Oh god... I wrote this chapter so long ago. But it was actually so much fun to write. And I'm here now.
I'll never stop having to apologize for not updating... but I'll do it again anyway. Sorry guys. xP Thanks for your continued support, anyway!
i - Thank you again :D Actually, I definitely agree with what you said about not wasting time on Claire's comrades' reactions to her relationship with Caius, and I have to admit that's been an ongoing struggle for me while writing this, because I've tended to drift toward that for filler. But no, you're right, it's not really doing anything for the plot or the interactions between characters. But I will continue writing Fang and Noel as support characters! :D Again, thank you!
jollyp - Well... yes... Caius isn't always the most pleasant person... But I dunno about sadistic for this story xD
FantasyWriting - Thank you :D and I'll try to update more consistently if I can.
Anyway, yeah, I think that about covers it. See you guys in the next chapter. :D
Chapter Seven: Reconnaissance
Claire woke up long before anyone else on the day of the assignment. She put on her uniform, listening to the silence that enveloped the dormitory. After a while, memories of past conversations began to fill the quiet in her mind, mostly the voice of General Ballad telling her how he had killed his own commanding officer.
The other officers were reluctant to give me his position, but they realized they had no other choice.
"Be quiet," Claire said under her breath. Her voice echoed in the otherwise empty room. She didn't need the two different versions of General Caius Ballad occupying her head this morning. Not for this assignment.
She sat on her bed, staring out the tiny space she almost couldn't even call a window. When she finally heard the echo of voices in the hallway, she pulled on her boots and slipped out of her room. The dormitory's common area, she found, was empty and dark as it had been last night. She half expected to see someone standing in the shadows around her, lurking in the common room's half-light, but detected no motion and no figures. Turning away, she attributed the feeling to her nervousness about the morning's mission.
As she reached the door, she thought she heard footsteps behind her, and when she looked toward the sound, she saw Fang and Noel emerging from the darkness.
"Did you really think you were gonna just up and leave without us?" Fang demanded, though she was already grinning.
"Dammit, Fang," Claire sighed, collapsing back against the door. "You're like the Cheshire Cat. At six in the morning, too."
"You're just jealous of this smile," Fang answered.
"Let me guess," Claire said, turning to Noel. "You got woken up by Fang too, because she's just way too damn excited about this."
"What?" Noel asked, rubbing his eyes.
"Yeah, that's what I thought."
"Speaking of being too damn excited," Fang said, clapping her hands together, "let's get this show on the road. I'm ready. Are you two ready?"
"Ready as I'll ever be," Claire answered, rolling her eyes. She cast a glance over at Noel. "And I think this one's asleep on his feet."
"What was that?" Noel asked, trailing after them as they moved out of the dormitory.
Caius paced back and forth in front of the squad after they lined up on the training grounds. Naturally, they were short a few soldiers, and some of the officers had gone to track them down while Caius appeared to think of ways to punish them. Claire watched two of the officers run up to the front of the lines, salute their General, and shake their heads as they spoke to him in low tones. Caius nodded and dismissed them, facing his squad.
"It appears we have several soldiers who have decided not to show for this mission," he said. "When found, they will be disciplined for their actions. Failures such as these require much stricter punishments than just time in solitary. This, soldiers, is cowardice: a trait that will not help a soldier in any context."
Claire thought his eyes caught hers for a split second.
"However, I should think we are to continue without them, as we have no time to waste." He scanned the faces of the rest of the soldiers. "The transport vehicles at the gate will take us to the edge of Pulse territory, where we believe there is an underground base. Until now we have not been able to get close enough to investigate it. A select few of you may even be asked to infiltrate it, if we do find it. This, while still recon, is a very dangerous task."
This time, Claire had no doubt: he looked directly into her eyes. She felt her blood turn to ice as she realized what this meant for her. He saw her as a capable soldier, so he had no problem putting her in a situation like this.
"You will receive your weapons at the gates. Follow me." Caius turned and led the squad out of the training area. Struggling to stay in formation, the soldiers marched after him.
As they cleared the gates, officers stopped each of the soldiers and handed them their weapons, the same guns that they had received on their previous assignment. Claire cradled hers in her hands, half hoping she wouldn't need it.
Transport vehicles, looking not unlike the outdated pictures of tanks Claire had seen during classes, waited for the soldiers once they stepped outside the base. They boarded, single-file, and then spread out as they found their seats on board. Claire managed to find a seat next to Fang and Noel and slid into it, gripping her gun with one hand and the back of the seat in front of her with the other.
"Hope we don't have to go too far," Fang commented. "Otherwise I might have to use this on myself." She tapped her weapon and rolled her eyes.
"Fang!" Noel admonished.
"Looks like someone finally woke up," Fang said, jabbing him in the side with her elbow.
"For God's sake, Fang, dying by your own hand is worse than dying in battle," Noel pointed out.
A crackling sound issued from the vehicle's sound system, followed by a mechanical voice. "We will arrive at our destination in twenty-three minutes," it said.
Fang mimed pointing her weapon at her temple, and Noel slapped it away.
"Twenty-three minutes, you guys. Seriously? How far into Pulse territory are we going?" Fang demanded.
"Just to the western coast, a few miles past the border," a raw, deep, familiar voice answered, and a black-gloved hand dropped down onto the back of the seat right beside Claire's. She followed the hand up to the arm and shoulder to which it belonged, and finally her eyes found the face of the speaker. His lavender hair framed his face and fell over his shoulders. Naturally.
"General Ballad," Noel said, his arm coming into a salute across his chest. Fang and Claire copied the gesture, but Caius waved his hand, dismissing them.
"At ease," he stated. "In response to your question, we are only traveling as far as the base, which is on the edge of Pulse's territory. The transport vehicles will be nearby at all times, and only a few of you will travel into the base if we find it."
Claire resisted the urge to ask if that meant her.
"Be prepared," Caius continued when none of them said anything. "Though we should be protected from view at all times, the possibility of ambush still exists."
He walked past their seats, striding along the aisle, and vanished into the rows of other soldiers. Fang, Claire, and Noel stared at each other, wide-eyed.
"What the hell just happened?" Fang asked. "He just came out of freaking nowhere."
"Seems like something he's good at," Claire answered.
"Good thing you weren't saying anything worse when he showed up," Noel said, casting a pointed glance at Fang, who sent him a withering glare in response.
Several minutes later, the mechanical voice announced the end of their journey into the forbidden land of Pulse. Caius rushed to the front of the transport vehicle, running even though the row was hardly big enough for one person to pass through unscathed and even though their instructions for taking the transports had explicitly forbidden anything faster than a regular walk. He stood at the vehicle's door and watched the landscape pass by in a rectangular window hardly wider than a pencil.
Claire felt the vehicle slow to a stop. As soon as they stopped moving, Caius turned around and shouted, "Everyone out!" The trainees obeyed, moving single-file down the rows of seats and following him out of the transport. Claire descended the stairs and jumped down into the dust, where she stopped and stared at the area around her.
Their immediate surroundings were made almost entirely of dust: light, glittering dust, like sand, coating the ruins of buildings and the few plants that dared to sprout from the God-forsaken frontier that was Pulse's territory. Claire couldn't understand how anyone, anything could possibly live here.
"There's a base somewhere around here?" she said under her breath.
"Yes," Caius responded, and she looked up sharply, once again slightly disturbed that he had been listening. "And we must find it."
Claire turned her eyes to the horizon again, wondering where on earth they could have possibly hidden a base, but Caius kept talking. "Claire, I task you with leading your comrades while I move on to the second group of soldiers. Use this location device and scout the area as well as you can. Alert us if you find anything."
"Y-yes, sir," Claire stammered, accepting the device from his gloved hand and securing it around her wrist. As Caius walked to the second transport vehicle, his dark armor receding toward the second transport vehicle, she switched on the device and opened the location service. It showed a gray area devoid of any sort of distinguishing characteristics, adorned with a large white question mark as though to indicate that the place had not yet been charted and added to the server. Of course it hadn't. Claire sighed. She had nothing to go on but the markings of the cardinal directions overlapping her terrible excuse for a map.
"Okay, everyone," she called out, facing the other members of her squad, including Noel and Fang. "Follow me."
And, picking a direction, she set off into the unknown.
No one questioned the sudden transfer of power. Fang and Noel, who stood toward the front of the group, had watched the brief exchange between Claire and their General, and even Fang didn't say anything. For the rest of the group, Claire supposed, her credibility was reinforced by her actions on the first day of training.
The landscape consisted mostly of dust, with the occasional hidden formation of rock or stone. Claire scanned the area, looking for traces of metal which might indicate a more recently built structure or irregularities in the terrain hinting at entrances into the earth. Everything they passed looked only like it belonged to a long-past era.
Maybe that's the point, Claire thought. She squinted harder at the small outcroppings of rock and patterns in the sand, but still she saw nothing.
Until she spotted it.
Ahead of her she could see a dip in the layers of dust, marked by a deviation against the color scheme of faded gray stone and off-white dust that reflected what little pale light leaked from the skies above them. Red. Rust and paint the color of blood, barely bleached by the effects of the elements and hiding beneath a layer of dust. Next to the door she could see a metal panel awaiting a number pass code, not unlike the ones they used at the base back in Academia. Claire stopped and held out both her hands to force the squad behind her to a halt.
She lifted her location device to her mouth, changed the mode to communication, and spoke into it: "We've found it."
Caius's voice came back to them. "We are on our way."
Claire let her hand fall back to her side and took a deep breath. She had a bad feeling about this, even though she knew believing bad feelings could only be a trainee's mistake. A soldier couldn't trust her feelings. She could only trust her orders, and her training.
Minutes later, the other two-thirds of their squad appeared, one of them led by Caius and the other led by another trainee he'd appointed. Claire hardly dared to make eye contact with their General, but he turned in her direction when he spoke anyway.
"I will send four of you into this base," he stated. "Because you are trainees, I will not require that you go very far. Another squad is on its way in to take over for you, and when they arrive, I will give the order to pull out."
He gestured to Claire and the other temporary squad leader. "You two, since you both already have access to communication. I will be sending you and two others." Claire watched as he paced in front of them and chose two other soldiers whom she recognized but had never really spoken to. She felt a lurking dread at her core, having known he would choose her to do this job.
But she could only trust in the orders.
Caius descended to the place where the door lay hidden in the dust. His hand drifted over the keypad. "Kreiss," he called out. "Here."
Noel followed him and punched out a few number codes into the keypad. The display flashed before going dark, and Claire heard clearly the click of a lock releasing. Caius pushed the door open, testing it, and when it revealed a dark corridor beyond the frame, he beckoned the four of them forward. Noel stepped away from the door to allow them space to pass, and when Claire walked by him, he muttered, "Good luck."
"Thanks," she said back.
Caius fully opened the door for the four of them, holding out his hand to show them the way in. A smirk barely graced his face, almost as though—but Claire hardly dared to think it—it was a trap. Then again, it probably was. But not one Caius himself had created.
She refused to be caught in the jaws of Pulse.
The four soldiers stepped through the door to the base. Not ten feet from the entrance was a set of stairs leading downward, carrying them deeper into the darkness. As Claire descended them, she looked back and saw the rectangle of pale light that was the door growing smaller and smaller, along with the outline of Caius's polar silhouette, black against the light gray sky. He stood with his arm propping the door open, waiting, watching the trainees move ever farther into the lightless chasm.
When they reached the bottom of the stairs, the light almost completely vanished. Only a few strips of the light-producing plastic often used in mines lit the corners of the ceiling. It barely cast enough light for them to see the path ahead.
In an unspoken agreement, two of the trainees went left, and Claire and the remaining one headed to the right. Her location device still showed a blur of gray and white pixels, and she kept it powered on only to use the glow from the screen to navigate in the dark. She ran ahead to take the lead.
Something didn't feel right. Even as she moved through the shadows, keeping her eyes ahead, Claire still felt as though she was being watched. She scanned the corners, the ceiling, the spaces where clouds of darkness floated like shrouds, but she saw no surveillance devices and no watching eyes.
Behind one corner, she thought she heard snatches of conversation, like whispers. She wondered if they were close enough to hear the other trainees speaking, but as much as she strained to hear the voices more closely, she couldn't detect more than the hisses of harder consonants.
She edged around the corner. Dim light from several electric bulbs revealed stashes of weapons against every wall: explosives to their left, firearms to their right, blades lined up against each door. The far door was locked by a keypad. Of course. Why hadn't they thought to take Noel along with them?
Bringing the device at her wrist closer to her mouth, she turned to address the other trainee, to say something about reporting back.
But only darkness answered.
Claire looked back and forth, switching her device to communication mode as her heart began to beat wildly in her chest. "General Ballad?" she said in a low half-whisper. Her attempt to hide her panic didn't work.
"Yes?" His voice returned to her through a fuzzy and broken signal. She opened her mouth to say something else into the microphone, but before she could, a hand clamped over her mouth. The other cuffed her wrists together, holding her there, preventing her from resisting.
"Those idiot Academia soldiers," a voice said, and before Claire's eyes, several other soldiers emerged, their faces unrecognizable, covered by masks. She knew without looking that they were from Pulse, however. Their voices cracked with the effects of breathing their polluted air; their hands were covered in metal gloves that bit into the soft skin of her wrists. Their weapons shone unnatural blue lasers at her face, probably made from the crystal they stole. From their land. From those unfortunate souls of legend who had turned to crystal long ago. "What do they think they're doin', sending in a bunch of trainees? And ones who couldn't even cover their tracks right."
"That keypad was practically screaming intruder from the second that kid touched it," another voice answered. "Christ, are they ever gonna learn?"
"Probably not," still another voice said. "Damn, man, if anyone stayed out there after the keypad got hacked, we're gonna be scraping them off the door for the next three days."
Claire thrashed against the hands that held her back, but it did no good. The soldier holding her shook his head and squeezed her hands tighter, cutting off the circulation. "No, no, no," he said. "We gotta get this one out of here. Can't have anyone knowing what's in this base."
"Right." The soldiers turned away from the room filled with weapons and dragged Claire with them. Claire realized, panicking, that her communication device was still powered on and set to send transmissions to Caius. She struggled again, trying to reach it, but she couldn't move her hands. The soldier holding her forced her forward. To her dismay, she heard Caius's voice come through the device.
"Claire, come in," it said.
She tried to speak again, to respond to him, but the soldier holding her took care of the device by smacking the display, hard, with one of his metal gloves. Claire squeezed her eyes shut as she heard the crack that meant his hand had connected with the screen. But she didn't have to endure the discomfort long: the soldier's next target was her head, and when his metal glove met her temple, she lost consciousness immediately and completely, like a light whose switch had been flipped to off.