"How did you find this place, Geoff?"
He looked over at the sound of his name, smiling at the woman who spoke. "It was listed in an old database I hacked into a while ago. Some American survivalist kook built it in the seventies and eighties, he spend millions on the place. He picked this location because it was out of the way, far away from any targets of ICBMs like population centers or military bases, things like that. There are twenty rooms, a self contained power system with dual diesel generators backed with a huge uninterruptible power supply, dual air filtration systems, over a hundred thousand liters of both fuel and water, the whole deal. It was designed for a dozen people to live in completely cut off from the outside world for a decade. It's basically a government-spec nuclear bunker."
Pointing upwards he added, "Fifteen feet of ferroconcrete under thirty feet of granite. The walls are as thick, as is the floor. Practically impervious to anything but a direct hit. We're as safe in here as anywhere I can think of, especially since no one knows we're here in the first place. I erased all the records of this place a couple of years ago so no one else knows about it."
"What happened to the owner?"
"Leviathan, ironically enough, I think. He was last seen down at the docks unloading more supplies for the place when the tsunami hit. There were only two survivors from the island, one died later, the other one moved to New York, about a month before Behemoth. After that, there were only the records in that one old server and they're gone."
He smiled as she relaxed slightly. "We're safe, Mags. No one knows about this place except me, no one knows where we went. Narwhal nearly got us, and losing two of the new suits to her is a pain, but we can rebuild. There's a very well equipped workshop here which will let me repair the damage to the other units and possibly even make one or two more. All the equipment we salvaged is in the storage bays and I stocked up on a lot of things when I found this site, so there's more than enough food to keep us all going for months. Not even counting all the non-perishables the guy who built it left behind."
Extending his arms, he indicated the entire area. "We're the only people in a thousand miles. Dragon has no reason to look here, or the Guild, or the Protectorate. We can recover, rebuild, then begin our operations again. We'll beat it, trust me."
The woman looked relieved, sitting in one of the slightly dusty but high end office chairs that were scattered around the large room they were in, most of them still with the original plastic on. She looked around. "Well, it's a lot better than the last place, I have to admit. I'm looking forward to a hot shower for once." Smiling, she turned back to him. "Although the lack of windows is a shame. I'm starting to feel just the smallest amount closed in."
"We can go outside when there are no satellites passing," he assured her. "There's a gap coming up in a couple of hours, you can go and watch the Northern Lights. They're spectacular here. But it's fucking cold out there."
They both turned at the sound of a metallic clang, as a heavy hatch shut somewhere above them, which was followed by footsteps on the stairs to the next level up, descending towards them. The man that entered was slapping his hands together, looking chilly. "Big storm coming, I think," he announced. "It's very clear, but I heard thunder from the south."
"We're safe here, no storm is going to get through all that concrete and rock," Geoff laughed. "Let's clean up, have something to eat, then work out what we do next."
His companions nodded and went off to their quarters. After a moment, he left the room too, going in the other direction. Arriving at a very solid door with a wheel in the middle like a ship hatch, which it seemed to be based on, he spun the wheel several times, then pulled, the door swinging open without sound on well lubricated hinges. The very large room on the other side was bare concrete, not wood paneled like the rest of the bunker, and something like sixty feet by eighty with a nearly twenty foot ceiling.
At one end was a ramp that led up to a pair of horizontal sliding doors like those on a missile silo, which he knew were camouflaged on the outside to blend perfectly into the rocks. He'd looked for them from the other side and even knowing where they were it was almost impossible to see the seams. The builder of the bunker had been very paranoid, very rich, and very skilled.
He liked that.
Walking into the room he looked around.
In a row at one side of the room were three battle-scarred Dragon suits, mobile flying units he'd recovered from the AI Tinker known to the world as Dragon then modified for manual control. He moved over to inspect them again, running his fingers along a gash in the leg of one, shaking his head slightly. It was going to be tedious repairing the things but there were more than enough tools and materials here to do that.
Losing the reverse-engineered new suits he'd nearly finished making was a setback, definitely, but not a permanent one. The AI had no idea where they were, no one did, so they had time to work. Then they could contact the new recruits again and arm them, to take the fight to the enemy.
Satisfied for the moment, he walked across the machine bay to another, even heavier door set into the far wall, which had a combination keypad on it. Thinking for a moment he punched in a long sequence of numbers, then smiled when the lock beeped and clicked. Pulling the door open he entered what had been, and still was, the armory of this facility. A remarkably large range and quantity of weaponry was in racks on the walls and freestanding in the middle of the room, covering everything from handguns through various rifles and machine guns up to a number of six shot grenade launchers, several RPG launchers, and half a dozen MANPAD Stinger missiles.
Ammunition enough to fight a fairly convincing small war was in crates along the back of the room, all neatly labeled in a mix of English and Cyrillic, denoting the country of origin. None was newer than the attack on Newfoundland, obviously, as it had all been put in place before then. The bunker had been abandoned for years before he'd found out about it, then managed to hack his way through the surprisingly complex defense system and gain entry.
Picking one of the Stinger launchers off the wall he hefted it curiously, examining the simple controls, then put it back. Geoff didn't expect to need it any time soon but thought it would be a good idea to go through the manuals that were filed away on a small bookshelf on one side of the armory, over a workbench equipped with all the tools and equipment required to service the weapons.
The previous owner of the place had really liked guns.
Walking over to that bench, he looked at the heavy duty armored case, about eighteen inches square and six thick, that was sitting innocently on it. A small label in one corner had an alphanumeric code put there by the designer, the long dead 'father' of the AI known as Dragon. Andrew Richter had died along with hundreds of thousands of other people when Leviathan sank Newfoundland, but his creation lived on.
"Unfortunately," Geoff sighed. Tapping a code into the lock pad on the top of the case with the ease of long practice, he opened it and stared at the oddly thick laptop computer sitting inside, the display opening as the lid of the box did. The keyboard had quite a number of extra special keys on it with cryptic ideograms on, the entire thing obviously not a commercial product. A window showing lines of rapidly scrolling text and numbers was open on the screen, next to a couple of other that had shifting diagrams.
All of that represented the inner working of the mind of Dragon. This was basically a remote access terminal to its hardware and software, an absolutely irreplaceable one-off machine that he could use but had no real understanding about the workings of. Even with the skills imparted to him by the Parahuman known as Teacher, now a resident of the Birdcage, it was far past him.
It was the weapon that would eventually defeat the threat to the world that Dragon represented.
His finger caressed the covered button safely off to one side of the keyboard, recessed into it with a key slot next to it, which if pressed would send the complex program known as 'Ascalon' directly to the innermost core of the AI, wiping it from existence.
"One day, but not yet," he murmured, pulling his hand back. Peering at the screen he frowned, deciphering the codes there to get an idea of what Dragon was thinking and doing.
It seemed to be frantically working on completing some form of underwater vehicle. Frowning, he wondered why, then yawned. It could wait until they had rested for a while. The close escape from the Guild led by Narwhal who had attacked them out of the blue, somehow having located their old base, had left them all exhausted.
Carefully closing the case he patted it as it re-locked with a clunk, then left the armory, locking that behind him as well. Shortly he was in his own quarters showering, looking forward to something to eat.
Colin turned around as he heard a familiar voice. "It's done," Dragon said, "I've tested it as much as I can without putting it in the water. It will work. I just loaded it onto the hypersonic transport craft and I'm en route right now. Flight time is one hour forty-three minutes."
"You're going personally?" Colin was surprised. "I thought you were planning on running it by remote."
"This is too important, and I'm curious," she smiled. "Weird things are still going on. Seismic monitors have registered some odd disturbances, some quite large. Not explosions, as such, but more like small earthquakes. They're slowly going up the coast towards a former settlement called Harrington Harbor, it seems to be in a direct line from where the first explosion was. No one lives within many hundreds of miles of that area, it's perfect for testing weapons. Whatever it is hasn't left yet."
"It may do by the time you get there," he cautioned.
"Of course. But even then there will be debris, residues from firings, various time sensitive evidence. I want to collect everything I can before it gets washed away."
She send him a file, which he looked at with interest. "I have no idea what caused this, for example. Look at that data! Like a perfectly straight fault line that opened simultaneously over the entire length of over six miles. But there are no faults there, it's a geologically very stable area. Whoever it is definitely did their homework. No risk of setting off an earthquake if something very destructive is used, no observers, almost no satellite coverage during the time period in question..."
"When is the next pass that will give us anything useful?"
"There's a visible light and IR earth observation satellite passing in about an hour and a half, then an old spy sat with a functional thermal camera something like twenty minutes later. Both of them are in awkward orbits and it's not sufficiently important to risk using limited propellant to redirect the spy sat, it's got almost nothing left in the station keeping tanks, but there will be about half an hour of overlap where I can use the combined data to get a pretty good view, unless it suddenly clouds over totally. But the weather forecast is for completely clear skies all night, so with a little luck we should be good."
She looked mildly annoyed. "It's a little irritating, but we're stuck with what we have available for the moment."
"True enough," he sighed.
"How is the weapon design coming?" she asked curiously.
"Overall, very well," he replied, brightening up. "I'm actually quite impressed. Leet, despite his character flaws which are numerous and deep, does do good work. He took the original designs from the Orion project from decades ago and converted the nuclear shaped charge into something more like an outsize shotgun shell. A tungsten casing, with a much thicker plate at the output end, the Saurialsteel flechettes partially embedded into it in a tightly packed mass. The fusion charge in the middle, then a channel filler material which is a mix of the originally suggested beryllium oxide and a substance he seems to have invented wholesale, which his notes suggest Saurial could produce. It absorbs the emitted X rays and gamma rays from the blast with nearly one hundred percent efficiency."
"Where would we find a fusion charge small enough?" she queried, looking at the specifications he sent her. "This calls for a yield of two kilotons, which is small for a nuke, true, but still quite a large device physically, and it needs to fit into a very small space."
"He designed one. The design isn't complete but it looks feasible. From what I can see it's something he abandoned some years ago." Colin sat back, shaking his head a little. "That man could be unbelievably dangerous. Having seen this I'm very glad he sticks to video game themed petty crime. It's only the odd limitation he seems to have of not being able to replicate his efforts that prevents him being a truly awesome Tinker. Even so some of what I've seen him produce is remarkable. That Tricorder of his is astounding in its capabilities."
"It would be a very interesting device to examine," Dragon noted, nodding.
"Fallout from the blast is an issue," Colin went on, going back to the weapon design. "But he even thought of a possible solution to that, at least in part. Have Saurial, or Raptaur, make the various components herself, using her matter generation ability, with a very short lifetime, just long enough to complete the task. He thinks that any created isotopes and radioactive material produced in the blast should then vanish when the time is up. It should reduce the aftereffects to a tolerable level."
Dragon looked surprised, then thoughtful. "That's an intriguing thought. Could either one of them do it, do you think?"
He shrugged. "I have no idea without talking to them and finding out what their limitations really are. Hopefully they'd tell us under the circumstances. All of this is moot unless they can come through, and are willing to do so. It hinges on Leet being correct that this material really is electron-degenerate matter as well." He picked up the cube of gray metal with the rope that was still attached. "My initial tests do seem to bear him out, remarkably enough. Nothing I have been able to do has so much as mark it. The strength, toughness, and hardness of this material are so high as to make it almost impossible to quantify in any meaningful manner. It would definitely survive a point-blank nuclear explosion, though."
"Unbelievable," she said in a low voice. "I wish I understood how they were able to produce it and make it stable."
Colin emitted a small sigh once more, putting the sample back down. "So do I. It might as well be magic for all the good my investigations have shown. But it's not actually important at the moment, all we need to know is whether they can do it and will do it."
"What muzzle velocity do your calculations show it would have?"
"Slightly indeterminate at the moment, there are a lot of variables that have never been properly explored since such a device couldn't be made by conventional techniques, but based on estimates for efficiency of conversion of X ray capture, heat transfer, kinetic energy transfer, and the focusing effect of the barrel, something over a hundred and fifty kilometers per second for the flechettes. Possibly considerably higher, unlikely to be more than ten percent lower."
Dragon looked both impressed and appalled. "That's higher than I expected."
"It's Leet's fusion package design, it should be much more efficient in this application than a fission weapon, which is what the original designs were based on, would be. But even so I still have a lot of work to do to simulate the thing accurately and come up with more precise figures. There are still some unknowns as well, such as heat radiation from the device, the truly incredible recoil, and a few other things. I'll keep you updated with my progress."
"Thank you. I've still got an hour and a half of flight time left, if you want to discuss it, call me."
"I will," he promised with a smile. She returned it, then went off line. Turning back to the desk he looked at the small unassuming block of metallic impossibility then shook his head, before pulling his keyboard towards himself and starting work once more.
Feeling a slight tremble through the floor, Geoff looked up, then stared suspiciously around. "What was that?" he asked. His two compatriots glanced over from where they were idly playing cards and eating snacks.
"Just the storm, Geoff, don't panic," the other man, Dobrynja, said while going back to his cards. "We're pretty high up here and it's a bad one. I've heard several like that even through all this rock. The sound of the wind is barely audible every now and then as well." A faint howling sound came and went. "Like that."
"Maybe I should check..." Geoff turned towards the door to the stairs.
"Go ahead, but if it's as bad as I think it is, you'll practically flood the place as soon as you open the hatch," his comrade warned. "Listen to it! I know this whole part of Canada gets horrific storms regularly, especially at this time of year. If I were you I'd sit down and finish your meal, then come and play cards with us."
Not entirely certain, but also not really wanting to get soaked, cold, and possibly blown away considering the access hatch was very exposed to the elements, Geoff dithered slightly, then sighed and relaxed. Another thrumming rumble, closer, made the entire place shiver slightly. "God, it sounds horrible out there, you're right," he muttered, picking up his fork again. "Hard to believe that wind alone could make rock shake like that."
Mags chuckled. "Believe it. I went through a hurricane in Barbados years ago and even in the basement of the hotel, the entire place was shaking like someone was bombing it. Hundred and fifty mile an hour winds do that. It's probably not that bad out there but I'm not going to look. It'll blow over sooner or later and it makes it even less likely that anyone could find us."
"True," he noted with a small smile. "When I've finished eating, I'm going to make a list of what we need to do over the next few days, but after than I'm going to bed. It's..." he checked his watch, "...four in the morning and I'm really tired."
"Just go to bed, you can do the list tomorrow," the woman advised. She scowled at her card partner, then threw her hand down in disgust as he grinned at her. "That's what I'm doing. I've lost all the cash I had to this bastard already."
Laughing a little, the two men watched her go, then Geoff resumed eating while his remaining companion started playing Solitaire.
It was, except for the occasional rumble of thunder or howl of wind, very quiet for the next half hour.
Which made the unbelievable sound that came through the walls at that point, along with a strong vibration which shook the entire bunker to the level that things tumbled off the table and several chairs tipped over, all the more shocking. Falling to the ground with his hands over his ears, Geoff looked wildly around, ducking as a cupboard fell off the wall and smashed to the ground next to him. His companion was screaming curses as he picked himself up, his cards all over the room.
"What the fuck was that?" he screamed.
"I have no idea," Geoff yelled back, heaving himself up via the table, then heading to the door. Halfway to it, Mags ran in, looking shell-shocked and only half dressed.
"What happened?" she shouted. "Are we under attack?"
"I don't know," he said, grabbing her shoulders and holding her still. "We need to get the suits going. Yours is barely functional, but I think it has enough power left for a trip to the mainland if we need to evacuate. Hopefully the storm has died down."
Releasing her he headed for the machine room again. "Get anything that's lying around which could identify us and meet me at the armory," he called back over his shoulder. Reaching the door he spun the wheel, dived through, then only just caught himself in time to avoid falling into the enormous gouge in the ground that had somehow replaced the room he'd left there less than an hour before.
"What?" Holding onto the frame of the door he looked around, then up, then down to where the concrete floor stopped a yard away, sliced through as cleanly as a razor blade through paper. "WHAT?" He closed his eyes, counted to five, then opened them again. The scene was still the same. "WHAT?!"
Wildly looking around him, all he could see was dark and ruin. Staring up showed blazing stars in a totally clear night sky, no signs at all of any storm. In front of him the light from the open door vanished into a void, which stretched from left to right as far as he could see. He couldn't make out the other side at all in the night, but when he gingerly leaned out, he thought he could see foaming white seawater far below.
The rest of the bunker was simply gone, as if it had never been.
As were all the weapons, the modified Dragon suits, and the only chance the world had to avoid the AI taking over.
Geoff Pellick nearly fainted, only just managing to keep himself from tumbling into the crevasse in front of him. "What the fuck happened?" he wailed, staring around again. The scene didn't change. "How? Who?"
There was no answer.
Peering into the dark to the left he thought for a moment he could make out two orange-yellow lights in the distance, but when he blinked they vanished. All that was left was stars, shadows, the scents and sounds of the sea, and the total destruction of his dreams.
"You fuckers!" he screamed at the heavens, letting go of the door frame and shaking his fists at the uncaring stars. "I don't know who did this, or how, but I'll find you and make you pay, you bastards!"
"Geoff, what the hell is..." Mags voice cut off sharply as she appeared in the doorway, gaping in total disbelief. "What?"
"They took it all, Mags," he yelled, waving a hand at the total lack of more or less everything in front of them. "We're fucked. All the suits, the laptop, everything. All gone. I can replace the suits but not Ascalon."
She looked faint, staring around dumbly. Behind her, Dobrynja came out and stared around as well, then slid down the remaining wall to sit at the bottom and stare into the night with blank eyes.
"What did this?" she wailed.
"I have no idea," he screamed, waving his fists again. He nearly fell over the edge, only the quick reactions of the woman saving him as she grabbed his right wrist. "But I'm going to find them and feed them their own fucking kidneys, while they watch!"
She stared out into the darkness, then up. A moment later she pointed with a trembling finger. "Geoff. Geoff!"
He finally stopped screaming and turned to her, then followed her finger. His face blanched.
"Oh, Christ, it's Dragon." A moment later he went purple. "IT did this. I don't know how it found us or what it did, but I know it was fucking Dragon!"
White-faced, Mags looked at him. "What do we do? How do we escape?"
"Escape?" The dark laugh came from behind them, both turning to see their compatriot staring out at the night. "We can't escape. We're on a small island surrounded by nearly freezing water over a mile from shore with no one else anywhere within nearly a thousand miles, in February. No equipment, no boat, nothing. We're dead."
"We can't just give up," Mags shouted. "Not after everything we've been through. We have food, water, we can last until it gets warmer. Then we can make some sort of raft and get to shore or something."
"Most of the food was in the store rooms under the machine room," Geoff said in dead tones. "The end of the water tank is just over there, whatever did this cut it in half. We've got years worth of diesel and no generators. The place is running on batteries now, they'll last maybe a day. We lost almost everything useful to whatever did this." He waved a despondent hand at the gouge in the island.
"But..." She seemed to have run out of ideas. After a moment, her mouth moving but nothing coming out, she slumped.
They were still standing there looking at the hole in the ground that represented their hopes and dreams when the Dragon drone unit appeared over the other side of the wide cut in the island and slowly approached, containment foam projectors ready.
Dragon studied the satellite imagery with growing shock. 'What on earth did that?' she wondered. Opening a channel to the Rig in Brockton Bay, she waited until her best friend, the man she loved, finally answered.
"I'm sorry, I was catching a nap," he apologized, looking mildly annoyed. Having to sleep even the small amount he managed to get away with was a constant irritation to him.
"Colin, I'm about five minutes out, but the first satellite is high enough to get some decent images," she said without preamble. "Look." She transmitted a copy of what she was studying to his lab computer. Blinking a little, he turned away from the camera and studied the next monitor along. She saw his eyes widen.
"This is current?"
"Yes. But compare it to the last pass, on the left," she said, remotely moving a cursor with a minor flex of her mind. "There are at least fifteen islands missing, half a dozen more that are piles of rubble, and another one with a hundred yard channel blown all the way through it. What the hell did that?"
"I have absolutely no idea at all," he replied slowly, leaning closer to the monitor. She send more images as the satellite rose higher over the horizon. "It seems to show the destruction started here in the south and headed up the coast for nearly eighty miles. The targets seem random, but they form a rough line terminating in the big island there with the slice missing. Almost like a trail."
"Yes, I thought so as well. And look at this." She overlaid the seismic data from the earlier events. "This is the first and biggest… whatever it was… which seems to start where there should be a small island. It's completely gone. If you extend the vector from that point along the track the data shows and keep going..." She did exactly that, a bright red line moving across the map. "… it intersects that big island right in the middle, crossing over the cut in it here."
"This is… very odd." Armsmaster seemed puzzled, tapping his cheek with a finger as he thought.
"That's one way to put it. I can't help feeling that someone is trying to tell us something."
"What are you going to do?" he asked.
"I'm still aiming at the beginning of all this, I'll deploy the underwater drone and transfer command of it to you, then I'll follow the trail. I need to scan the various places where parts of the landscape are missing, but I'll send an attack drone on ahead to that island. It's the former site of Harrington Harbor, where I suggested the source was heading. Looks like I was right, but I don't have any idea what it was doing there, it's been abandoned since May 2005. No buildings, nothing of interest to anyone except perhaps an archaeologist one day."
"OK, that sounds like a good plan. I'm ready to take control of the drone. I assume the controls are standard?"
"Yes, you'll have no problems with it. ETA is three minutes to drop zone."
She had been decelerating and descending the entire time, slowing from over Mach 3 to only a few hundred miles an hour. Reaching the destination she scanned the area carefully, although she was fairly certain nothing would be there. Whoever was behind this was far too careful to still be around when she arrived.
Sure enough, there was no sign of life, mechanical or biological. Hovering a few feet up over the unusually still water she ejected the underwater probe, which splashed down and activated immediately. "It's online, you have control, Colin."
"Thank you, Dragon," he replied, working the control panel he'd unfolded from his desk while watching the high resolution monitor with the video feed from the device intently. "The image quality is excellent, by the way."
Smiling to herself, she made her digital avatar replicate the expression, then turned the aircraft and slowly moved away from the underwater vehicle, following the estimated path their mystery object had taken. Behind her, Colin drove the probe in a spiral expanding search pattern.
A few minutes later, she arrived at the first destroyed island, scanning it with a number of instruments. It was shattered into large chunks, the granite that formed it having crumbled to powder in a few places. A quick measurement determined that a considerable amount was most likely missing, presumably becoming shrapnel and flying off into the water surrounding it.
The puzzling thing was that she could detect no traces of chemical explosives. With a simulated frown, she scanned it again, with the same result, then started checking for more exotic traces. She didn't find anything.
"This is very odd," she commented. Her friend looked over at her monitor.
"What is?" he asked.
"No traces of any form of explosive, energy weapon, or anything else I can find. It looks like it was a very severe impact with something, but there are no traces of what hit it."
"Strange," he said with a small frown.
"Yes," she agreed, moving on to the next location nearby. This produced basically the same results. "Same here. Although, that said, there are some interesting readings. Whatever did this released enough energy to actually vaporize quite a lot of rock, it condensed out over the remaining material, and some of it has turned to glass from heat. It was a very hard impact. Almost like a very small asteroid hit it."
"But anything small enough to cause so little damage would be far too small to penetrate the atmosphere all the way to the ground," he replied. She sighed.
"Also true. Something of a mystery."
"I haven't found anything here except some odd depressions in the silt, so far," he reported, looking back to the probe screen. "The mud is so fluid it's filled them in already almost entirely, I can't even determine the original shape."
"Craters from smaller weapons, perhaps?" she suggested, curious. He nodded slowly still studying the screen.
"Possibly."
When she'd finished documenting the destroyed island, she returned and recovered the probe, then proceeded towards the site of the linear tremor, deploying it again. This time she watched the feed from it with Colin, as he sent it to the sea bed. Both of them stared in shock.
"What on earth…?" she said, astounded. Where the island should have been was the beginning of a massive scar in the silt and rock, which was slowly filling as mud flowed in from the sides. It was well over two hundred yards wide and got steadily deeper as they moved along it, showing it was essentially circular in cross section. Reaching a maximum depth of about a hundred and forty feet it finally disappeared more than six miles further on.
"I think it was a beam weapon," the other Tinker finally said when they'd finished. She'd recovered and redeployed the probe several times to speed things up. "It's completely straight. The varying depth is consistent with the curve of the surface and the beam following a line of sight path through it. Where the mass of rock that was removed went I have no idea, several tens of millions of tons of material are missing. There's no shrapnel or detritus surrounding the mark, it's completely clean under the mud."
"The sheer power needed to produce that effect is… almost impossible," Dragon noted.
He nodded. "Do you have any other explanation?"
"No. I agree, that's what it looks like. I have no idea how it could be done, though."
"Neither do I," he muttered, watching the monitor intently. "There are more depressions here as well. They form a steady line, or more accurately, two lines, alternating to either side."
"Strange." She inspected the data and agreed with his conclusions. "Let's check the next one."
The pair inspected several of the missing or damage islands, finding similar damage to all of them. Some of the really small ones were mechanically crushed, these coincided with the odd depressions in the silt, while the others were basically vaporized by whatever had made the first scar.
A number of somewhat disconcerting conclusions were beginning to gel in her mind. Looking at her friend, she could read from his face with the ease of much practice that he also was thinking thoughts he didn't really want to.
The depressions in the mud wandered around a little, but went in a more or less straight line towards Harrington Harbor, evenly spaced. The various vanished islands and outcropping were to either side of the track, and there was one thing that stood out about them. "The damage is getting steadily smaller, or at least more concentrated, with less spillover," she noted in the end.
Armsmaster nodded. "I'm certain it was a series of weapons tests where the operator or operators were learning what their device could do. It started with an unexpectedly large output, or… possibly a deliberate attempt to attract attention. But everything after that is showing all the signs of someone slowly dialing in the power level of a weapon and characterizing it."
She nodded her virtual head. "And the two lines of depressions in the silt?"
He looked dubiously at her for some time.
"OK. I know we're both thinking it. I'll say it. They look like… footprints."
Extremely reluctantly, he nodded slowly. "They do. But there's no way they can be! A human form based on that stride length would be over three hundred and fifty feet tall! That's completely impossible. A bipedal machine would be insane at that scale but a living thing is worse. There's no biological material that could sustain the loads required to merely allow an organism that large to simply stand still, never mind walk. Not to mention the impossibly high strength required for muscles and tendons to make it move, or the gigawatts to terawatts of power required. Nothing living could be that big, or even close to it. It would weigh tens of thousands of tons, minimum."
"Which is about the amount of force needed to crush those little islands to gravel like we saw," she remarked, making him sigh.
"Yes, I'd already worked that out. But I still maintain it's impossible. And it doesn't explain the mystery energy weapon, or the impact damage to the first two islands."
She nodded, then went back to piloting the aircraft. "My attack drone has scanned the rest of the islands ahead of us and is now approaching the final island. It should arrive there in about..." Dragon fell silent abruptly, shocked.
"About?" he prompted.
"Colin? There are three people on that island." Sending him the camera view from the attack drone which was holding station half a mile from the unexpected find, she studied it as did he. It was a high resolution thermal view, which clearly showed three human forms on a platform about fifty feet below the top of the island, at the edge of the huge channel blown through it from east to west. One of them was sitting down while the other two appeared to be arguing, based on the flailing arms of one of them.
"It looks to me like that beam weapon was used to very precisely excavate a buried bunker in the rock," Colin said after a moment, as she re-positioned the drone to get a better view. With all its lights off she was confident it was unseen by the three people they were watching. "Look, it missed what would seem to be the living quarters by mere feet, leaving the door they're standing in front of untouched and enough floor on this side of it to allow someone to enter and not fall in. That's a very careful shot."
"There are no records at all of anything like this that I can find," Dragon noted curiously, having quickly and thoroughly checked. "No survivors of the island on record either. How did the weapon user know that facility was there? And what is it?"
She moved the attack drone in a wide orbit of the site, scanning the terrain with every form of sensor it had. "There's a hidden hatch on the other side of the hill at the top, built into the rock. I can detect a number of rooms behind that door as well, but it looks like most of the life support systems were in the piece that's gone. You can see the exposed pipes and wiring and what looks like a very large water tank. Whoever did this worked out exactly how to make it uninhabitable without actually killing anyone. Presuming no one was in the vaporized section, of course."
"This gets stranger by the second," he grumbled. "Can you get a better view of them?"
"I'll have to go in closer to get a decent visible light image but they'll probably see the drone then," she replied, moving the machine as she spoke. Seconds later she nearly suffered an exception.
"I think I might be seeing things," she whispered.
"If you are, so am I," he replied softly.
"That's Geoff Pellick. Saint. The bastard who keeps stealing my dragon suits."
Colin nodded, a smile growing across his face. "It would seem that our mystery person or whatever it is has given you a present," he said, something that was perilously close to a chuckle in his voice. "I suddenly have the distinct feeling that all this was specifically aimed at getting you here. The vector of the first scar intersects this one exactly at that door. There's no way that's a coincidence."
Dragon felt a wild sense of hilarity and gratitude to whoever it was who had arranged all this. "It's a very peculiar way to arrange the capture of a terrorist, but I can live with that," she laughed. "I have more questions than ever. But first..."
She deployed the containment foam projectors and sent the drone in, while simultaneously collecting the underwater probe, then wheeling the aircraft around and heading towards the island at high speed, wanting to get her prisoners into custody as fast as possible.
"I wonder if faking footprints of something impossible was a joke, or just a way to keep us interested?" she asked, as she amused herself foaming the three people, who seems weirdly resigned to it.
"I have no idea," Colin sighed. "It's very odd behavior. Some strange Tinker, perhaps. Out here experimenting with a shiny new toy, detects Saint and his friends, then goes to a lot of trouble to set up this whole scene. It's the sort of thing I could see Leet and his friend doing if they were Heroes. They have a strange sense of humor at the best of times."
"Think it really was them?" she asked. He shook his head.
"No, not really. Whoever is behind this is far more organized than those two and has much better facilities. They know our capabilities far too well, know the satellite paths and how to exploit them, predicted your interest and managed to manipulate you into arriving here within hours of them exposing this base. Not to mention, knowing about Saint's base in the first place. No, this is the work of a fairly large organization, I suspect, one we have no record of. Amusing, but also somewhat worrying."
"At least they seem to be on our side," she commented as she used the attack drone's manipulators to transfer the foamed and immobile prisoners to the secure hold of the transport aircraft. "Got them."
"So it would seem, but I still want to get to the bottom of this." Her friend looked intrigued and slightly concerned. "Sooner or later I'm going to have to report to Director Piggot about all this and I'd like to have something to say other than 'I don't know' to be honest."
Incoming data from a familiar source made Dragon check it carefully, then smile at him with her avatar. "Well, you might get your chance. They're on the move again. SOSUS is tracking the underwater vehicle moving approximately south-east at high speed, estimated at three hundred miles an hour, halfway between here and the edge of the continental shelf. We can go and have a look."
"What about the prisoners?" he asked, not looking like he was particularly worried about their well-being.
"They'll keep," she replied, turning to put the aircraft on an intercept course, then accelerating hard. Muffled swearing came from the secure hold, making her snicker in her own silicon way. "Let's go and see who we have to thanks for all this."