'Calvert's in here,' Taylor commented, smelling a familiar scent trace. She inspected the door, listening carefully to the sounds of someone typing on a keyboard inside the room.
"We can deal with him later," the Varga replied. "I've found the computer room." She paid more attention to her other aspect's senses, both of them having separated as much as they could into individuals for this task. Her demonic friend was inspecting several rows of computer hardware in six foot tall racks, bundles of cables rising from each one to the ceiling and running into suspended metal trays. The room was humming gently to itself, dozens if not hundreds of fans making a steady roar in the background. Two of Coil's men were tending to the machines, one of them armed and looking around every now and then, while the second one was half-inside one of the racks doing something to a server.
'OK, mark it, and we'll get back to that when we're done,' she said. He made a note on the tracking system, uploading the location to the PRT base where Armsmaster and Dragon were monitoring their work.
"Done." He left the room, the cloaking spell meaning that no one noticed the door opening and closing at all.
'Medical bay here,' she added, looking into another set of rooms quite close to what had to be Coil's office. There was a small but well equipped mini-hospital set up there, a surprisingly large amount of top of the line machinery lining the walls and on shelves. Off that room she found a locked storage area, which opened readily enough when she slipped an EDM blade into the lock mechanism and sliced through the bolt. The room contained enough drugs to make the Merchants look startled.
'There must be a couple of million dollars worth of stuff just in this room,' she noted with interest. 'His budget is pretty impressive.'
"He is a wealthy man," the Varga chuckled. "Or, more accurately, was a wealthy man."
'I wonder how he's going to react when he finds out about Lisa's little decoys and works that out,' she snickered. 'I bet he literally screams with rage.'
"Hopefully." They both laughed at the thought. She mapped out the rest of the medical bay, relocked the drugs room with a new bolt on the inside which would prevent the mercenaries accessing it, then left.
Forty-five minutes later they'd finished mapping the entire base. The power room had been located and carefully analyzed, letting them work out exactly what to cut to kill power to various sections of the shelter, and how to disable the generators. All the mercenaries had been photographed and their faces uploaded to the PRT system, along with the three medical personnel who had been in the medbay.
They regrouped in an unused room some distance from the nearest people, closing the door even though it wasn't really necessary. The Varga changed his aspect back to Raptaur, then they reopened communications with the others.
{We've mapped everything now,} Taylor said into her headset. {We found quite a few places that weren't on the plans. Forty-six mercenaries, Calvert himself, and three people in a medical bay of some sort. One doctor and two support workers. We've uploaded pictures of all of them, and all the data we could locate on the first sweep through about the power, environmental, security, armory, and server rooms.}
{There is also a strong smell of human blood coming from a room on the bottom level,} the Varga added soberly. {Not fresh, but in a large enough quantity that I doubt the person or people who supplied it lived through the process. My best guess is a torture chamber.}
{Shit,} Lisa sighed, her voice coming through the headsets a little tinnily, but well. {I can't say that surprises me. Any idea who was involved?}
{The scents suggest Calvert and the doctor, mainly. There are traces of several of the mercenaries, but the amount tells us that they probably weren't in there very much. Probably only delivering people, rather than actually doing the work.}
{Bastard. It's exactly the sort of thing I can imagine him getting his jollies from,} their friend growled. {How many?}
{Victims?} He exchanged a glance with Taylor. {At least half a dozen. Mostly female, young.}
{If you accidentally have to eat him, don't worry about it,} Lisa muttered in disgust. {No one will miss the fucker.}
{It's probably best not to,} Amy added in a hard voice. {I'd quite like to see it, and I'm tempted to help, but the Director needs him alive.}
{Not necessarily fully intact, though,} Lisa pointed out helpfully. {His mouth needs to work. The rest is optional.}
{We'll bear it in mind, Metis,} the Varga snickered. {We'd better talk to Armsmaster and the director, now, to coordinate what we do next.}
{OK. I'll put him on,} Amy replied. {Hang on.}
There was a short delay, before Armsmaster's voice came over the headsets. "Excellent work, Saurial, Raptaur," he said. "Ianthe has filled me in on your progress so far. You are certain you've mapped out the entire base?"
"Yes," Taylor replied. "The place is close to twice the size that's on the official plans. We've explored it fully, located the power room and the relevant places to cut to disable everything we want to, and we're pretty sure we can deal with the computers. Dragon's equipment should let us access it, lock out any deletion of data, and also let us run a nice little psychological program to soften them up and distract them."
"We've also double-checked on the status of the self-destruct explosives," the Varga, speaking through Raptaur, added. "They're definitely inert. There were demolition charges in the server room which have also been deactivated, based on the scent."
"I've looked at the images of the armory, if you can disable that it would be a good idea, since they have a large amount of ammunition and spare weapons. Without access to that they'll be limited to whatever they have available on them," the Tinker remarked.
"That's easy enough, we were planning on sealing up a number of places before we start anything," Taylor told him. "Unfortunately these guys aren't idiots, they're pretty much all patrolling in squads, so we can't easily lock them into various rooms. We might get a few like that, though."
"And you remain undetected?"
"Yes. None of them have the faintest idea we're here. We could probably just run around darting them and get half of them before the rest even noticed, but that might make them go a little mental and someone is going to end up killed considering the amount of weaponry they have. I'd prefer to keep the casualties to a minimum."
Taylor didn't say that she was fairly sure they could simply teleport around the place and drop them all in their tracks as it gave too much away, and in all honesty she wasn't entirely certain that was a sure thing. The mercenaries definitely seemed to be very alert and well trained, utterly unlike the normal sort of people they went after in the gangs. The ultimate outcome wasn't in doubt, of course, but she didn't want to show off any more of their abilities than they had to.
"Impressive. All right, if you want to make your preparations for the attack, you should proceed to the server room and connect Dragon's special equipment. She can talk you through the correct process. Once we have an external connection, I'll talk to the other teams and make sure everyone is aware of the timeline. We need to synchronize our attacks closely to minimize the risk of any traps or avenues of escape."
"All right. We're heading back to the server room now."
"Good."
"Your new comms units seem to have managed to sneak in without them noticing as well," she went on as she and her other aspect left the room and silently slipped through the base to the server room. "There's a hell of a lot of advanced comms gear in the security room, and they're definitely monitoring it very closely, but they don't seem to notice this at all."
"That was what we were hoping for," he replied. "Dragon's latest communications system design utilizes a large number of parallel spread-spectrum compressed microburst channels at very low individual powers, as well as a highly advanced encryption and error-checking methodology. In theory it's essentially indistinguishable from background noise without the key. We're well aware of the PRT communications equipment specifications, of course, and we assumed that Calvert would be utilizing it as it's currently the best available. This new system was designed specifically to avoid detection by such equipment."
"I assume you'll upgrade your equipment to the new standard when the switchover takes place?" the Varga asked curiously.
"Yes, that's the plan. All the new comms units issued today are using this system, so Coil's people can't listen in on us. Using it in such close quarters was the acid test, which it appears it's passed with flying colors."
"Certainly seems to, yes," Taylor said. They'd reached the server room again. Neither mercenary was present any more, presumably having finished the job. "OK, we're here."
"I will hand you over to Dragon now, in that case," Armsmaster replied, sounding satisfied. "I'll be talking to the Director if you need me."
"OK."
Entering the room, they locked the door and sealed it, the Varga quickly applying the cloaking spell to it as well. He was grinning when she looked inquiringly at him.
"I believe this will make them unable to even locate the door now," he chuckled in her head. "That could cause some interesting results."
'I'll say.' She grinned back at him. 'We should do that to the rest of the important places, like the armory and power room.'
"This particular spell won't last long on an inanimate object compared to a living thing, but it should easily manage a few hours," he told her.
'That'll help, and confuse the hell out of them as well,' she noted.
"Hello, ladies," Dragon said as they were both snickering. "Can you upload another image of the server racks, please?"
"Sure, hold on a moment," Taylor told her. "Pity this won't send video."
"It can, but there isn't really enough bandwidth for real time high resolution video, even heavily compressed," the Canadian replied. "The video quality I can get through this sort of communication channel isn't good enough for this work, compared to a couple of still images. If I increase the bandwidth, it makes it more likely to be detectable by hostile forces, so it's the usual sort of trade-off between security and convenience."
"Fair enough. This will work." Taylor held the mapper up and carefully took a number of photos with it in camera mode, turning around to cover the entire room. The upload took thirty seconds or so.
"Good, thank you. All right, you see that console on the left, next to the rack labeled COMSRV1?"
"Yep, got it."
"Under it, two units down, there's one with five blue LEDs on the front panel. The middle one is out."
"OK, I see it."
"Carefully pull it out until you can get to the back of it. There are sixteen ethernet ports on the back. Plug the comms tap into the third one from the right as you're looking down at it."
"Hold on." Taylor squatted down and unscrewed the thumbscrews on the sides of the relevant rack-mounted unit, then gently slid it out a little over a foot. The cables that were carefully folded and bundled behind it accordioned out without any trouble. Handing her one of the pieces of equipment Dragon had made for them, the Varga watched as she plugged it into the relevant port. "OK, done that."
"Great. Now, connect the other cable coming out of the tap into the free port on the unit immediately under the one you just pulled out. It should be reachable from the top, right in the middle."
Supporting the extracted unit on her knee, Taylor reached into the rack and felt around, nodding to herself when a claw slipped into a free ethernet socket in the right spot. Unrolling the other cable, she fed it down the back and pushed it into the socket with a click.
"Done that too."
"Wonderful. Turn the tap on and wait for all three lights to go green. It should take about fifteen seconds."
"OK." She pressed the power button on the small unit in. Three leds lit one after another, in red. Each blinked a few times, then went on solidly, before changing to orange, then green. "All green."
"Good, you're in. It's hacked through the firewalls and gives you complete override control of the entire system. It's also disabled any alarms which would be triggered when we take out the backup sites. Put everything back and stand by, we're nearly ready."
"That was scarily quick for a complete system override," Taylor commented as she carefully reinstalled the extracted unit.
"I designed that equipment," Dragon chuckled. "It doesn't present much of a problem, no matter how good they think they are."
Snickering, she did the thumbscrews up again, then stood up. "No, I guess it wouldn't." Looking at her other aspect, she shrugged. "Now we wait for a bit, I suppose. Let's think up some interesting little amusements for dear Mr Calvert."
The Varga was already prodding the wrist-mounted terminal that they each had a version of, which was connected wirelessly to the now-compromised computer system. He had, of course, as much in the way of computer skills as she did, which was admittedly far less than Dragon did, but also much more than needed for this particular job.
Both of them got to work, exchanging ideas and laughter, while coming up with a number of diversions for the next part of the plan.
Watching the leader of the tech squad he was assigned to check out the front door of Coil's backup computer site through a pair of hi-tech digital binoculars, Eric waited patiently for instructions. The smell of whatever it was that they'd used to cause the diversion was omnipresent, horrible, but muted enough by the respirator mask he had on under his helmet to live with. He'd forgotten the name of the chemical in question, thio-something-or-other, but it was clearly pretty powerful stuff.
Determined to make a good impression, partly to keep Aunt Carol from glaring at him, partly to stop his mother sighing a little, and partly so he didn't get the PRT troopers making any more jokes about his age, he simply sat and watched them work. They obviously knew exactly what they were doing and were only awaiting the word to begin. He checked the time on the transport van's dashboard clock, seeing that it was just after seven in the morning, the March day beginning to lighten rapidly as the sun rose higher. Still chilly and damp due to the time of year and their proximity to the bay, he was very glad for his new costume, which was easily keeping him comfortable.
After a discussion with a couple of techs, the sergeant, a woman in her early thirties by the name of Adler, turned to him. "Shielder, we're fairly sure that there is an automatic gun emplacement concealed in the building across the street from the entrance to the data silo." She showed him a tablet which had an image of the site in question, taken through a very good telephoto lens, then zoomed in on a second floor window. Tapping the screen she highlighted the window, producing a false-color graphic that did indeed suggest there was something rather lethal-looking in the darkness behind the glass.
"This looks like a mark seven automated 12.7mm gatling gun pod with fully-autonomous target tracking and fire control, the sort of thing we have on the Rig as a short range anti-aircraft battery. It's aimed directly at the entrance of the silo. There's a possible second one in the next window along but we can't get a good enough angle on it to be certain."
"Vicious," he commented, inspecting the image, then looking up at the street, squinting at the location a quarter of a mile away. "He's not taking prisoners, is he?"
"No. That thing will completely shred lightly armored vehicles like this at that range, and what it would do to body armor..." She trailed off with a look of distaste. "How the fuck he got his hands on at least one of them, I have no idea at all, but someone is going to pay for it. The good part is that the ammunition capacity is only about fourteen hundred rounds without the associated automatic reloader, which is much too large to be present from these images. The bad part is that it can go through those fourteen hundred rounds in about twenty seconds, they're probably the armor piercing explosive incendiary ones, and the gun AI is a fucking good shot. If it lights off when we're in range, we're dead in seconds."
"And you think it will fire up if we try getting into the silo, I guess."
"Practically guaranteed. That's the only reason it's there. He obviously doesn't care about civilian casualties, on a normal day that thing opening fire would probably kill everyone on the street. What I'm thinking is that you can form a force-field between us and the weapon or weapons, in case it decides to fire on us. We could attempt entry on the building to shut it down, but if it was me I'd have booby-trapped the hell out of the place, so we have to assume that he did as well. The easiest method may be an RPG round through the window, which has the side-effect of destroying the place and eliminating a lot of evidence, and might well set fire to the entire building. I'd prefer to avoid that."
"OK." Eric nodded his understanding. "So if I just block it from us, we wait for it to run out of ammo?"
"That's the idea. It'll get pretty loud for a while but from your file your force-field is easily up to the job. Just keep it there until we're sure it's out. We'll deal with the booby-traps, assuming that the Family countermeasures Saurial and Raptaur used haven't already done that. We can't be completely sure until we check."
"I can do that."
"Great. We're waiting on the word to go, but the latest information is that it shouldn't be much longer. As soon as the main assault starts, they'll shut down the system, and we'll start our move here and at the other backup as well." The sergeant looked satisfied.
Turning to her squad, she got reports from all of them, then they went back to waiting, sipping coffee in silence. Eric wished he'd made some more ham sandwiches at his cousin's house, as he was getting hungry again, but decided all he could do was live with it for now.
Not to mention that the residual smell was definitely taking the edge off…
"So I just stand in the way?" Vicky asked doubtfully. "Will that work?"
Her squad leader shrugged. "You tell me. You're invulnerable, right? And that costume the Family gave you is supposed to be practically indestructible as well from what your file says."
She was interested about how much information the PRT actually had on her, since it was obvious from what the man had said that her information was being regularly updated. That said he was correct. While her invulnerability wasn't quite as absolute as the PRT appeared to believe, something they didn't mention to others, in combination with her EDM-lined costume it was basically true that no mere armor-piercing high velocity round was going to cause too much of an issue. Not even at three or four thousand of them per minute.
However, she didn't think she was going to really be able to shield the entire squad with her body, not without risking something getting through. Unless…
"I can just hover in front of the thing," she said. "Or, why don't I just attack it and wreck it before it opens fire in the first place."
"Can you do that without bringing the entire building down on top of you?" he asked with a small grin. "Based on past episodes..."
She frowned, making the man smirk. "I don't always have to smash the entire place up, you know," she mumbled.
"You don't have to, true enough, but it does seem to be a habit," he snickered. At her glare, he spread his hands. "Just saying. If you're sure you can take it out and leave the rest intact, that would certainly be the easiest solution. We're pretty sure there's only one weapon, since there isn't anywhere else that's large enough to conceal one in range. There might be something else inside the place but we won't know for sure until we breach it." He grinned more widely. "You get to go first."
"Oh, thanks," she sighed. "OK. That's what I'm here for. Fine. I'll go and beat up that gun, then kick the door in when you need me to."
"That's the spirit," he smiled. Glancing at his watch, he turned to one of the other troopers. "Daniels, any word yet?"
"No, sergeant, just the last check in telling us to hold position."
"OK."
They went back to waiting, keeping an eye on the boarded up warehouse in the distance, which had a lot more computing equipment in it than the sign over the door announcing it had belonged to a long-defunct automotive spares business would suggest. Vicky wondered how the rest of her family was doing, and how long they were likely to have to wait before something interesting happened.
Listening to the various PRT personnel talking to each other, Amy waited for the next part to begin. She'd modified her bioconstruct's sense of smell to filter out the thioacetone almost entirely and had discreetly done the same for Lisa. It hadn't affected either of them all that much in the first place, but it was still fairly unpleasant.
{How much longer do you think?} she quietly asked the black lizard standing next to her. Lisa was intently watching the various monitors in the command post, undoubtedly having a far better idea of the overall situation than almost anyone there.
{Only a couple of minutes, they're just double-checking that all the external teams are in place. The systems techs are ready to shut the existing system down any time now.}
{Coil's people will know as soon as it happens, won't they?}
{I'd think so, yes,} Lisa nodded. {From what Taylor said they're pretty competent. Coil isn't an idiot either, unfortunately. He'd be a lot less dangerous if he was. It's going to make them very worried when all their spying gear goes dead. When the external links are cut too, they'll go on the defensive and barricade themselves in even more than they are now, waiting for an attack.}
{Not realizing that the most dangerous people have been in there with them for the last hour or so,} Amy snickered. Lisa grinned at her in a very toothy way.
{They're going to get pretty upset when they work that out,} she replied happily. {Even odds that they end up surrendering and asking for the PRT to rescue them from the horrible monsters…}
Both of them laughed for a moment. {That would be hysterical,} Amy said, shaking her head with amusement. {And I can see it happening, actually.}
{I wonder if dear old Thomas has worked out what I did to him yet?} her friend added maliciously. {Or is that going to be a nice surprise for later?}
{Either way works,} Amy chuckled. Armsmaster, who was talking to Miss Militia and Legend, looked over at them for a moment, then turned to Director Piggot who came out of the elevator as it dinged and the doors slid open. She was wearing one of the respirators and seemed both slightly unwell and rather anticipatory.
Walking over to the senior Protectorate people, she had a short conversation, then nodded. "We're ready to begin, everyone. The next stage begins in three minutes exactly."
A wave of activity swept through the parking garage, all the people at the temporary command equipment suddenly jumping into action. Amy reached up and tapped her earpiece. {Three minutes, Saurial,} she said calmly.
{Got it,} Taylor's Saurial voice said with a definite note of eagerness. {We're ready to initiate operation 'Terrify the Humans' on your command.}
{Don't get too carried away.}
Lisa shook her head. {Ignore her. Get as carried away as you want. Aim it at Calvert.}
{That's definitely the plan,} their friend giggled. {He's not going to forget this, I guarantee it.}
{Just make sure you record everything, I want to watch this over and over,} the black and scarlet reptile said with a certain amount of anger in her voice, although it was suppressed enough that only Lisa and Taylor heard it.
{We will.} Taylor sounded calm and certain now, making both her friends sure that the next part was going to be entertaining from their point of view.
"Thirty seconds, everyone," Miss Militia called. She added "Collection teams, stand by on Coil-1 and Coil-2, apprehend on my mark and isolate. Switchover teams, ready for complete shutdown of local nodes. Backup teams one and two, begin attack when signaled. Everyone else, get ready for old system disconnect."
Everyone on the new network heard her through their earpieces. Armsmaster and Dragon were each working rapidly on a pair of keyboards, checking a number of screens as information scrolled past in dozens of windows.
"Five seconds… three, two, one, mark!"
The military-themed cape snapped the last word, and dozens of people went into action.
Quite a few things happened in rapid succession as a result…
"Mark!"
Vicky heard the word through her earpiece. She looked at the squad leader. "We're moving in, people!" he called sharply. "Habib, Andrews, get ready for dynamic entry. Stay behind Glory Girl until we know there are no traps. Johannsen, you and your guys get in there and shut the entire place down, you know what to do. Keep alert for booby-traps. Glory Girl, take out that gun, then meet us at the entrance. Go, everyone!"
"On it, Sergeant," she replied crisply, before accelerating down the street fast enough that her wake left dust rising into the air in swirls. Behind her the PRT truck roared into life and started to follow.
Doing a ninety-degree turn at over two hundred miles an hour as she reached the hidden gun emplacement, she smashed through the window and aimed herself at the now-revealed weapon system. Even as she entered, it whined into life, the barrels spinning up to a remarkably high speed almost instantly. By the time she was half-way across the room it had slewed to track her and begun firing, the autonomous system aiming precisely at her center of mass.
The noise was suddenly unbelievable. Hundreds of explosive rounds in an almost solid stream screamed out of the firing weapon, strobing flashes of flame reaching six feet past the muzzle. She felt very little of the actual detonations of the rounds, the EDM-lined suit absorbing them and redistributing the energy in an amazingly effective manner, but the sheer force involved slowed her instantly. Surprised, she pushed harder, overcoming the huge amount of flying metal fragments, reached the weapon, then attacked it with her fists.
At that point it was basically game over for the thing. It didn't last more than a couple of seconds before she'd grabbed the rotating barrel assembly and ripped it loose in a shower of bent parts and sparks and a screech from the motor driving it. A rising whine followed by a loud thump heralded the motor overspeeding and dying from the sudden lack of load. What was left of the turret panned back and forth, until she located the main control unit and simply punched it, turning it into scrap on the spot.
Silence, broken by the ringing in her ears, fell. She shook her head and slapped the side of her helmet without any real result. 'Have to get Amy to check that,' she thought a little dizzily. While it hadn't lasted long, the sheer noise had been more than a little disorientating. She was very grateful to Saurial for her new costume, knowing that without it even she would have had problems. Dropping the remains of the barrel mechanism on the floor of the room she looked around, raising an eyebrow at the damage. The ricocheting shell fragments had perforated every surface she could see, breaking the other two windows and making a very impressive mess.
Vicky walked over to where a small fire was burning, a couple of floorboards smoldering from red-hot metal bits, bending down and pulling them up, then tossing them out the window. After she'd checked that there was no further risk of fire destroying the building, she flew back through the window and down to the PRT truck, which had stopped outside the target warehouse.
"Gun's dead, Sergeant," she reported. "The room's a mess from the shrapnel and I put out a fire, but most of the weapon is still intact."
"Good work, Glory Girl," he nodded. Turning to the rest of the squad, he watched as the entry team ran a number of different devices over the main door, carefully checking the results.
"Sergeant, there are faint traces of nitrogen oxides that indicate there were explosives present here, but they're too low for anything to still be active. We think that the Family agent deactivated some C4 charges around the door. There are two separate tripwires on the door, we've bypassed both of them, but I can't guarantee there's nothing else." Corporal Andrews shrugged as he made his report.
"Good enough." The squad leader turned to Vicky and raised an eyebrow. "After you, ma'am," he said, gesturing to the door. "Please minimize damage, we want the equipment intact."
"Of course," she nodded with a smile. "Stand back, everyone."
All the squad members took cover behind the armored vehicle, except for Habib and Andrews, who were crouched behind a pair of Tinker Tech riot shields, watching carefully and still using some sort of scanning device. She floated over to the door, inspected it, then punched the lock. Hard.
The door, which on the outside looked like a perfectly normal exterior industrial metal portal, was clearly much more than it appeared. There was an echoing BOOM! and it shook slightly, but nothing else happened. Looking at the dent in the outer surface which perfectly corresponded to her fist, she shook her head. "Tough door," she commented.
It took four more hits of increasing force before something finally snapped. She was sure she could have smashed it down with one really solid hit, or simply flown into it at high speed, but that risked making the entire door end up coming loose and destroying whatever was on the other side. She didn't want to let these guys down and ruin the raid, so she was going carefully. When the lock failed with a crunch, she grabbed the edge of the door, sunk her fingers into the metal, and yanked hard, ripping it out of the frame towards her and against the direction the hinges were meant to go.
It screeched open, until it was sufficiently out of the way that she could see in. Inside was darkness, aside from dozens of small blinking lights at the far end of a bare concrete corridor. Stepping through the opening she twitched when there was a rapid series of very loud bangs, closely enough together that they almost merged into a single roar that went on for a few seconds. Thousands of metal fragments bounced around the place and raised a cloud of dust.
"Holy shit!" she yelped, instinctively covering her helmet with an arm. "What the fuck?" When the noise and metal hail abruptly stopped, she lowered her arm and looked around, then up. Mounted on the ceiling above the door was another gun emplacement, a much smaller one that sported two automatic shotguns with large cylindrical magazines. Both these were now empty and there were ejected twelve-bore cartridges all over the floor.
She looked down and saw that the ground was covered in both buckshot and a dozen or so enormous slugs, all flattened where they'd impacted either her suit or the walls. She suspected that normal PRT-issue body armor wouldn't have saved anyone who'd been standing right where she was at the time the guns fired. "I think it's clear now," she said over her headset. "The guns are out of ammo."
"OK, we're coming in," Corporal Andrews replied, both he and his colleague cautiously entering behind her a few seconds later, their shields raised in front of them. He looked up at the booby-trap weapons emplacement, shaking his head in mild wonder. "Really didn't want anyone getting in here, did he?"
"Antisocial bastard," his companion snorted, scanning the corridor. Vicky stayed in front of them just in case as they slowly and carefully moved down the passageway, checking for more booby traps. "Found a deactivated mine here in the wall," he added a little later, running the device over the concrete, then pulling out a small spray can and quickly spraying a circle with an X in the middle of it in green paint. "C4-based explosively formed penetrator with a copper plate. Nasty."
"What would that do?" Vicky asked curiously.
"Punch a hole six inches in diameter through practically anything that got in the way," the man grunted. "At this range, even Armsmaster's armor would feel it. Here's another one." He took another step, then jumped as there was a sharp pop from inside the wall where he'd marked it, some dust floating down. "Looks like the detonator still worked," he added when he'd recovered, smiling slightly. "The main charge is inert, luckily."
Vicky peered at the floor. "What set it off?"
"Pressure switch," he replied, kneeling down and scanning the ground, before getting up again.
They found four more traps on the way to the far end of the corridor, all of which had been deactivated by whatever Saurial and Raptaur had used, some invention of Ianthe's as far as Vicky could tell. The PRT troopers were relieved that they didn't need to disarm the explosives in the normal fashion. Each one went pop as they tripped the sensors, but nothing untoward happened otherwise. By the last one they didn't even flinch, although Vicky was inwardly amused to notice they still stayed behind her the entire way.
When they reached the end, all three looked into the large room which was absolutely filled with computer equipment. "How much do you want to bet there's another trap on the other side of this doorway?" Habib commented.
"Sucker bet," Andrews replied, pulling out a small mirror on a telescopic pole, which he very carefully and slowly moved past the threshold, tipping it from side to side. Squinting at it, he nodded. "Same as the other one, right about… there." He pointed at the wall above the door.
Vicky looked up, then floated up to the ceiling. "Here?" she asked, putting her hand on the concrete.
"Six inches to the left and down three," the man said, double-checking, then stepping back.
"OK." She punched a hole completely through the wall in one hit, grabbed the metal on the other side, and yanked hard. Most of a very bent automatic shotgun came through in her fist in a cloud of concrete dust and gravel, while the remains of the other one and the mount dropped to the floor.
"Good work." The corporal looked approving. He scanned ahead of them very thoroughly. "Just the self-destruct charges as far as I can see, C4 again, on every cabinet. All deactivated. We're clear." He'd broadcast the last words to the rest of the squad.
"All right," the sergeant replied immediately. "Johannsen, you're up. Quick as you can, please."
"Sergeant," the other man said in acknowledgment. Vicky looked over her shoulder to see three more troopers enter and jog towards them, two of them carrying a considerable amount of equipment and the third unreeling a drum of optical cable that led back to the truck. She moved out of the way to let them past. They spread out through the server room, inspecting everything rapidly while exchanging technical comments that were far past her level.
In a surprisingly short period of time they'd connected their equipment to the stuff present in the room and were through all the firewalls and security. Soon after that the lead tech nodded in satisfaction. "We've disabled the protection and traps, we're copying the entire data-set off. All wireless backup links are down, and we've cut the hardlines," he reported. "This site is completely isolated."
"Stand by, I'll call it in," the squad leader replied. Everyone waited in silence, the sound of dozens of fans humming in the background, as he contacted headquarters.
"Mark!"
Eric glanced at Sergeant Adler. She nodded. "We'll do it just like we planned."
"OK." He formed a force-field platform and stepped onto it, then floated it a little erratically to the front of the PRT truck, where he anchored it to the vehicle. Forming another one vertically in the air in front of them, which wrapped around the truck some ten feet out to the sides all the way past the back, he motioned to the trooper behind the wheel. The truck jerked into motion and headed down the street towards the target location, two troopers walking inside the shield on each side, weapons at the ready and very alert.
Looking around somewhat nervously, while feeling like a hood ornament, Eric made damn sure to keep his fields as hard as he could make them. When they arrived at the destination, he expanded the one around the truck to cover the door into the building, then jumped down to the road.
Sergeant Adler looked around carefully, then nodded approvingly. "Can you push that side out as close to the building as you can, please?" she asked, pointing towards the known gun installation and the place they suspected one might be. "We'll try opening the door and see if that's enough to trigger it into firing. If that doesn't work, we'll have to go in and destroy them, but my guess is that without the right sequence of operations they'll open up on us."
Eric did as requested, making the gunward side of the visibly glowing hard light shield sit a foot in front of the buildings. One of the troopers was pointing some sort of scanner towards the hidden weapon. He adjusted it carefully, then slowly panned it across the brickwork, before looking up. "Definitely a weapon in there, I'm reading active electronics consistent with a targeting system. The other location has one as well, both aimed right at us. Move the truck back ten feet, will you, Zach?"
The driver, who was hanging out the window, nodded and put the vehicle into reverse, slowly backing up.
"Yes, both weapons are tracking the vehicle," the man noted. He put the scanner back on his vest, then turned to Adler. "I'm almost certain they'll fire on us if we open the door."
"All right, let's see if you're right. Jones, breaching charges on the door, please."
The addressed trooper pulled a small black disk from his pack and slapped it over the lock, then repeated the action on three places down the other side of the door over the hinges. Pulling the pins on all four charges, which made them beep and start flashing a small green light, he took cover behind the truck. Without being asked, Eric put another faintly glowing force-field between the door and the vehicle, making Sergeant Adler nod approvingly.
"Fire in the hole!" the trooper shouted, before he flipped up two safety covers on the remote control he was holding and pressed both buttons with his thumbs.
The next thirty seconds were quite exciting.
With a loud bang, all four charges fired, shattering the door and part of the frame into fragments which bounced off the force-field causing lots of small points of light. The remains of the door tipped inwards and crashed into the floor, almost instantly followed by a very rapid series of explosions and a hell of a lot more shrapnel as something inside started firing.
At the same time, there was a loud whine from two different places across the street for less than two seconds, before it was drowned out by a thunderous roar as both gun emplacements opened up on the truck. Eric staggered a little at the sudden load on his shield, having been taken by surprise by the insane volume of explosive shells hitting it. Everyone hit the deck, except him and Adler, who just stood and watched with interest, her hands over her ears. Above her respirator, her eyes showed she was pleased and impressed.
The field glittered with thousands of points of bright light as each shell detonated on it, the guns walking the fire pattern back and forth across the entrance to the backup site. Eric, ears ringing, kept his concentration on maintaining the field until the firing finally and abruptly ceased as the weapons ran out of ammunition.
"Fuck me!" he shouted when he could finally hear again. The whine was still coming from inside the buildings, but the windows and much of the walls surrounding them were utterly gone, ripped to shreds under the onslaught from the guns. "That was loud!"
"Great job, Shielder." Sergeant Adler slapped him on the back. "You four, go and make sure those weapons are shut down. Be careful of booby traps." She pointed at several people as they picked themselves off the tarmac. "Make sure there aren't any fires."
All four men nodded, two each going across the road and heading into the buildings, out of which a surprising amount of smoke was now coming. Eric let them through his shield but kept it in place, just in case. After that introduction to Coil's paranoia and firepower, he wasn't taking any chances.
It was only a few minutes later when the two teams came back. "Three small fires, extinguished now, Sergeant," one of the men reported. "Both weapons are disabled and locked down. Nothing else found."
"OK." Adler nodded. "Let's get in there." She regarded the open doorway with suspicion. "I'll lay money on there being other traps. Shielder, can you make a sort of force-field tunnel through that?"
Eric dropped his current force-fields, then went over to where he could carefully look into the opening. It led down a plain hallway for about fifty feet and turned right at the end. "Sure," he replied. "I can push it out into a cylinder with the end covered, and we can walk down it."
"Excellent. All right, entry team, you're with Shielder. Tech team, ready your equipment, we're running behind schedule and I want to get in there as soon as it's cleared. Let's go." She stood to the side as Eric and two troopers cautiously entered the ruined doorway, the boy projecting a protective force-field all around them as they slowly moved into the building.
He glanced up at the ceiling, seeing that the firing that had happened when the door was breached had come from some sort of device on the ceiling. It was now hanging inert, having run out of ammo as well. Returning his attention to the corridor, he looked around, alert for anything dangerous. Both troopers were scanning the entire place, moving one step at a time.
"Stop," one of them abruptly snapped, holding up a hand. Eric froze, pushing as much power into the field as he could.
"Mine in the wall to the right," the man said, pointing. "I'm reading a pressure sensor in the floor."
"Got one on the other side," the other trooper said after a couple of seconds work. "About six feet further in. Both read as inert."
"Good thing." The first man stared at the wall. "They're buried in the concrete, we'd have a hell of a job getting at them without them going off if they were still active." He looked around, then at Eric. "Your force-field would take it, I guess, but it would get hellishly loud."
After some discussion, they deliberately tripped the sensor, hearing a sharp crack! sound from inside the wall. Nothing else happened, making all three relax. Moving down the corridor a little more confidently but still very carefully, they triggered the rest of the mines they found, eventually reaching the end and rounding the corner to find another doorway just a little further on. Five minutes later, after disabling another shotgun-based trap with a force-field and the long pole on which had been placed a small explosive charge, the tech teams were in the process of hacking the servers.
"Very good work, Shielder," Sergeant Adler commented, glancing at him while they stood to the side and watched the squad do their job. "That would have taken a lot longer without your help, and could well have resulted in casualties."
"Thanks, Sergeant," he replied, smiling. "It was sort of nerve-racking but I'm glad to help out."
She nodded, before turning away to talk to one of the technical experts, then made a call back to the control center. Eric leaned on the wall and listened, wondering how the others were getting along.
The lights flickered several times, went out for a second, then came back on. Lisa looked up at them, frowning. {That's not good,} she commented to Amy, who was also looking.
Another bout of flickering immediately followed her words, and both of them felt the concrete under their feet shake very slightly, a faint but deep thud transmitted through it. All the main lights went out at the same time. Emergency lighting kicked in instantly, running on batteries. None of the new equipment the technical people were working on had any trouble, running as it was on a set of Dragon's generators which were off to the rear of the garage, but the technicians themselves became quite excited.
{Crap. What happened?} Amy asked.
{They missed at least one booby-trap,} Lisa snarled. {That fucker is sneaky.} Letting her power have free run, she watched everyone working frantically, listening and thinking hard. {There was some sort of unusual explosive in the power distribution room and a couple of critical nodes,} she finally said, moving to peer at one of the screens that showed the current status of the original computer system, which was now entirely dead. {Some low-priority and innocent-looking process running on a sub-processor here, tapped through the environmental control network over here…} A claw tip traced out the path the rogue data connection had taken as her ability fed her data. The tech at the console looked at her, then over at Armsmaster who was approaching them. She switched to English, and politely asked, "Excuse me, can you just shift over a little for a moment, please?"
The man seemed startled, but when Armsmaster made a motion of approval, he wheeled his chair to the side. Lisa took his place and quickly typed on the keyboard, bringing up several more screens of data in rapid succession. The Tinker watched with interest, as did Amy and the tech. "There. A charge in this conduit here severed the main feed to the power room around this point," she said, indicating a location on a schematic of the PRT building wiring.
"It automatically switched over to the backup feed, and started the generators at the same time. Another charge destroyed the frequency synchronization unit right at the critical moment and the generators didn't come into sync with the mains power fast enough. That caused a surge which blew the entire power regulator section and shut everything down, including the battery backup. The entire building is totally dead except for anything that has an independent battery like the lights."
Armsmaster was inspecting the data closely, nodding as he did and looking reluctantly impressed, although whether it was from her deductions or Coil's annoyingly complete forethought she wasn't sure yet. "That is sufficiently convoluted to be one of Calvert's plans," he sighed. "And it must have been put into place during the last refit eight years ago. Non-standard explosives, I would imagine, as they'd otherwise have been detected in our security sweeps. Probably some Tinker design, disguised as something innocuous."
"And it relied on letting the power feed itself do most of the damage," she added, also almost impressed. "Several hundred kilowatts of electricity can vaporize a lot of wiring."
"We're going to have to bypass half the power room," the technician complained, sounding miffed. "It'll take hours."
"No choice, though," Armsmaster said with resignation. "It won't affect our operation as we're running on the new portable units, but the new system is down too as a result. We'll have to pull some of the spare generators out of stock and connect them for the moment to get it back in operation. I'll arrange that now. Metis, good work, thank you for the quick analysis. Please tell your cousins what happened."
"OK, Armsmaster," she nodded, moving out of the way. Amy was listening with interest, and turned to her with an inquisitive look.
{Think there are any more surprises?} she asked quietly, while the Tinker went to talk to Dragon, Miss Militia, and Director Piggot.
Lisa shrugged. {My power thinks that's probably it for Coil's backup plans here. These people are very good, they found several levels of traps, but the problem is that he's had literally years to plan for all this and his ability definitely let him try a lot of things to settle on the least likely to be discovered methods. This is probably the backup to the backup to the backup, meant to create enough chaos that he could escape while everything was shut down. If it wasn't for the way they're already running on the new system for the most part, it would have completely paralyzed the PRT in the city for hours while they tried to figure out what the hell was going on.}
{But it won't have that much effect now, I guess?}
{It's going to cause a lot of little problems, they'll be finding issues for days, but I doubt it's going to slow us down all that much.} Lisa reached up and tapped her earpiece. {Guys? Minor development, but nothing too serious for you at least…}
She began telling Taylor and the great demon what had happened, while the PRT staff dealt with the problem.
"Mark!"
Taylor glanced at her double, both of them grinning.
'We're up. Let's go and cause some trouble,' she said with a silent chuckle.
"Indeed," the demon replied. Turning both tracking and mapping units off, they stored them in one of her pouches. "I suggest that we dismiss the second aspect for now, as we won't need it yet and we've had it active for an hour and a half," he added. "It's best to let us rest for a while as we set the scene, I think."
'Fine by me,' she replied, accepting the data terminal, camera, and earpiece he handed her, before dropping the spare aspect. Turning the device off she put it away, then looked around the computer room to make sure everything was in place. Satisfied, and after reinforcing the cloaking spell on the door, she formed a sheet of EDM over the back of it just to be on the safe side then teleported to the armory.
They spent the next few minutes popping all over the base, sealing then hiding critical openings. None of the mercenaries noticed as they lost the power room, the armory, and the medbay. In the latter, she watched the doctor reading a file, peering over his shoulder to see it was the medical report on one of the mercenaries, then looked back at the two other staff members who were playing cards in the main room. After a little thought, she formed a very sharp needle-pointed instrument coated with Amy's latest soporific and poked him in the neck with it, watching with satisfaction as the man abruptly slumped in his chair, asleep in seconds.
'That'll keep him quiet for a few hours,' she said with a nod. Moving into the other room, she quickly did the same to both the medical technicians, grabbing one of them as he started to fall out of his chair. Putting them both on a couple of gurneys, she retrieved the doctor and did the same with him. She finished up with manacles for all three to be safe.
"That was fairly straightforward," the Varga said with amusement.
'These guys were easy,' she snickered. 'No real challenge so we may as well get them out of the way right at the beginning.'
Her earpiece made the little sound that indicated one of her friends had come on the line. After Lisa had filled them in on the latest problem, she shook her head a little. {That guy is a pain,} she grumbled.
{Tell me about it,} Lisa replied with an irritated tone in her voice. {Armsmaster isn't happy, and the director is looking like she wants to beat the bastard to death with his own severed arm right now.}
{Not his greatest fan, is she?} Taylor asked whimsically, getting a snort of agreement back.
{She hates him even more than I do,} Lisa agreed. {Go and fuck with him for a while. Make it good.}
{That, I can do.} Grinning to herself, Taylor disappeared from the medical facility, leaving three faintly snoring men behind.
"FUCK!"
Thomas picked a paperweight off his desk and threw it across the room to shatter on the wall. Slumping back in his chair, he dropped that timeline and sulked. It was getting worse. Now, every timeline scenario he tried that involved anything outside his base in any way went bizarre almost instantly. Half the ones inside his base ended either in that horrible sudden void with no warning, or some of the most peculiar things he'd ever encountered, then the void.
The worst of it was he had absolutely no idea what was causing it.
Was it an attack? Some interaction with another power, possibly even an accidental one? Some medical issue? Alien intervention? God hating him?
Cauldron doing something to him?
That last one was the worst and most worrying thought. His contact number no longer worked at all for the person who years ago had given him his power. They didn't even hang up on him, it just didn't connect. No matter what he'd tried, he'd been unable to locate any trace of the people involved. He was hesitant to attempt any of the more dangerous methods of attracting their attention, for two reasons; One was that it might not work, the other was that it might.
He shivered slightly. Those people were… dangerous.
Not quite at that level of desperation, he yet again went over a list of other possibly useful contacts that might help with the situation he'd found himself in, while absently swallowing some more painkillers to deal with the tension headache he seemed to suffer from almost continuously these days. Before all this had started he'd had tentative plans to recruit several other Parahumans, both individuals and groups, but hadn't had a chance to do so to any others than the Undersiders before everything went to shit.
Circus had been one of the ones on his list, as the cape was a very skilled thief among other useful abilities, but right now he didn't see how a thief would help anyway. Not to mention that as far as he could tell Circus had legged it some weeks ago, leaving Brockton Bay for parts unknown.
He rather wished he'd taken that as a hint and done the same…
The Travelers were also on his list, being potentially very powerful and with a mix of powersets that he had a number of uses for. Unfortunately he'd not gotten that far in his planning before the lockdown, so even if he managed to contact them now, the best they could hope to achieve was to cause chaos, and most likely not in a way that would actually help him very much. Not to mention that he didn't have very much to offer them as temptation to come and work for him, since trying to hire someone then asking them to rescue him from his own base wasn't going to give the right impression. So that was out, leaving aside the fact that the last information he had on them was weeks old and somewhere on the other side of the country anyway.
He had enough information on a number of capes, both heroes and villains, that he might be able to apply pressure to get some sort of help. The problem with that plan was that it wasn't something he could walk back on, once he started blatantly violating the Rules the word would get around and without being in the right position to take advantage of it, he was at least as likely to end up finding they attacked rather than fell into line. The whole long-term plan had required him to be in a much more powerful place before he could use such data for his own benefit. Attracting any attention to himself right now seemed unwise, especially that sort of attention.
He sipped some water, massaging his brow with his other hand. What to do? Sooner or later his mercenaries would lose patience and there was a limit to the number he could make examples of before he had a mutiny on his hands. The one who had decided to get clever with his documents had been bad enough, Smith had nearly lost it when he'd shot the man in front of him, despite being ready to do it himself. He didn't take betrayal any better than Thomas himself did, but he also wanted to deal with discipline issues in his own way.
And the worst of it was he still didn't know where those fucking documents had ended up. He just hoped they'd been lost or destroyed, since the information in them could really bite him in the ass if it came out at the wrong moment. However, despite a lot of paranoid checking in the weeks since they vanished, nothing seemed amiss, which was a definite relief. He'd gotten lucky there.
Not to mention that the way the Undersiders had vanished so completely had taken him by surprise. He'd been waiting for the PRT to make a move against him using the information that Tattletale could easily have given them, but so far nothing had happened. The purge of his disposable agents in the organization had worried him a lot, but since his most important and well hidden ones remained, it looked like it really was something caused by Kaiser not being as smart as he thought he was. It suggested that the disappearance of the group was possibly down to something else. Perhaps Lung had managed to kill them all after all?
He shook his head in massive irritation. This whole last two months had been dreadful, had put his plan back enormously, and he was sure was giving him more gray hairs than his age deserved. When he finally worked out what was happening and dealt with it, he was definitely going to have a holiday.
Closing his eyes he leaned back and waited for the painkillers to work, mulling over his next move in his head. There was still time to recover the plan if he could only work out what the problem was and fix it. He was smart, and devious, so it was only a matter of time.
Taylor watched the tall thin man lean his chair back, a pained expression on his face. She was standing not ten feet away, cloaked and unnoticeable, musing on the most entertaining way to screw with Coil.
'I wonder what he'd do if I just dropped the cloak and shouted BOO!' she giggled.
The Varga grinned inside her mind. "Possibly have a coronary," he chuckled. "But Lisa would be annoyed, that would be much too quick."
'I have Amy's healing thingies with me, I could bring him back,' she suggested with an evil snicker.
"True." He was radiating amusement into her mind. "Let's call that plan B. Plan A is much funnier."
'Yep.' Prodding her communicator with a claw, she added out loud, even though the other occupant of the room couldn't hear her, {I'm going to start the psyops campaign now. We'll need the outside links to stay up for a little longer, I'll tell you when to cut it, OK.}
{All right,} Lisa replied happily. {DO NOT forget to video his reaction or I won't speak to you for a week.}
{Can't have that, dear cousin,} she snickered. {Camera on, action about to start. Talk in a while.}
{Enjoy yourselves,} her friend laughed.
{We will, I guarantee it.} Dropping the comms link, she raised her computer terminal and selected the right icon, tapping it then typing with two fingers for a moment. With an evil grin, she pressed another icon, then watched the result.
Opening his eyes when his computer made an odd sound, Thomas turned his head to look at the screen. After a frozen pause, his eyes opened even more widely.
All Your Base Are Belong To Us
He gaped at the message box that had opened up across the width of the screen, displaying the message in large letters. After a second, he glanced at the video wall to see to his horror every single screen had the same message on, and nothing else.
"What…!"
Then the lights went out.