For all disclaimers: see previous Chapters.
Faith
Chapter Five
/January 4th 2001, northern Afghanistan/
Thomas Walker was taking his last walk around the inside of the camp perimeter before he returned to barracks as twilight slipped up on the camp, something he always did for his peace of mind, when what looked like an entire mountain suddenly blew up almost directly in front of him maybe a mile away from his position. He was too shocked at seeing tons of rock and earth being catapulted into the air as though it was something one might witness every day to do anything more than stare even as his jaw dropped...
The shockwave hit him with such force and speed he didn't realise that he was airborne before he'd been flung half the length of the camp, not even screaming he was so shocked. He'd just begun to draw in his breath to begin screaming when he hit the far perimeter fence of the camp, stopped dead in mid-air and suddenly realised that the pressure on his chest would snap his ribs inside him like twigs in seconds if he was lucky-
The horrendous wave of sound and force ended as suddenly as it had begun and Walker hit the floor butt-first with a force which he believed would leave an imprint for life. He dimly took in startled shouts and howls of pain, the crash of falling metal, but his attention was caught and held by the mushroom cloud blast of red fire engulfed in black smoke that seemed to be going on and on. Had they just been nuked?! If they had, it didn't matter what anyone did now. They were all dead...
Suddenly, running figures passed him, racing across the base in all directions, most of them carrying weapons, some with fire-fighting gear, others still with construction tools. Then he saw his own men from the SOC among them, shovelling dirt onto an electrical fire near the base of the HQ structure, a reinforced concrete and steel box with reinforced windows-and realised he had no more time to be shocked. Time to get to work.
He forced himself upright and managed an unsteady run over to his men, grabbed a spare shovel and started shovelling dirt onto shorting electrics and the small fire they'd already started, working right beside Mark Klein and Paul Edwards. Flashing sparks being spat out by the electronics forced them to occasionally duck, but they kept at it.
Other men fought fires started by damaged equipment and what appeared to have been falling debris from the original blast, while more secured damaged structures as best they could as holes punched in steel and concrete quickly became apparent. Medics had appeared carrying stretchers and were checking everyone who had apparently been caught by the blast, several of whom were only moving feebly at best. At least two he could see weren't moving at all, a fact he was sure the Medics would be hoping meant they were "just" unconscious.
The electrical fire he and his men were fighting suddenly went out as someone managed to shut off the power, letting him look around properly. Noticing a particular fact, he did a head count and realised the guards in the towers and the perimeter guard had been doubled.
Then the general alarm went off, a deafening klaxon wail that screamed out trouble to everyone within a mile of the camp itself. It was only meant to be sounded if the camp was under immediate threat or in an emergency when all available troops were immediately to stand-to. But for it to have been sounded, an Order had to have been given specifically by the Bases CO...
A tall, thickset man stepped out of the HQ structure, grey hair and blue eyes shining even in the twilight. The mass of colour on his uniform shirt told the rest of the story. Six feet tall and solidly muscled, the ageing man looked as solid as a rock even in his late fifties, while the sharp intelligence in his eyes made sure men under his command never even tried to lie to him because he'd just know if they did.
His name was Jacob Yeager, General in overall command of Marine Firebase Echo, a man whose dedication to the US army and the USA itself had never been questioned, or even doubted, in forty years of service which had gathered him every award for bravery and service the military had. The professional model for any serious soldier who wasn't a front-line savage like Neagly, he was known as a man and soldier who never, ever lost his cool and always knew exactly what he was doing.
Walker had met him before and seen him work, however, so he had some familiarity with the man and his moods. From the barely-controlled glint in the General's eyes, he had no doubt that the old man was about one split hair away from loosing his temper. Of course, given the fact that the base he commanded had just suffered a heavy hit from an unknown threat who appeared to have the explosive know-how to nearly bring a mountain down on them, with no advance warning, he had good reason to be that angry. No good officer ever liked being caught off-guard like this, it exposed either a serious intelligence failure or a massive flaw in base security.
Yeager's eyes swung around, fastened on Walker himself. Walker didn't like the way that happened, he had too many secrets to keep secret...
"Walker, what the Hell just hit us?" snapped Yeager, sharply. Never one to mince words either, Walker thought.
"Unknown, sir, massive explosive detonation of some kind hit us with a shockwave and flaming debris, can't tell the origin. Request permission to lead a recon mission to investigate, sir?" Walker replied.
"Granted. Get your team together and go, now. Understand that the blast has temporarily knocked out communications so all you'll have is contact with base until we can affect repairs. Report in every hour on the hour or you will be presumed dead and a retrieval mission launched" said Yeager, then he turned and began barking orders at other soldiers.
Walker turned to the two other SOC men present, looked around, then back at the two men. "Where's Matt?" he asked, well aware that the younger man would have been the first person out to help in situations like these under normal circumstances. As he saw the expressions on the men's faces, though, he suddenly knew that he wasn't going to like the answer.
Y
"To quote Einstein: The only thing more dangerous than ignorance is arrogance. How are you, anyway?" Anna asked, giving the groaning Xenia a professional once over and seeing nothing worse than cuts and bruises.
Xenia, who had only just regained conscious after the recent nightmare swim, glared at Anna, gritted her teeth and shook her head to shake out the cobwebs. She spat out the mouthful of water she'd inadvertently swallowed when she'd been unexpectedly catapulted into clean air and automatically gasped for air without time to think, then sighed.
"Alive, if bruised, sodden and angry. How are you?" she replied, well aware that Anna was by far the most battered of the two of them from even before the swim. Not that injuries tended to have much effect on the woman, she'd be the first to admit.
All the same, Anna didn't look so good. Dried blood crusted her neck and shoulders, creeping down over her back and chest. Her hair was still slick with more and, although the bleeding was clearly considerably slowed, the back of her head was visibly still bleeding. On top of which, the woman had taken an uncontrolled tumble over a significant drop straight into a deep pool of water and been forced to swim underwater immediately after suffering significant head trauma. Despite all of that, Anna looked as fresh as she always did, the picture of health, vitality and hard-muscled strength. Madwoman, Xenia couldn't help but think.
"Nothing which won't heal up by itself. However, since I think that we might want to be gone before we all develop hypothermia we should leave this room. Now" said Anna, pointedly looking down at the floor even as she gestured at her barely-dressed body.
The water on the floor was an inch deep and rising, so chilled by passage through the mountain passes the cold cut right through to the bone. Even only just the right side of conscious Xenia had been able to feel the sting as it pooled around her seated body and hands as she braced herself upright. It occurred to her, though, that Anna was very right. They had no spare clothes, no gear or weapons, no immediate or effective way to get warm and dry. If they suffered health complications in a situation like this they were already dead.
"Couldn't agree more. What about him, though? What about them?" asked Xenia, sharply, glancing first at the still-unconscious Matt and then at the only other occupants of the room...
Three men, or at least they had been men. One had both arms broken in so many ways the ends of broken bones stuck out of torn flesh in every direction, while a stab wound which had punched through the front of his chest, through his heart and on through the back had clearly killed him. Oddly, though, his nose had been shattered and driven up into his brain as well. Why would someone have killed him twice? Or was it deliberate overkill for some reason?
A second man had suffered multiple gunshot wounds to the chest, several of which had struck vital organs. However again, that hadn't been the end of it. His head had been torn half free of his body, the spine clearly severed by massive application of physical force. On top of that, the top of his skull had been compressed with such force that his brain had been crushed almost physically out of his head.
The third had suffered a single gunshot wound to the head, evidently self-inflicted despite there being no evidence of a weapon-and, oddly, was the only corpse with no other injuries. Xenia hadn't seen dead bodies with such extensive injuries since the last time she'd been hired to clean up the mess after the latest killing spree by one Warlord or Dictator or another. Occasionally, she'd even been hired by the "good guys" to do the same job. The last time, come to think of it, had been in Chechnya, when soldiers of the former Red Army had gotten carried away with some villagers who'd objected to their women being "borrowed" by the soldiers...
"They can lie there and rot, I couldn't care less. Dead is dead. Him, though? Well, let me try something..." said Anna, before she knelt down next to Matt and whispered something in his ear Xenia couldn't make out even as she stood up, careful to be sure that her legs took her weight-
Matt's eyes shot open and he exploded to his feet so suddenly Xenia thought he was going to keep going up and bounce off of the roof before he stopped, only he was suddenly standing so still he could have been standing at attention on a parade ground. It took a long moment, just long enough for Xenia to blink, then he breathed in deeply and relaxed, looking at Anna with a half smile she returned with a full, easy one.
"Anna, did you really need to do that to wake me up?" he asked, dryly, clearly well aware of what the answer would be. The smile on Anna's face just grew broader.
"Knock it off, the pair of you...alright, we need to get out of this room, da? I need options" said Xenia, staring around the room to take in what there was to be seen.
Seven feet tall, ten wide and twenty long, grey metal walls and door-electronically locked, based on what she could see. The room was filled with storage cupboards, also made of metal, plastic tables and what looked like scientific equipment of some sort, test tubes, beakers? Plastic stools were the only other things contained in the room apart from the dead bodies.
Problems immediately occurred, though. Something catastrophic had clearly occurred here, very recently. The metal walls were deformed and bent into shapes that nature could never have defined and the door had been blasted partially inwards at the bottom. Whatever had done the damage had forced enough excess from the blast inside what was evidently a combined lab and storage room to throw heavy cabinets around the room as though they were children's toys which didn't weigh a quarter-ton each. Some freak twist of the blast had gone on past that to tear a huge piece of wall away from the stone it had backed onto, which had opened the way in for them.
The room was barely lit with flickering pale white electrical lights, several of which had been damaged or were simply no longer there. The result was what she referred to as the "Haunted House" effect, when at best you could see a little of what was going on and, more than likely, what you could tell was there but couldn't see was far worse than what was in front of your eyes. In these circumstances, shadows could kill. They were already veering towards "Worst Case Scenario" in her mind...
"Powers down, so we'll have to force the door. No guns, gear or even clothes, none to be had from those bodies, so we'll be walking the unknown pretty much naked and unarmed. The other option is to sit here and slowly freeze to death. What have I missed" asked Matt, already striding over to the door.
"Look through the gap to see what's outside before we open the door and maybe you'll find out. Exercise all due caution, though, we don't know what the Hell's going on here nor who's causing or caused what" replied Xenia, striding over to the door herself even as Matt, who was clearly under no illusions over who was the muscle, braced himself against the damaged section.
"You know, Xenia, between us all I suspect that we have about thirty-five years of bloodshed experience in some of the worst situations on earth to hand. We don't need Orders, save them for the greens" said Anna, sharply.
"If I'm not simply vocalising what were all thinking, Anna, I'll dance through these halls naked singing the Russian national anthem. Now some quiet, please" said Xenia, keeling down to get a good look at what lay beyond. She didn't like what she saw.
Metal-sheathed corridors extended left, right and directly in front of the door, as far as she could see. The corridor to the left had two doors she could see on the right hand side, while the central corridor was blank until it reached what appeared to be fractured glass walls and double doors at the far end. She couldn't really see anything to the right, but that was because there were several small fires visible that were letting off enough smoke to obscure her view down the corridor.
Fire damage was evident everywhere, in fact, streaking ceiling, walls and floors. Bent and twisted areas of metal reflected the damage that had clearly been caused when the explosion had occurred, whatever the cause. Worse was the torn-up roof, shattered lights still flickering on and off, from which still-live electrical cables, wiring and jagged edges of metal and plastic hung. The floor was buckled, bent and scorched, but the structure itself seemed solid enough to move around in.
What had happened here? Had somebody bombed what looked like an underground complex from the outside? Or from the inside, as looked more probable? If so, where were all of the bodies there should have been if this place evidently wasn't abandoned, as the bodies in the room suggested? If a structure like this had been bombed but retained some kind of electrical power, what kind of source was it drawing from? Could they be dealing with a reactor of some kind?
Ultimately, though, unless they could find a way out none of that mattered. She knew the signs of combat when she saw them. This place had seen combat, very recently. If even just survivors from either side were still present? Good as any single soldier was, anyone trying to kill them only had to be lucky once...
"It's clear, lets pry this thing open and get out. Matt, ready on 3, 2, 1...NOW!" snapped Xenia, bracing her feet and wrenching up and back at the damaged area with all of the considerable power of her long body. Matt did the same, with Anna right beside him-and, after just a few seconds resistance, the damaged metal bent half out of the track of the doorway with a protesting scream, easily opening to the point that a human being on his or her knees could fit through.
Xenia went through first, followed by Anna and then Matt. Once outside they all stood up straight, stopped and looked around to take in the scene.
"What happened here? It looks like there was a fireball blast combined with a big explosion recently, but there's no sign of the kind of debris I'd associate with a bomb" asked Matt.
"To quote my old instructor, six months training in handling explosives just teaches you how to blow yourself up. For all we know the blast vaporised the bomb itself, Matt, or the explosion was more powerful than it was supposed to be and scattered the casing in pieces so small we just can't see them. None of us are experts, we can guess until doomsday and not know. Better we get out of here and worry about it later" replied Anna.
"I'm with Anna on this one, Matt. Something very bad happened here recently and this place looks far too modern for it to have been from faulty wiring. I don't think we want to be here when whatever caused this comes back. More to the point, the lack of bodies disturbs me. If this place has been evacuated, why would someone try to blow it up? If not, what's happened to everyone? Why wouldn't a blast designed to destroy the facility have done so? I hope that this is a Terrorist training area, because I'm starting to think that were in a Black Box facility" said Xenia, at which Anna shot her a sharp look and Matt shook his head.
"No, no way, there would be guards and staff everywhere if this was a Black facility. We'd already be in jail or suffering Amnesia. Besides, they don't make those kinds of mistakes" said Matt, shaking his head.
"Should I point out now I could given you half a dozen examples from the time the USSR was still a real power in the world, Matt? The KGB was more brutal, ruthless and thorough than any of your security organisations and it couldn't erase even the possibility of mistakes completely. It's American arrogance to think that you can, nothing else" replied Xenia, pointedly.
Matt's eyes flashed, but a warning look from Anna saw him force himself to calm down. Given the odd expression on her face, though, Xenia wasn't sure whether or not Anna agreed with her or held a different opinion altogether.
"Where are we going first, anyway?" asked Anna, loudly, to break the silence that had descended. It didn't quite work.
"Now there's a question..." muttered Xenia, almost wishing that she had a coin to toss-not that coins came with three sides, of course...
Y
In Marine Fire Base Echo, events were accelerating. Troops were gathered in combat formations and moving out of the base at a jog to set up a hard perimeter around the entire area until communications could be restored, heavy weapons were being brought out of the armoury to reinforce the perimeter of the camp itself and combat engineers were already hard at work. Damaged electrical circuits had already been repaired or replaced, plates of steel were being welded into place over damaged areas of metal structures and cement was being used to seal holes in other buildings.
Atop the HQ building, though, Walker couldn't help but notice no less than three engineers all clearly having trouble with the buckled satellite dish and damaged antenna. Being higher than almost anything else around the camp, the communications array had taken the most damage as well. He wondered, in fact, whether or not they'd have to replace rather than repair it...
He glanced around at his men, who were equipped and ready ten minutes after the event, of course. Weapons locked and loaded, gear and body armour in place, all they needed was the go Order. When they found him-if he was even still alive-he'd have words with Matt about leaving his own men with no more idea about where he was going than "Out of contact for at least an hour off-base".
Xenia? If she was in pieces somewhere he'd suffer from nothing worse than a sense of extreme satisfaction, the bitch deserved nothing better, probably worse. After she'd humiliated him in front of the entire Special Operations Command structure during his very first briefing when he was still fresh on the ground? Dared to state that he was inexperienced where Wetworks were concerned? Warned that they needed an experienced hand-i.e. Her, he'd realised at the time-planning the missions? Even gone so far as to warn that just knowing the maps wasn't enough in a country like Afghanistan, one had to see and experience the place before one could even begin to understand it?! She'd dared to bring up the failed Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which had failed to crush guerrilla resistance despite flooding the country with millions of soldiers and tons of heavy equipment?!? A resistance everyone knew had been backed up by the CIA and US Military?!
She deserved a slow, painful, lingering death for even suggesting indirectly that there was any comparison between the modern, well-equipped and highly trained US troops now in-country and the ramshackle, disorganised and barely-trained rabble equipped with outdated equipment scavenged from vehicles and weapons going back to the Second World War her country had deployed. For her insults against him, personally? He would have had her gang-raped and boiled alive at the very least if they'd been anywhere near a form of civilisation where he could call a "friend".
Anna? He'd use drugs if he had to, a woman that beautiful didn't need a mind of her own anyway. With a body like hers she was born and built to pleasure men, particularly wealthy and powerful men like him-or at least that would be the case once his plan came to fruition. The stupid bitch just didn't want to admit it, but he knew people who could fix that...
He paused as he heard the faintest trace of an echo on the wind, a suggestion of sound which shouldn't have been there even over the racket of on-going engineering work. It was almost impossible for him to pin down the source or the nature of what had alerted him, his instincts more than his hearing had alerted him, but he'd seen and experienced more than enough in the way of "silent" work over the years to be sure that, whatever it was, it wasn't a natural sound.
Klein went to speak, but Walker irritably hushed him with a gesture. There it was again, a dull rumble that no natural movement could cause. He knew what could, though: a very low-flying fast-attack helicopter. He'd been on more than one Op where the slaughter had finished the fight before it began because nobody saw the attackers coming. That had been since they came from the sky and at such a speed that by the time the defenders realised the attackers were shooting at them from above and inside the defensive circle, it was all over. He wasn't, wouldn't be going out like that.
All the same, something was...well, off. He could only make out one approaching echo and, while basic, Echo Base had anti-air defences. Short of a Suicide attack, no single aircraft would do any real damage to the base. Klein and Edwards could hear it now, too, he could tell, from the way they were both frowning and looking around themselves, as though they could hear something but weren't sure what, like him. If all else went to Hell, at least he could still use the men in full SOC body armour as cover-
Suddenly a jet-black Stealth helicopter shot out of the mouth of a valley just over a mile away, startled shouts rising immediately, heading straight for the camp. Calls for Orders went up even as anti-air gun crews brought weapons to bear and aimed, ready to shoot, but General Yeager's hard voice overrode everyone's and nobody fired as the helicopter slowed to a sudden halt just fifty metres from the base perimeter wall.
Given a better look, even as the choppers side door swung open, Walker noticed that the aircraft had absolutely no identifying markings, which had to have been what had caused Yeager's hold Order. Special Forces often rode around in unmarked vehicles as a security measure, with the hills and valleys often literally crawling with any number of fanatics and terrorists who believed they would receive their reward in Paradise as long as they died slaughtering the enemies of their God. Most of the time, it worked-but not all of the time
Walker personally believed that anyone mad enough to believe in God in the kind of world they lived in should be executed for the good of the species. Terrorist believers deserved to be taught the true nature of Hell before they died submerged in molten lava, at the very least, just so they understood where they were really going to end up if there was some kind of "After" when one died. Of course, thanks to an old and very special friendship, he'd known there were literally fates worse than death available for close to twenty years now...
A tall, slim figure with an athletic build which was too muscular to be a woman's eased himself down a rope he'd tossed from the helicopters side. Thick brown hair carefully shaped around his head, he was smooth-faced with hazel eyes, young-mid-twenties at most-and solidly built. He moved with an easy grace and speed which had extensive training and highly-developed martial arts skills added to natural talent to Walkers eyes.
Dressed all in black, a t-shirt, jeans, solid looking boots, he had a pistol rig strapped across his chest with a heavy pistol-a .45 apparently-snug under his left armpit. What looked like a Backup weapon was almost concealed at the base of his spine under his t-shirt, while Walker could see twin combat knives sheathed on the outside of his boots, one to a boot. A closer inspection revealed that he was wearing a sleeveless bulletproof vest over his t-shirt and, over that, combat webbing with various sealed pockets.
His lack of the deep tan that always existed on Veterans told Walker the young man wasn't stationed in country, but told him nothing about the man himself. That sort of fact was a result he never liked.
The man jogged over to the main gate without apparent worry once he touched the ground, seemingly not bothered by the dozens of guns aimed at him. He showed the gate guards some wallet-sized ID-and suddenly the guard called out for General Yeager. Yeager hurried over, checked the mans ID himself, then beckoned Walker over.
"Walker, this man is going into the base with you, no arguments. Get up there" snapped Yeager, sharply.
"Sir? This man is a civilian, surely. Might I ask why he is being included on a Military mission?" asked Walker, not needing yet another pair of eyes to watch out for.
"He is included because his authority here and Orders come down directly from the White House, the President in fact. Any more questions, soldier?" asked Yeager, pointedly.
"By the way, I'm Leon S. Kennedy. Good to meet you, Mr. Walker" said Leon, reaching out and shaking Walkers hand with a firm, strong grip despite his piano-players soft hands.
Walker could only hope that he'd kept every trace of what he was thinking and feeling out of his eyes and off of his face when he heard the young man's name. Leon S. Kennedy, rookie cop in 1998, survivor of Racoon City. Now, reportedly, part of some above-Top-Secret unit dedicated exclusively to dealing with Bio-War attacks and events, answering only to the President. What Walker's information suggested to him was that Leon was possibly that units top Agent...
His job had just gotten ten times more complicated. Things were getting more dangerous for him every time he turned around...
Y
The ringing in her ears had finally stopped, the floor had ceased to move without her consent and she could actually breathe normally once more. That was a start, although barely an improvement.
A thin layer of ash covered the faceplate of her combat helmet, so she raised a hand to brush it off. The effort was only partially successful, some smearing occurring as her gloved fingers pressed down too hard, but at least she could see a little. What she could see, however, did nothing to improve her headache, the after-effect of being caught up in the initial explosion to begin with.
Gleaming red light still flickered intermittently, the remaining visual warning signs of the Self-Destruct having been armed. She could still dully hear the faint beeping of computer alarms going off from nearby, what had to be the main computer console. That she wasn't dead was remarkable in and of itself. What came next, though? She wasn't sure whether or not it would be an improvement on what could have been.
She checked her arms and legs, hands and feet, eyes, every part of her body. All intact and functional, if sore with bruising. Her hearing appeared to be impaired, as well, she was picking up on sounds she should have noticed immediately after minutes. That it was most likely the result of massive air pressure changes nearly blasting in her eardrums didn't help, since she had no way of telling how bad the damage was or if she would, or even could recover.
Didn't matter, for now at least. If she couldn't rely on her ears to tell her what was happening around her, she'd just have to rely on her eyes. On that basis, it was time she stopped playing dead and got back to work. If there was any way left to retrieve her mission objective from this clusterfuck meltdown, she could only have a limited amount of time to do it at best.
The heels of her boots skidded momentarily on the damaged steel floor, but she compensated by placing both hands down on the floor and pushing up, raising her upper body and lowering her centre of gravity so that her own body weight gave her more traction. Her boots caught and she got her feet flat on the floor, rose upright and looked around her as best she could.
The control room for the underground base had only been six and a half feet tall, eight wide and long in good condition. One end had contained the security seal reinforced steel doors, which were still shut. The other had been filled with every kind of computer equipment, monitor screens-and a gun locker, for emergencies.
By Umbrella standards the base was actually austere, small at half a mile square-but that didn't take away from the importance of the work they'd been doing in it. Work that she was supposed to have been stealing from them with her team...
Now the doors were blackened from a fireball blast that should have incinerated her, pock-marked and dented from the explosion that should have brought down the roof, or possibly blown out the doors and smashed her flat against them in the process. The steel on the walls looked as though it had been hit by an earthquake, bent and distorted in ways that defied the human eye and even the imagination, while the ceiling was simply shredded, fragments of steel and even bits of rock lying all over the place. The floor was simply a huge dent, as though it had been struck by a sledgehammer wielded by the Devil himself trying to tear a hole down into Hell.
The computers and other gear were a slagged, shattered mess sprayed around and about the room like metal confetti mixed with glass fragments and bits of plastic from too many sources to count. Only the dim remnants of the Self-Destruct warning lights provided any light at all, flickering on and off as they were. Which reminded her, if the Self-Destruct had gone off, why wasn't she dead?
She knew Umbrella and its security arrangements better than almost anyone, she'd even worked for the company for a while years back, so she was absolutely sure the entire structure would have been rigged to be sterilised by incendiary charges even as explosives blew out all of the supports. The structure would simply have been obliterated, no traces of man or machine left behind, let alone data. So, again, why wasn't she dead?
Even as her brain caught up with the fact that without power to run either the air-conditioning or open the doors she was as good as trapped in an underground tomb where she was going to suffocate where no one would hear her scream, literally, she spotted something odd. Something that shouldn't have been possible.
A flickering green light, on one of the seemingly shattered computer screens which was still roughly in one piece, was glowing. That could only mean that the screen itself was still active, which could mean that she had central network access. Was it possible...?
She made her way over to it carefully, moving aside the debris, ignoring the scorch mark where the Security Chief for the base had blown himself up. Finding an operational keyboard to attach to the computer safely proved a challenge, but she was up to it. When the computer displayed a prompt, she tapped in the dead head Scientists details and Password and entered them. She was granted access, so she decided to see what she could do from her position first of all.
ACCESS: Granted. Welcome, Researcher Philips.
:System status?
WARNINGSystem interruptWARNING
Self-Destruct system ACTIVE.
Countdown COMPLETE.
WARNING System failure/interrupt-source identified, INTERNAL.
PATRIARCH program initiated.
Self-Destruct ABORT.
System RESET.
:Query PATRIARCH program?
PATRIARCH program RESTRICTED. Access Lv.10+ Clearance ONLY.
:Query Security systems?
LOCKDOWN. Breach detected main storage/lab four. CCTV/Monitoring systems estimate 85 percent DESTROYED 9 percent DISABLED. H/K systems 75 percent DESTROYED-SYSTEM ACTIVE.
WARNING System interrupt WARNING
CORE BREACH DETECTED. Safety system protocols COMPROMISED, estimate 45 percent efficiency. Time to total systems failure/Core destruction:
35.46.05
:Initiate Emergency Reactor shutdown procedure. Code Triple RED.
Command DISALLOWED. SYSTEMS FAILURE.
Manual Override REQUIRED.
35:39:43
:REROUTE-to motive work systems and air circulation. Shut down ALL non-vital systems Code Triple RED.
PATRIARCH program Override authority Lv.12 Clearance. Emergency redirect to communication systems/computer download 50 percent power output AT ALL TIMES.
Working...Task completed. Motive systems and air circulation systems RESTORED.
33:42:12
:Verbalise system reports. Log Off.
Task completed.
Standing there, still as death itself in the sudden gloom, the young woman reached into a belt pouch and withdrew a small but powerful flashlight. The light snapped on and reflected from hundreds of shards of shattered glass, illuminating the room somewhat once again and letting her get a good look at herself.
Steel-grey boots, leggings, shirt and gloves, helmet with one-way gleaming visor, all state of the art body armour. Belt with various pouches, pouches set in her leggings that held spare ammunition and other surprises. On her right hip a long knife was securely sheathed, while on the floor lay an automatic rifle loaded with hollow-points which she'd dropped when the explosion had occurred as she'd dived frantically for cover.
She could still hear the Security Chiefs last words, spoken just before she'd shot him in the head and he'd fallen over backwards, a dying wrench ripping open his shirt to reveal to her horrified eyes the explosive suicide bomber belt he'd been wearing. She suspected she'd be able to hear them for the rest of her life.
"I'll wait for you in Hell, bitch, the companies better there!"
She swore, something she rarely did, then reached up and almost wrenched her helmet off, the sudden surge of air letting her feel the hum of air conditioning on her face and pushing through her hair, letting her hear the electronic buzz of the door systems now working again. She closed her eyes for a moment, to clear her head, then opened them again and sighed.
She would not be left responsible for nuking Afghanistan, not when it could be prevented, even thought the fault was really Umbrella's in building a facility powered by a small nuclear reactor in the first place. One kiloton or ten kilotons, the destruction would still be absolute in the affected area, the casualties beyond her ability to understand, let alone take in, even out in the wilds like this. Worse, if the US Military base nearby got taken out by an apparent nuclear strike? The USA would have the only excuse it needed to start nuking even suspected Al'Quaeda strongholds and bases.
Her maternal grandfather had been in Hiroshima in 1945 as a young conscript when the nuclear bomb dropped by the Americans on the city had gone off. At first entranced by the intense flash of light, he'd realised too late that it was a bomb of a kind the world had never seen before-and the last thing he'd ever seen had been a mushroom cloud that had destroyed the whole of the world he knew in less time than it took to say. The flash had burnt his eyes out of his skull entirely, but his last sight had been the detonation itself. He'd never talked about it afterwards, not even how he'd survived, except to say that he'd looked through the gates of Hell itself that day-and knew something was smiling back.
In the dim light, short-cut black hair and brown slightly slanted eyes shone in a smooth face. She looked angry, to her own eyes, very angry, with good reason. She'd made her grandfather a promise, decades earlier, that she would never, ever walk away from a situation where what had happened to her could ever, even possibly, happen to anyone else. To save her own life, she'd been forced to break an oath to the only father figure she'd ever really had and ended up left unable to do anything but stand and watch, weeping, as the nuke killed almost a hundred thousand people.
She'd been so close to the explosion that she'd been left physically scarred by it, on top of her other injuries, but she knew a superb Doctor who never asked questions for the right compensation and Plastic Surgery had removed the scars-on the outside. On the inside? A very different matter. If Trent hadn't managed to track her down before she'd finally recovered her memory following her Breakdown after Racoon City and explain what he had in mind, clearly well aware of what the catastrophe had truly meant to her?
People would be dead. A lot of people. At her worst, she was capable of anything and she was...close...to someone who could literally do anything she put her mind to. Between the two of them, unless Wesker himself with his G-Virus enhancements got in the way, she knew that she and Giselle could have brought Umbrella down themselves. Trent's intentions, however, were so much more interesting...
Enough was enough. Her name was Ada Wong, she had a job to do and a bomb to stop. It was time to get to work...
/End of Part Five. All Reviews welcomed/.