knew. He knew. But the rest of them didn't know. That was what he was banking on.
Over the shouts from the security detail, O5-2's careful, measure voice rose: "Ari?"
"It's him. Yamada."
She expected a confused "what?!" but wasn't shocked when it didn't come. David wasn't like that. He looked between them for a second, gears turning in his head. One of the Alpha-1 operators swivelled to aim at Yamada, but the rest stayed trained on her, per protocol. Then Ari followed it up.
"You have to trust me."
Their eyes met. After a second, he nodded. "On her command."
The operators didn't hesitate. They all pivoted on their back legs, aiming their handguns at Yamada's shocked face. She shouted at him. "HANDS UP! ON THE GROUND, NOW!" His mask shifted from surprise to one of barely-suppressed rage. For a second, nothing happened. Then he went for the gun.
She lit him up.
The explosion of gunfire was deafening. The other techs in the room dropped to the ground in unabashed terror — which was good, she didn't have to worry about accidentally hitting them. In the half-second she squeezed the trigger, the Uzi kicked back and sprayed over a dozen rounds into Yamada's chest. He crumpled, dress shirt a ragged, bloody mess. The gun was still in his hand.
As he fell, she watched his face. The mask slid and dropped. He wasn't Yamada anymore. It was the same as the other; little more than a shell they'd inhabited for their own purposes. It turned into a gaping mass, where something might once have been but hadn't been in a long, long time. The hint of a symbol branded onto the face, and then nothing. It wasn't that their face was a black void — her brain just refused to process it, rejecting any input from the surface.
She moved quickly, sliding over the table and kicking away the gun. She was breathing heavily.
O5-2 rolled up next to her. They both stared at the corpse of Not-Yamada as the Alpha-1 operators swept in, securing the entrances and exits. She heard the plane's jets kick up, and knew they'd be exfiltrating within the next three minutes.
"What is it?" she asked. "Why was it trying to kill you?"
He stared at it. "I have no idea."
