CHAPTER 129: MI6

Beneath the heart of London is an old complex. This was used in the Second World War as the meeting place of the heads of government and military for the planning of the war itself. It was too difficult to upgrade to modern electronics and had fallen into disuse. Yet in that disuse it found a new use. Its official position of largely abandoned but still secured because it connected too many official government buildings together and its hallways were still used by government officials made a few of its rooms, including the famous map room valuable to MI6 for the planning and tracking of covert ops. Although nobody knew it at the time, today's use of the room was nearly as vital to national security as in Churchill's Darkest Hour. The agents had just begun to grasp a new terror was arising.

Stuck into the map were several pins, but the chief pin (the only white pin) was in Scotland, and contrary to any practice used before there was a white thread coming off of it to a card on the side that merely read "Pin location: 51.0317N, 3.5667W". Yet the card was necessary, for trying to hold the pin location in your head based on surrounding terrain would slip from the mind's grasp as soon as the person looked away. Several more gray pins indicated mapping anomalies located by computer, all of which were cataloged as the computer says the satellite views have a suspicious level of nothing there but the human mind doesn't observe a problem. This had been discovered by reading a mapping engine's source code and finding an indicator that read /* algorithm returns false positives for these coordinates on real data; * test data does not show false positives here for unknown reasons */ The meaning of this was obvious when you knew what you were looking for, but it must have been baffling to the programmer who encountered it. Most of these were in Scotland, yet there were two in London and most disturbingly, one in the North Sea.

An attempt to visit the nearest one, which was right next to King's Cross station, had revealed it was walled off on all sides. Climbing to the roof level had lead to finding the roof was continuous across it. A note was merely added to reference the city planning community for how there is a walled-off section of London was made and to find out who owned the land and MI6 moved on.

Furthermore, there were red pins in London and scattered across Scotland where curious incidents had been reported or really odd disappearances. There were, of course, something like a fifty percent false positive rate, but sorting the true rate out from the background noise wasn't too hard once adjusting for area population.

A destroyer had been dispatched for the anomaly in the North Sea, but it would take some time for it to get there and report back what it found. In the meantime, MI6 elected to pursue the white pin anomaly first. It was too far to go directly from London but a local unit had been dispatched with a backpack battery pack, a backpack GPS unit, a pair of handheld radios with the transmitters frozen open, two magnetic compasses and a gyro compass, and orders to make for the anomaly, by dead reckoning if need be.

Some hours before, the NASA reports had reached them. They were already moving to investigate the local anomalies but the report had put speed to their actions. An uprising in the Scottish Highlands was concerning. An uprising in the Scottish Highlands that had put somebody on the space station while at war with itself was a threat. A threat of unknown capabilities was to be investigated before mobilizing the army. A threat for which they could not get any answers was deemed an impossibility.

There was a knock on the door. "Courier Dispatch."

"Come."

"Your requested satellite photos from the CIA, sir."

"Prompt work mister. Dismissed."

The grayscale image was pixelated from facsimile transfer, and showed mostly barren terrain, but there was a rather large splotch of almost uniform gray occupying most of the lower right quadrant, and had been circled with a black circle. The notation on the bottom read "no redacting applied: image anomaly present in the original satellite photo; was unable to notice until computer circled it for us".

So, they weren't the only ones encountering vision anomalies. This was instantly relieving to everybody in the room. On the other hand, adding this to space launch capable fringe group was not the most comforting data point. It did, however, have incredible explaining power. Yet "why" was a mystery.

There was another knock on the door, and no announcement.

"Come."

A man with a fiery bird sitting on his shoulder entered.

"Who are you, and what are you doing here?"

"Michael Evans-Verres. I was hoping I would find the situation room still here. As for the question you did not ask, I am the queen's man."

Sometimes the straightforward approach is the best. "I don't suppose you could tell us what is going on in Scotland."

"Ah yes that would be some telling. There is a war going on, and I have been very busy in it. Some would say I should have stayed out, but how could I stay out when the first blow was aimed at my son, and one was aimed at me before I entered it."

"What is it you can do?" A sound question at this point.

"What any man can do, but they leave me mostly to transport because this phoenix is very good at moving multiple at once and will answer only to me."

"Where is your son?"

"In high orbit plotting the next move. For being eleven years old he is far ahead of me in the business of making war. Yet the enemy is stronger than us and smarter than us. We remain out of his reach only by the utmost of cunning and taking advantage of him knowing very little science as of yet. Yet we fear our advantage will not last."

"How did your son get to high orbit?"

"Phoenix, of course."

"Who is we?"

"There is a small country of wizards overlaid on the United Kingdom; I do not understand how exactly, but they seem quite able to ignore whatever parliament says and appear to outsiders to not exist at all. An hour ago you would have been incredulous as to magic existing. Be not so. See that I got all the way in here unchallenged by any guard."

A pause to consider that statement. The satellite photo was produced. "Can you explain why this satellite photograph is blank or why we cannot notice it until the computer found it?"

"I cannot. Yet it makes sense else they would not hide so well."

"Who is the enemy?"

"He was named Tom Riddle, calls himself Voldermort, and is a mass murderer and leader of murderers attempting to rule Magical Britain (for that is what they call their country) and quite possibly the entire world. We don't really know how far he will go."

"How is it you are willing to partake in war of your own free will, and yet dare call upon the state for aid?"

"My son perceives the enemy is a threat to our United Kingdom, not just his Magical Britain. I would be an unworthy citizen if I did not report and did not seek to protect my own country."

"We are working on localizing this threat. What intelligence can you offer by which this threat might be neutralized."

"Shotguns, bazookas, hand grenades, and snipers. Keep moving and dodge everything they hurl at you. I have gone toe-to-toe with their best front-line warriors one at a time and have proven the victor. Even the queen is not safe from having her mind corrupted and compelled to do what she would not choose. There can be no defense against this except for they can only hold about fifty minds corrupted at a time."

"I have come to ask for aid. They cannot manufacture the weapons I named. My son intends to attack, and I am not given to stealing. This is perhaps the only thing by which we can keep them from going after the queen or the prime minister. To mount an attack we need to equip about twenty people with arms, mostly shotguns."

The scales involved were preposterously small to men accustomed to reasoning on the fate of nations, but the fate of nations was before them. The aid asked was small enough to not miss from the national budget. Only the rightness of the action needed to be checked, and that would not take long.

"Wait here. I shall return with your answer within the hour."