The trace had turned out more successful than he had anticipated. The transmitter was sending a direct subether stream to an anonymous relay node, about ten miles away from the volcano. An image scan of the area revealed nothing more than a large boulder.

Closer scans made it look as if the transmitter was buried within the boulder. Not surprising. What was surprising was the fact that the stream was relaying to nowhere.

It literally terminated inside the boulder.

Damian watched his screen, and pondered.

"Trace confirmed," Kaida said, watching her own instrument panels. "An abandoned castle in the Northern Kingdom - used to be under the direct ownership of the Army, but it was never used."

"Was being the operative word," Flame said. "Well, all this does is confirms our suspicions. Would it be possible to find out who's currently using the castle?"

"Gennai might have been able to. But our best guess at this point is a extramilitary force." Kaida said, then furrowed her eyebrows and stared at a fixed point on the keyboard.

"Kaida?" Flame asked. "What is it?"

"I don't know," she said, shaking her head. "But for some reason, I feel there's a human behind it. A human female, if I'm not mistaken."

Flame raised his eyebrows but said nothing.

"And I know of very few human females with the governmental clearances to access the Digital World."

"Assuming this is a government lady," Flame said. Kaida nodded.

"But the gates are extremely secure. And we'd have been alerted of any hack attempts."

"I'm not so sure," Flame said, and Kaida turned and looked at him.

"I know that the American and Japanese governments are indebted to us, etcetera, but something that Gennai said has been making me think."

"Oh?" Kaida asked. "What would that be?"

"That we'd be able to pull this thing off on our own. I don't know if he forgot we had the support of the American Government - but you know as well as I do that nothing ever slips his mind."

Kaida nodded again. "So you think they might have done a silent about-turn on us?"

Flame shrugged. "It's likely. Humans are notorious for their constant power struggles - and the lengths they'll go to to win."

Kaida chuckled and turned back to her computer screens. "I probably won't be able to look up gate traffic then."

"No," Flame said. "But either way, there's nothing we can do. If there's a human involved in this, then they're working for the Northern Army."

"But why?" Kaida asked without turning - she was busy entering a series of complicated commands.

Flame shrugged, the gesture lost on her. "I hesitate to think about it."

"Heh," Kaida said, punching a final key.

RED sent a signal via their plane gate, through the anonymous relay, and into the remote trace device, ordering it to stop the trace. The signal only took a split second to transmit.

And in that split second, Damian got the very break he needed.

But he didn't realise the break at first. All he knew was that his monitoring software had chimed with a new event. He saved the data he was working on, and switched focus back to the monitoring program.

He had left the program to record the boulder for any unusual activity. And there had been some - an infinitesimally short burst of data. The monitor had managed to snatch that data out from the subether, and it came up on the screen.

It looked like a command to terminate a process. And it coincided with the trace stream shutting down. Didn't take a genius to figure out that someone had remotely terminated the trace on this connection. But there was something else. The monitor had picked up another burst of data that had preceded the connection. Damian brought it up on the spectrographic analyser. It was just a mess of light.

As he looked at it, though, he thought he saw patterns. Frowning, he ran the image through a database of known energy disruptions. The answer was not what he had been expecting.

Interplane Interference

"Interplane?" he asked to the empty space in front of him. He knew what "planes" were - a fascinating phenomenon that, unlike most others in the Digital World, he understood. Planes were like seperate islands floating in space, tied to the Digital World by means of datalinks commonly referred to as "anchors".

But apart from the anchors, a plane could have thousands of "gateways" to the Digital World. The gateways could be placed anywhere, provided there was an anchor that connected the plane to the Digital World. There were limitations on this - such as distance, and density - but there were always workarounds.

Damian realised that the boulder was a gateway to another plane - and that someone on that plane had sent the termination signal.

With rising anticipation, he ran the image against the plane database. It would take a while to search, and he watched the results panel with interest. A hit would mean that he had located the plane of origin - and the owners of that trace device. And, if he was right - and he normally was - the home base of the force that had destroyed the volcano outpost.

There was a chime, and a name popped up in the results list. Damian couldn't help but grin - he knew it very, very well:

Plane:OB-27x-449-exo
Name: Chelone

Chelone.

Damian grabbed his cellphone, hitting Cindy's speed dial number. She had to know about this.

"Trace terminated," Kaida said, then turned back to Flame. "What do we do now?"

Flame thought aloud. "There's war coming. But it's not here yet - so the logical thing to do would be to make sure our bases are covered. Or rather, our anchors."

He looked up at Kaida.

"I want you, Edan and Jorcy to go to our Southern Continent anchor, and check up on it. I get the feeling that we may need to shut it down, to prevent the plane from being hacked."

Kaida nodded. "When do we leave?"

"Preferably immediately. Unfortunately, the closest gateway we have to the anchor is situated on the border between the Northern and Southern territories. Which means that once you get down there, you'll have to move very fast."

Kaida grinned. "HEAV says 'can-do'."

Flame shook his head. "I'm not so sure about that."

Kaida lost her grin. "Why not?"

"HEAV is about as subtle as a nuclear detonation in a nature reserve. And if we have a human contigent against us, they might have the resources to track you. This won't help. We need to remain as covert as possible with our movements. I don't think that these enemy humans know about us yet, and I'd like to keep it that way for as long as possible."

Kaida nodded and turned to her computers again. "Okay then. The best time to arrive would be nightfall. Disguise our gateway entrance in the solar descent flares. From there, a leisurely jog down to the Southern capital."

"'Leisurely' being?" Flame asked.

"Oh, about sixty miles an hour. Seeing as we don't have that much time, and the capital is about a hundred away from the border."

Flame smiled. "Remember to take some bottled water," he said with a wink, then turned to walk out of the room. Kaida chuckled to herself, then started preparing the gateway exit point.

They would leave in one hour. And with the element of surprise behind them, they would be able to get in, disable the anchor, and get out without being spotted.

Or so she thought.

"Chelone?" Cindy asked over the phone. She was back on Earth, but the signal was still clear.

"Yeah," Damian said. "They were the ones who took out the volcano, I think."

Her grip on the phone tightened. "Damian, see to it that the castle is on a constant Level-5 alert."

"Level-5? But that's..."

"Just do it!" Cindy shouted, then jabbed the 'hang-up' button ferociously.

Chelone. Gennai and his Digimon lackeys. She felt her blood boil.

She had lost to them once before.

Not again.

Not this time.

She made another call. It was time to step things up.

"Alright guys," Flame said to the three that had assembled in front of him. "It's time to get involved in this war."

He had already briefed them, and they all understood their missions. Each of them - Jorcy, Edan and Kaida - nodded.

"Just please be sure not to get spotted," Flame said, then took a step to the side. They were all standing on the runway outside the Chelone base. The heat of the day wasn't opressive, and the breeze was refreshing. At the end of the runway, there was an invisible barrier that, when crossed, would take them down to the Digital World.

Jorcy started running, and Edan and Kaida kicked into gear immediately afterwards. They traversed the 3000 foot runway in less than twenty seconds, and flung themselves at the barrier. Flame watched as their forms dwindled into the distance - and as they were consumed by a blinding flash of light.

They were in.