Entanglement Swapping
Veld was feeling extremely disturbed by the events of the past twenty-four hours. First an extremely talented hacker ‒who he truly prayed was not affiliated to AVALANCE‒ had sent all the security robots crazy and locked down the ShinRa building, then Reno and Rude had spotted professor Hollander leaving the document room and deduced that the scientist was the culprit behind the recent spate of data thefts. The two Turks had pursued Hollander down to ground level and across Sector Eight ‒the professor had a good turn of speed when pressed‒ but lost him after running into a pack of Deepground forces lurking near a theatre.
All of the Turks and most of SOLDIER had been out on the streets of Midgar all through the night fighting off Deepground forces, rogue robots and monsters that had been roused by the invasion. Then Angeal had been spotted near Mako reactor five and the President had dispatched Sephiroth to investigate; a choice Veld personally disapproved of, given the circumstances. The Silver General had returned a few hours later with news that Hollander and Genesis had been there alongside Angeal, but that they had escaped after knocking Zack down a ventilation shaft.
Veld knew that the newly promoted first-class was likely sleeping off a concussion in the Slums by now and let it be when the President ordered Sephiroth to comb the ShinRa building to ensure it was secure enough to lift the lockdown.
To be honest the chief Turk was more worried about the reports of a red-cloaked stranger with a triple-barrelled revolver taking out monsters coming in from across half the Plate. The only person to ever use a gun like that had been Vincent, and that some of the reports referred to red eyes and wild black hair confirmed his uneasy hunch. What had Hojo done to her after she had been reported dead?
Veld felt horribly guilty about the situation with Vincent, his fierce, ice-cold and thrillingly competent lover and longtime partner. They'd worked together almost constantly for seven years before the string of assassinations and her subsequent deployment to Nibelhiem, which had officially been a 'cool down' before returning her to active duty. But after the first year in Nibelhiem she'd started sending him messages about how the project was setting off her instincts and how Hojo worried her. Then she'd been reported dead and Veld hadn't done anything to investigate. True, he hadn't believed the 'lab accident' story for an instant ‒it was Vincent for Hades' sake!‒ but he'd thought she'd poked her nose into something the President had ordered her killed for and had never wondered whether she might still be alive.
In hindsight the evidence pointing to her survival was fairly obvious: 'Specimen V' had first been referred to in Hojo's notes the very same day of his partner's apparent demise and had been extensively experimented on for the next six months, at which point side project V had been declared a failure and terminated. Proof of Vincent's continued existence was contained in other notes referring to the rampage of a specimen through the Nibelhiem Laboratory barely two days later, followed by the entirety of the scientists decamping back to Junon in the next twelve hours. The rampaging experiment had been pronounced 'confined' but not dead and had been left behind.
Then there was Draculina, who was currently dating SOLDIER second-class Kunsel, one of Tseng's contacts. She was most definitely a Valentine and probably Vincent's daughter, born during her string of wetworks missions before Nibelhiem. The date of her birth set conception around the first week of the mission, meaning it was equally possible that Veld was her father rather than one of Vincent's targets. The chief Turk still wasn't sure how he felt about that; he'd recently discovered that his daughter Felicia was not as dead as he'd been told and was the leader of AVALANCHE. The possibility of being the father of two grown daughters, one by his old partner, was a bit of a shock. His conviction that Elfé was his daughter Felicia had been confirmed by Chaos, the strange summon who had mutated said daughter using the fragment of the Zirconiade Materia grafted into her body.
Veld had his own suspicions as to how the Silver General had known Chaos ‒Sephiroth did bare an uncanny resemblance to both his former partner and Draculina‒ but the Turk hadn't pressed the elite SOLDIER for details. He had however invested in some illegal blood tests and ascertained that Sephiroth was almost Vincent's clone and that both the other two Generals were closely related to the renegade Turk. That invisible network of relationships gave Veld a deeply uneasy feeling, which Cloud Strife's presence in the SOLDIER program exacerbated to the point of becoming a fully-fledged sense of impending doom: Vincent always had a plan. She was a consummate professional and a highly gifted schemer. All the subtle signs pointed to her plan involving Very Bad Things for the ShinRa Electric Power Company, or at the very least the top three or four levels of management. If Vincent really was out for blood the President and the Board ‒with the possible exception of Reeve Tuasti‒ were a lost cause. There had never been a Turk as brilliant as her either before or since her 'death' and with her SOLDIER contacts there was no way Sephiroth would oppose her if she chose to clean house. If he even could.
With all of this in mind, Veld had made his peace months ago with the necessity of cutting his losses and focussing on keeping Rufus and as many Turks as possible alive when the axe fell; the President had brought this upon himself when he allowed Hojo to turn the Company's most proficient assassin ‒who was quite possibly the best ever on record‒ into a test subject for the effects of Mako on the human physiology. The data Veld had managed to find suggested that Vincent had more Mako in her system than even the three Generals, which had resulted in her developing destructive metamorphic Limit Breaks. Hojo's hints suggested that she had also been experimented on by a third party who had added the insanely powerful and independently intelligent summon Chaos to her repertoire, implanted much as the Zirconiade fragment was in Felicia. Opposing her as she had been twenty-five years ago would have been tricky; doing so now would be suicide, which was why Veld was focussing his energies on preserving what he could: Vincent wasn't ambitious, just driven. Once she'd had her revenge she'd in all likelihood drop off the map and let Rufus pick up the pieces.
This process of subtle detachment from the top of the ShinRa hierarchy and protection of his subordinates involved disseminating subtle misinformation both within the Investigative Division of General Affairs Department and to the people he theoretically reported to. It was also why he let Tseng get away with not handing the Cetra girl in the Slums over to Hojo. The evidence from the blood tests had been completely destroyed, Vincent's true gender had not been disclosed to anyone and he had reassigned the Turks digging into Draculina's background to find out more about AVALANCE. All in all, he did his best to ensure his Turks were ignoring what his former partner was up to and well away from whatever her plans were. Thank the Goddess hunting down the two rogue Generals was now the Infantry's problem.
Veld, distressingly aware of the sword of Damocles casting a shadow over the Company, did his best to keep busy and pretend he didn't know what was coming.
Veld is not stupid and he knows the old Vincent better than anyone. More importantly, he has imparted his moral compass to the continued well-being of the nebulous idea of 'The Company' rather than any specific individual. This means that ‒when faced with the prospect of Vincent gunning for most of the Board and the entire Science Department‒ he is perfectly prepared to cut his losses in order to preserve the greater whole.
After all, 'The Company' will survive the shake-down so long as there are enough capable people left to pick up and keep going afterwards.
He's still nervous though.
