Patriarch dropped from a low roof onto an hovercar's hood and rolled off before dropping to a knee, lasgun leveled with a lone PDF private's head, on the other side of the alley.
"Terra!" He shouted to the immobile man.
"November!" Came the counter response. The rifle came down and Raptor team pounded that hovercar's hood into a bowl-like dent, jumping down one at a time.
"Psycho." Acey greeted with a short nod as the young PDF walked up to them.
"Ash…Acey." The other caught himself with a cringe, "Where's Ogre?" He scrutinized every member of the team, but decided he wasn't amongst them.
Patriarch stepped in, "He says to say you look sharp in that uniform."
Psycho scoffed and scanned the skyline, looking for potential sniper nests, finally picking one and smiling in Ogre's direction. "Understood, anything else?"
Alenka gave Aveline an insistent nudge, "They're speaking in code," she whispered, so low only the two of them could hear, "why? Don't they trust us yet?"
Aveline shrugged and inspected the only way into that alley, a red steel door. Locked, of course, by a keypad and magnetic seals in every corner.
Far too advanced for this backwater… Hey eyes darted from the door to 'Psycho' and understanding slowly began settling in, like remembering an old friend's name after half an hour of trying to recall.
Infiltrating the planet's PDF, gaining enough foreknowledge of the city's defence grid to take it offline in half an hour with a single man… This all spoke of an operation running for far longer than just a month, in place long before she had been captured.
"This is not a rescue mission…" Aveline's sudden flash of inspiration ended all conversation in the alley. "There is something else here you need, we are just decoy."
Patriarch shook his head calmly, "I can't talk about that, even if I did know the answer, it's classified."
"I understand, but there is one thing I must know," Aveline walked up to him in a threatening manner, "did the Protectorate have anything to do in our capture? Did your men set us up?"
Once again, Patriarch shook his head, looking as though he would repeat the same thing, but his tune was slightly different this time, "If that was our boys' doin', I wasn't made aware of it."
Much went unsaid in that sentence, but only one part really mattered to Aveline and her sisters; it was not unlikely. Patriarch seemed honest when he claimed not to know about it, but he clearly would not put it past his employers to manipulate friend and foes alike if it achieved results.
Before they could develop further, however, Psycho snapped his fingers as if to draw a drunk friend's attention, all eyes turning to him as a result, "We don't have time for this, Golem is green across, orbital defences are going offline in ten mikes, clock's ticking."
Patriarch nodded and punched his ID code in the keypad. The door hissed as mag seals released and it vanished in the floor to reveal an industrial lift, normally used for warehouses and probably a part of the original building, though now it hand only one way in and that door was far too small for the size of that elevator.
"Where are we going?" Alenka looked worried, but Acey gave her a pat in the back and walked in without a word.
Patriarch soon followed and smiled before answering: "Home."
0
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-[087.M42]-
-[SEGMENTUM PACIFICUS]-
-[SYSTEM KAREAL]-
-[PLANET DIADORA]-
-[AUTUMN CITY]-
-[OPERATION: -]-
Hadrick grimaced at the dark circles under his eyes, emphasizing the crevice-like wrinkles spreading across his temples like canyon networks. At a hundred and twelve years old, Hadrick "Thunder" Ellaine considered himself lucky to still have color in his hairs, though they were steadily getting greyer… Hell, he was lucky to have hairs at all!
Maggy Ellaine, his wife, was merely a decade younger, but she looked barely forty and that, even by Protectorate standards, was impressive.
An ambassador and economist for the protectorate, Ellaine was well aware of her husband's work, and he knew she was, for all intents and purpose, his direct superior.
She entered the bathroom, sweaty and out of breath, freshly back from her morning jog, and gave him the once over.
After having lived a century, Hadrick considered it normal to be getting soft around the edges, but his dear wife kept telling him, time and again, he still looked as shard as the day they'd met.
That had been fifty years back, during a trade negotiation with Dark Eldars gone wrong, Hadrick and his team were sent in to quell a slave rebellion and extract representative Ellaine…
"Don't let anyone tell you otherwise," she scolded him, stripping with the nonchalance that came with half a century of marriage, "you're still the best, not a single of those pups could do what you've done in your days."
She didn't know half of what he'd done in his days. One time, he let on that a Space Marine scout sergeant had proved no match for him, later in his career. She, at first, had dismissed it as bravado, but as she heard more about the man she had married, that unbelievable feat had become quite plausible.
There was darkness in Hadrick only she seemed able to tame, without her, he would still be on the ground breaking skulls and shouting orders.
He brought her closer for a long, passionate kiss and a gentle hug, which ended when she squirmed away. Hadrick wanted to just hold her close and never let go, let the world take care of itself.
"C'mon, off with you, Thunder," she chirped, hopping gracefully in the shower, "your perfectly-mentally-healthy minions need some yelling at or they won't remember which end of the stick makes bright lights..."
Odd that a career military man such as Thunder would pick an activist pacifist as his wife, odder still that she would pick him as well. Love does strange things to a person, but it cannot change their convictions, "Gosh, woman, coming from someone who throws frying pans at Orkz for a living, that's rather cold."
Maggy Ellaine, the only human to ever successfully negotiate an alliance with an Ork Warboss and actually keep it together after the fight. That had made his wife's career, that Warboss' as well, even earned him the nickname 'Deadpan' amongst the Protectorate, not that he was very invested in the community's life.
Mostly, Deadpan did what he was hired to do; kill stuff on whichever planet the Protectorate cargo ships dropped his WAAAGH! on.
Hadrick slipped on his dress uniform with a smile as his wife stuck her tongue out in a mocking grimace.
The thing was simple, unhindered by garnish and trinkets… The uniform, that is.
Before Ellaine had gotten this job, the General Head Of Special Tactics would wear very elaborate, very flamboyant dress uniforms, as to increase the feeling of authority they gave off. Hadrick hated such practice, respect had to be earned, he'd been the first GHOST to refuse sponsorship from any of the Protectorate's benefactors, rising through the ranks by simply being the most skilled operator around, to the point where even the council's veto would have been a minor hindrance.
There were three main forces amongst the Protectorate:
The Council, representatives of every world of the dominion and their main trade partners, made up of almost a hundred members all of which tried to use the consortium's resources to further their own goals, but only ended up becoming more dependants of it as a result. The Council also commanded a joint 'Planetary Defence Force', tasked with protecting planets and ships who were official members of the Protectorate.
The GHOST, commander in chief of the elite thousand men and women tasked with preserving the Protectorate's integrity, safety and commercial dominance, always operating from the shadows and reporting only to the third and last political entity…
The "Captain", effectively one of the Warrant to Trade's many heirs, elected by the others both to oversee the fleet and keep the GHOST in check. Though completely independent from the council, the Captain's every words and decisions had to be carefully measured, as the slightest misstep could cause a valuable member to leave the Protectorate or trades with an important partner to become overly complicated.
Essentially, Hadrick held the least political power of all three branches, but held most of the Protectorate's military in his hand, being authorised to order both a new Council and a new Captain to be elected should he feel either of these did a poor job. Most importantly, however, he had full operational freedom, meaning he had to justify his actions only when the others directly asked him about them.
Essentially, so long as he kept it low profile and things ran smoothly, nobody cared what Hadrick did with his troops.
There was no headquarters for him to drive to, no central intelligence hub; he'd gotten rid of that, in a sense.
Each operation was assigned its own support team, one ship and a flock of analysts and enginseers, the ground team would feed data to their support ship, who would filter and 'translate' that data in a format the ground team could easily comprehend and operate on, then it would be the team leader's call how to best proceed.
No red tapes, no clearance requests and minimal astropathic communication. Mistakes were made, small ones as well as big, but this proved a small price to pay for a neat increase in reaction speed, flexibility and overall performances on the grander scale.
Not every cell knew the greater picture, most being content to get their part done and go home.
Driving for five minutes on a deserted road, Hadrick drove his civilian issue Tauros off-road and on a deserted beach, where he unstrapped the car's soft roof to breathe deep of the sea salts saturating the morning's cold air.
Every morning, he drove to the beach, following the shoreline for kilometers as the sun rose above the ocean, its purple and blue beams reflecting off the tumultuous water in a kaleidoscope-like effect. He kept driving, not thinking about anything else, until there were two suns; one in the sky, the other a distorted reflection. This marked the beginning of his work.
The cogitator built into his Tauros' dashboard beeped before displaying reports from over fifty cells, spread across three sectors, all part of a single project…
Operation Factory Recall, for instance, intertwined with Operation Straight Arrow and Operation Red Dune.
Basically, one cell would infiltrate an Imperial planet's military, implant backdoors in the defence grid and prepare an escape route, the other would escalate tensions between two groups, tasked with investigating a fictional threat of Xeno indoctrination, and once things escalated, would use the ensuing commotion to pay the Planetary Governor a visit during which he was to be… Replaced… By a very loyal ambassador of the Protectorate, a skilled actor surgically altered to speak and look like the previous Governor.
The last cell was to retrieve the Sisters of Battle, provide a distraction for their colleagues and shed a more favorable light on the Protectorate before returning the Sisters to their coven.
This small pocket of activity, insignificant in the grand scheme of things, tied to a similar operation on Idaksi, a small forge world known to copy Accatran-pattern weapons quite efficiently, if nothing else.
Another operation, this time led in Tau space, had four cells organize and lead Dark Eldar pirates in an assault on Tau merchant vessels. The Protectorate let their Eldar allies take the crew while they reverse engineered the derelict ships to improve their own fleets.
It went on like that for fifty pages, most reporting success, a few admitting failure.
He closed the cogitator with a sigh. Fifteen casualties, sprained ankles, broken legs and a luckless kid got shot in the face. A small price to pay, all things considered, but he never liked seeing his boys come back on a stretcher, much less in a body bag.
He started his car and drove it up the nearest road.
This stroll on the beach was only a fraction of his job, the biggest part of it would come next…
Traffic was light and he made it to the planetary place much faster than he would have wanted.
Politics… He walked up the marble stairs to a PDF checkpoint and threw a dirty look to the kid on station.
The Protectorate's PDF often boasted they were on par with Imperial Guardsmen, on par with Thunder's men, even. Utter lunacy, the GHOST's forces were selected from the Protectorate's genetically enhanced population and educated to the level of doctors and enginseers before receiving the most brutal and advanced training outside the Adeptes Astarte. Nobody compared, not unless they had some added parts.
The kid asked him his name and rank, making him either dumb or new, both of which Thunder did not like. He gave him his name and rank nonetheless and the boy retreated to a nearby terminal.
He types something in and it came back negative. "I'm sorry, sir, it seems you do not have an appointment scheduled with the council…"
"I don't have one because I don't need it, meathead, call up your superior and stop wasting my time…"
The kid took an offended look, "Sir," he hissed, "I would ask that you remain polite."
That boy actually was serious! "Kid, just talking to you is being polite, now you can either call your superior officer or I can make you call for your mother, which is it?"
When a century's worth of combat experience threatens to hurt you, the smart move is to do as you're told and, green as he may be, that kid did the smart thing.
Blood drained from his face when he received his answer. Hadrick walked in without any trouble.
The Council was already in session when the GHOST stepped in, all heads in the circular room turning to him as an unnatural silence took over echoes of an heated speech.
This was unusual, people walked in and out of this room all the time and no one usually took notice.
"What's going on?"
Imran Kolevitsh, the current Captain, answered his question from where he stood, in the center of the room:
"The Imperium has declared Exterminatus on a major Tau population center. Fourteen billion deaths." From the lack of reaction in the council, they knew already. Hadrick walked to Imran's side and looked around the room. Human auxiliaries sent to represent Tau worlds looked outraged, seated across the room from their Imperium opposites, who grinned smugly to themselves.
"Why?" That made no sense, how could they have not heard of this?
"No particular reason, the Tau Councillors accuse Imperial Councillors to have orchestrated it as retribution for their recent outsourcing of metal importation to Demiurgs…"
A single glance at them confirmed this to be a reasonable assumption. He turned back to the Tau councillors, "I will have my men investigate this incident, those responsible will be brought to justice." He vowed, everyone in the room knowing full well he would hold that promise. It did not have the soothing effect he had expected.
Kalia Var'Gol, born and raised in the Tau Empire, stood from her seat, apparently speaking for the whole of her colleagues.
"We do not doubt your honesty, GHOST Ellaine, but you must recognize, as we do, that the Protectorate is at a point where it must rid itself of the Imperium's influence…"
Al-Goran Tellborn, a Colonel in the Harakoni Warhawks and speaking for most of the Imperium contributors, stood and cleared his throat, "Miss Var'Gol and I have been friends for decades now, her children call me Uncle Al whenever I visit," the two exchanged a pained but genuine smile, "believe me when I say this is not easy for me to say…"
Indeed, it took him a moment to gain the composure and find the words to continue, "The Protectorate has grown too large, too important, for it to sit on the side lines any more, this council has too many allegiances, too much hidden agendas, it is time to choose a side; become a part of the Imperium and act like it or break away once and for all."
The chamber was filled with objections, opinions and insults, everyone trying to have their personal vote heard over that of their colleagues.
Imran's attempts to bring order failed, Hadrick's didn't "Shut up! Shut up or I'll shock the next one to talk!" A Demiurg fell off his chair, shaken by seizures as the electro dart sparked in his chest.
Silence fell on the room once again and Hadrick's voice broke it a second later, booming like thunder, "It is the Captain's decision, those who don't like it can leave the council, it's best for everyone, but that is our law, if you cannot respect it, you had no place in this room to begin with. Session is over!"
He pressed his ear, and spoke as the council dragged their feet out of the room. "Impressive timing, Fisher."
"Timing? You have my boys sit on that roof twenty-four seven!" The voice in his Comm-bead spoke, adding, as an afterthought, "Hey, you realize whatever happens, there's at least a dozen of our benefactors we won't be able to defend?"
"So?"
"Well, I sure hope you planned for that, boss, because whichever side we ditch is going to be pretty riled at us, and we'll have lost a massive chunk of our support…"
"I know, Fisher."
"Just saying."
