Omega [REDUX]

Chapter 41

"You realise that all of this makes absolutely no sense."

"Seems like a standard attack to me."

"All Support Cruisers come with permanent cloak engines," Anna went on, pacing the room. It'd been three days since the attack, and they still hadn't made any sense out of it. "They've been virtually undetectable up till now; even if Empyrean was able to develop new scanning technology, they wouldn't even know where to look for a Support Cruiser."

Charles considered her words, leaning back in his wheelchair even as he brought up the mission intel. "Could just be an isolated coincidence."

Anna scoffed. "That's possible, but highly unlikely. Let's entertain the possibility that they do have a way to track our Support Cruisers. Even then, why attack them? They don't know what data we store on them. Hell, we don't even know how logistics spreads out our data most of the time. They have no reason to attack a cruiser without a discernable benefit."

"They don't need a reason to attack our assets."

"Empyrean has never acted without reason, Charles. I'm living proof of that." She observed the grimace upon his face. "Besides, Elaine herself admits they have a surprise in store."

"That might be reading too much into it."

"Is it?" Anna paced the room, glancing at the various reports on the holographic projection in the middle. "They're almost definitely planning something. And as far as our psychological profiles on Elaine show, she had no other reason to reveal it if she wasn't cocky enough about it."

"She had no reason to reveal the intricacies of Empyrean operations to you either."

"But they attacked a Support Cruiser, of all things, out of nowhere. We don't know what they were doing on the ship. Hold it for three hours with no discernable damage or motive?"

"Anna," Charles cut in, halting her train of thought, "I seriously advise you to reconsider. There are a multitude of factors that could have affected their op. Maybe Empyrean forces were too slow, or had a technical glitch."

"You really don't get it, do you?" Anna's lips formed a thin, fine line. "Charles, do you know why I ended up the way I am?" She morphed her had into a blaster for emphasis. "Like this?"

"Because you were captured and augmented, and like you've said, they did it with a reason and purpose." Charles narrowed his eyes. "What's your point?"

"They did this to me, to hurt Elsa," she stated flatly, surprised at the venom in her own voice. "If they wanted a new Ascendant they could have picked one of their own people, but no, they picked me specifically. They indoctrinated Ursula to become their agent to find some way to compromise their escaped weapon, and they found it in me. They planned the op so meticulously that they could augment me within hours of my capture that they knew would almost certainly succeed. They had me combat-ready and indoctrinated just as she arrived to rescue me.

"So there is no way," she spat as her hand remorphed to its normal form, staring straight at Charles, "that they, for some strange unknown reason, decided to attack this ship on a whim, or make a mistake in its execution. They are planning something."

Silence hung between them for a moment. Anna was the first to break the standoff. "I'm sorry."

"Don't be." Her handler shifted himself in his seat. "I get your point."

Another uncomfortable pause.

"Let's break it down again," Charles went on, turning back to the display. "Everything we know. First, our virtually undetectable ships were identified, boarded and captured." He reached for his cup and took a sip. "Empyrean forces were in control of the ship for at least three hours; two of which before our response teams arrived, and an additional hour over the course of the op before we bugged out."

He leaned back, wheeling around so he could move around the room, looking at the intel. "They brought along a small strike force and three Ascendants, which quite frankly is the strangest composition of forces you could possibly have. Two extremes in their spectrum of weapons and personnel."

She shook her head as she sat back down, gazing at the files Charles was now scanning through. "That, on the contrary, narrows down their possible mission objectives. They meant to seize the ship for a short amount of time. The Ascendants are meant to secure their entry, while the token squads are cannon fodder, meant to establish patrols once a foothold was established. When we inevitably respond, the Ascendants would be able to hold their own until their extraction arrived."

"They weren't there to take the ship down, that's for sure," Charles deduced. "They'd be able to do that within the two hours we had to scramble a response. What about targeting you? Or more likely, Elsa?"

"No, they only got her during their escape," she replied. "They'd have a much more coordinated plan for that. And of all the places to trap us, why onboard that cruiser?" She rested her head upon the table. "It has to be something else."

"Anything unusual about the op that you noticed? Anything out of place?"

The datacenters. "It had something to do with the data, that's for sure. I detected large amounts of dataflows near the main servers." But what? The surprise? "That's about it."

"It's likely they made copies of whatever was stored in there" her handler quipped.

"But we agreed they wouldn't have known what they were going for when they attacked."

Charles frowned. "We should probably work with the assumption that they do. I'll give you full access to archives; you'll be able to locate the data that you offshored the ship just before it went down. Some techs have probably already flagged it."

Some archive.

Charles hadn't warned her about the size of the archive, or the amount of data she had offshored from the ship. Her haste to scan quickly through vast quantities of data she'd ended up overloading herself. Her vision had gone complete static for a brief moment, and she'd lost her sense of balance for a good five minutes in a row. Now she found herself sitting outside Elsa's ward as she waited for the doctors to arrive with a full report on her minor accident

Elsa wasn't inside the room.

That puzzled her. Elsa was out cold when she dropped by last night after checking In on Kristoff's team, having survived with a few minor injuries. Small burns and all that. The med personnel must have wheeled her away for a checkup or something—

"I'm really fine, doc. You and your team did your job well. Now I need to get back to my job."

"Ma-am—"

"With all due respect, doctor," Elsa said as she rounded the corner, her exasperated doctor right behind her, "and as much as I sincerely appreciate what you've done, I'm really okay. I'm good to go." She flexed her shoulders for emphasis. "I promise you, if anything comes up I'll head right back to you."

"I still strongly advise—"

"Come on, Doc. Please?"

The man let his hands down in defeat. "Okay, okay. You've made your point. But I'm sending a med team to Cradle Alpha within the week to check on your progress."

"Deal."

The whitecoats walked away. Elsa caught her gaze.

"You just wake up?" Anna asked as her lover walked up to her, embracing her, burying her head in the crook of Elsa's neck. "God, I was so worried. I can't imagine how you must have felt when you rescued me."

She felt a hand caress the back of her head reassuringly, ruffling fingers through her hair. "It'll take more than a few minigun rounds to take me away from you."

Anna chuckled as they pulled apart. "Don't ever do that, ever again."

"You know I had to," Elsa replied, pressing their foreheads together. "I couldn't let anyone else die. Especially because we all didn't see it coming." She felt Elsa take a few strands of red hair into her hands. "I've missed you so much. Even if I was out for most of the time. Come on, let's go."

"Where'd they take you? You weren't here when I came in," Anna asked as they walked, passing through the medical sector and past scurrying nurses and doctors. She made a quick decision not to tell Elsa why she herself ended up in the medical wards. "Did you wake up in the morning or something?"

"They were running a scan on me when I woke up," Elsa said, her smile sending a familiar tremble through Anna's heart. "About to put me under another MRI. I convinced them it wasn't necessary."

"How are you feeling?"

"Good. Pain is but a memory right now, all things considered. Didn't even have a headache."

"Movement impairment? Orientation difficulties?"

"You know, you could run your own bio-scan on me and probably know my condition better than I do."

They reached the shuttle bay, Anna spying their dropship at the end of the line of aircraft. "You sure they fixed you up okay?" she said, turning to her lover, concern spilling out a little more than she intended. "You have an awful lot of faith in recovering from severe wounds."

Her lover chuckled, ruffling a hand through Anna's red hair. "You're so cute when you're worried."

Anna pouted. "Hey!"

"Relax. Our doctors are basically the best at their job. Besides, our enhancements give us better recovery rates. I'm going to be fine."

"I can't imagine how it must be like," Anna said. "Being hurt so bad. I doubt I could have endured it like you do."

"You're stronger than you think, Anna. Besides, I'm not worried about the physical wounds," Elsa replied as they stopped in front of the bay, watching personnel scurry about their duties. "Those can heal. Emotional ones are… a bit more complicated."

"What do you mean?"

She watched Elsa's demeanour change visibly. "I don't think I'll ever get over some things that happened." She sighed, looking out at the bay and its flurry of activity, or maybe just into the general distance, or maybe nowhere in particular. "Like the people I've killed before I got here. Sometimes I'm glad I can't remember them. Then there's the soldiers that retrieved me. And when…" She sucked in a breath and couldn't continue. "When—"

"I know," Anna said. When I was captured. "I know."

Elsa exhaled again and turned back to face her. "I'm just glad those moments are behind me. Behind us. If anything I'm just lucky to have kept myself together. Especially after all this time."

"How do you do it?"

Her lover raised an eyebrow. "Do what?"

"Keep yourself together," Anna said, lacing her fingers through Elsa's. "I mean, after all you've been through – and you've had it pretty tough – I don't know how you manage all of this."

She watched Elsa smile slightly. "When things get difficult I think of you. That's enough to keep me going. You're worth all the pain in the world."

Anna pulled her lover into an embrace, holding her tightly for a time. "Stinker," she finally said, pushing her away to peck Elsa lightly on the lips. "Can't wait to get you back for some private time."

"You little devil," Elsa mock-chastised as she took her arm and they began to stroll down the walkway towards their dropship. "The only thing you missed about me is how I ravage you in bed?"

"Let's just say that's one of your best qualities, shall we?" she replied with a wink, sending a blush to Elsa's face.

Anna had decided not to bother Elsa with the discussions she'd had with Charles earlier in the day. She'd also been way too busy; making Elsa scream in ecstasy was a much higher priority anyway. And make her scream she did.

But it didn't leave her mind. At least, not permanently. After all, it was a lot easier to forget things when Elsa's mouth was between her legs and doing devilish things to her body.

So when they were done making sweet, passionate love to each other and had worn themselves and each other out, Anna lay in bed, resting against Elsa's cool body, the events of the day once again reaching her mind. Now that she was rested, and definitely more relaxed than earlier in the day, she could get back to work. Accessing the archive would have been easy enough, and definitely more comfortable from where she was but she needed to organize her thoughts and ideas as she scanned through them. Reluctantly, she pushed herself off Elsa's alluring figure, kissing her goodbye on her shoulder and made her way to the main hall.

Yawning, she triggered the holographic projector wirelessly, accessing the archive in another simultaneous process. She dug out the information she'd offshored from the carrier and threw it onto the display; she didn't bother trying to read it directly from the archive this time, simply transferring it to Cradle Alpha's own databanks. This time she approached the situation differently; she scanned through all subsequent reports of the attacks. She scanned past the testimonies provided by herself and Kristoff's squad, looking at the official analyses of the op.

Nothing. Everything she tried came up as a dead end. Nothing in particular that would suggest a specific motive for the attack. She was back at square one. She'd curse out loud, but she wouldn't want to wake Elsa up.

I'm definitely doing something wrong here. I need a new angle. Perspective. Change it up a little.

She continued scanning the archive for additional information, digging up past reports of Empyrean activity and operations to see if she could draw any similarities. Unorthodox, but an option she was forced to take; her actions only cemented the idea that this was a completely illogical operation. Empyrean's tactics thus far had been specific and targeted, and their motives could always be discerned almost immediately.

Anna leaned back against the chair, eyes staring at the table in the glare of the display, hand propping her chin as she continued to think. She refused to believe that she was being paranoid, then retracted that thought immediately as she realized that that was what paranoid people tended to believe, and left room in her mind for reasonable doubt.

"Can't sleep?"

She didn't have to turn around; cool hands snaked down her shoulders, fingertips grazing the skin on her arms ever so gently. "Just been thinking about some stuff."

"Didn't make you come hard enough then," she heard Elsa smirk behind her, and they shared a soft chuckle. "Seriously though, what are you doing?"

Anna pushed her chair back so she could turn towards Elsa, her lover resting her palms against the table and placing her weight on them. "Don't you get the feeling that the attack on the cruiser made no sense whatsoever? No clear objectives, unusual modus operandi… it doesn't fit in line with Empyrean's tendencies."

"I see where you're coming from," Elsa hummed. "What have you gone through?"

Anna filled her in. Her discussion with Charles. Her initial attempts to scour the data archives. Whatever she had put up on the screen. "What's that then?" her lover asked, pointing at the files in an isolated corner of the projection. "Have you scanned through that?"

No, Anna realized that she hadn't. "It's just the files I offshored during the attack, just before we bugged out. The techs flagged it out but didn't find anything of importance."

She knew the look Elsa had on her face, where she narrowed her eyes and pursed her lips. Elsa brought the files over and opened them. "Interesting…" There wasn't anything particular about them at all, as far as Anna had remembered. "Then this is Empyrean's mistake."

Anna was confused. "Mistake?"

"They forgot to make their objectives look obvious. There's nothing really important in here, nothing of strategic importance that would logically help Empyrean's cause or operations. So we know they weren't after anything in particular, as they would want us to believe."

"This is really bordering on conspiracy theories, Elsa," Anna remarked dryly. "I don't think—"

"Found it."

Anna stared. From the corner of her eye she could see Elsa's definite disbelief too. Her lover had found something completely illogical, something that made absolutely no sense, and that made it the perfect explanation for why the attack took place. Fished out from the depths of the archives of the support cruiser that had gone down.

They were looking at an Empyrean file.

"It… it has to be a mistake," was Anna's first response.

Her lover brought up a data analysis of the file in question. "I know the encoding all too well," Elsa responded. "But no harm in trying to be sure. Cross-reference the data signature with the ones' in your own databanks."

"You mean the ones stored in my head?"

"Yes. We should attempt to verify the authenticity of this particular file before attempting anything."

Anna brought up the files. They were rooted in her core neural programming, as far as she could tell. The last time she had tried to access them, she and Elsa had ended up having sex. No harm in letting that happen again, she mused, trying to distract herself from the gravity of the situation, and the fact that her heart rate was speeding up for all the wrong reasons.

She broke down the data signatures for comparison and ran them side by side. Perfect match. "The file's legit."

Elsa swore out loud before continuing, "Not too far off from a conspiracy I suppose."

"How… what? Why?"

"Whatever this is for, we've just opened a whole can of worms." Her lover paced the room. "We're in a spot of deep shit."

"We need to—"

"Proc our data isolation protocols," Elsa said as she moved to the display's console. "I'm cracking this thing open."

"Protocols are in place," Anna stated as Elsa began to access the files. "What're you looking for?"

Elsa began to scan through the files at an alarming pace. "We need to find out exactly what these Empyrean datafiles are for." She narrowed her eyes and kept scrolling. "But this doesn't make sense at all. These are just codes. Encryption codes of some kind, but for a specific dataseal. Almost like a password. Why would they give us access codes to anything—?"

Everything seemed to click in Anna's head. The files implanted inside her. The matching signatures. Without hesitation she synced with Cradle Alpha's systems, input the codes into her own files and brought them up onto the display.

"Two pieces of their puzzle," Elsa muttered as they stared at the new set of data they had just unlocked, scanning through it for keywords that would give them a hint, anything as to what they were looking at—

—[Ascendant Candidacy Program]—

Revision span: {v1.0 – v1.2}

Encryption tier: Valkyrie

Abstract: Assessment and log details for current Ascendant Candidates; all logs from Candidate Snowflake to Candidate Dreadnought. Enclosed are files for creating, conditioning and countering each Ascendant as ascertained from research and practical experimentation.

Navigate folders: [Snowflake][Golem][Pyro][Blade][Thor][Dreadnought]

—[END]—

Anna's jaw dropped. Elsa's reaction was similar, her face tinged with surprise and pain. She watched her lover's fingers curl into a fist as she wrung it in front of her repeatedly. "For fuck's sake," she barely managed through clenched teeth. "Of all the things—"

Anna navigated through the folders, scanning every gruesome detail inside. How the Ascendants save her had been bred from embryos, grown using advanced incubation techniques, accelerating their development until they were the equivalent of a seven-year-old. Everything Empyrean did to them after that made Anna want to puke. She couldn't begin to describe the pained look on Elsa's face.

"These… dossiers…"

Elsa exhaled deeply and regained her composure. "We know what they're doing. Anna, kill the power to the building."

She stared blankly at Elsa. "Wait, what?"

"You heard me. Kill the power."

"What the heck are we doing this for? We should be—"

Elsa's face turned deadly serious. Anna hadn't seen that look since they'd been trapped in the convention center, now construed with the pain of having dug up her past, and instantly she knew something was different. Something she wasn't reading that Elsa was. "Kill. The power. Now."

Wordlessly she interfaced with Cradle Alpha's systems and disabled them temporarily, not before sending a satisfactory notice to command that they were performing some routine maintenance on their own systems. Satisfactory enough for Elsa, who turned her attention back to the datafiles they had uncovered.

"Why are we doing this?" Anna demanded. "This is a matter a grave importance that we need to report to HQ! They need to know about this!"

"Report this to HQ?" Elsa asked incredulously. "Anna, this entire operation only means that Empyrean has a mole inside UIF!

"A mole?"

"Think about it. It makes perfect sense; it's how they found Ursula and indoctrinated her. It's how they knew to target you for abduction so it would hurt me. It's how they knew what cruiser to attack and how to launch the operation."

Anna raised an eyebrow. "That doesn't explain why I'm here. Why I'm able to fight them."

"Weselton tends to get cocky. He must have thought I'd be too paralyzed to fight you after my abduction, so he turned you into an Ascendant and sent you to fight me without proper conditioning. That was his mistake. He didn't think we'd survive or that we'd be able to turn you."

"So all of this is an elaborate plan to infiltrate the UIF?"

"We don't know who it is, but we can assume it's a relatively high ranking official, given that they chose to transmit the information so insidiously. Any formal channels of report will be monitored, and this is going to go straight to the mole if this gets out."

"We can't just let them get away with it!" Anna protested.

"I'm not saying we should. If we're going to stop the mole at their own game, we cannot let them know that we know about what they're doing. But from here on out, we are in grave danger. "

"Grave danger?"

"It's been days since the attack. In the elapsed time the mole probably waited before making their move to avoid raising suspicion. It's likely they already know the purpose of the attack, and what information was planted."

"Then they know…" Anna's voice trailed off as she began to comprehend the full extent of what they were dealing with. "They want the files I have. The files inside my head."

They want to make their own Ascendant.

"Whoever is doing this also wants a legitimate excuse to kill us," Elsa cut in. "They will know you have the files. They'll accuse us of withholding critical information from HQ and declare us a threat. Then we'll be out of the way and no one will be able to stop them and their plan."

"They can't accuse us of that! We both didn't tell them about whatever was stored in my head."

"They won't need an excuse for that part."

Anna felt her heart tighten in her chest. She'd believed it was all over. That after her abduction, all she'd have to handle was a few attacks and keep fighting Empyrean on every front. Every front but from the inside. She'd wanted to spend her life, her career, with Elsa. And now…

"Here's what's going to happen," Elsa stated, her voice flat and monotone, and Anna could swear she detected a hint of fear in her voice as she began to pace the room. "We won't know the order in which they'll execute their plans, but I suspect this is how they'll do it:

"First, they'll attempt to physically dispatch us. It's the most quick and efficient way. Kill us both, extract the information from your head, and they're good to go. It's likely they're already on their way; by informing them that our systems are down for maintenance, they'll take the window to kill us now.

"Second, if we survive that, every medical team, psychological profiler, any UIF personnel sent to Cradle Alpha will carry the risk of being an assassin sent to kill us. We can't trust anyone from here on out, but we will have to let them enter to avoid raising suspicion. And then we have to deal with whatever tactics they employ by ourselves.

"Third, they'll denounce us by branding us as renegades and a threat to UIF security for withholding information. They can do this after we're dead, or if we survive their attempts on our lives. By then we'll have to find ways to expose the conspiracy at the heart of all of this bullshit or we'll literally become fugitives and will have played directly into their hands." Elsa stopped in her tracks. "Wwe literally cannot trust anyone anymore."

For a moment neither could find a proper way to respond. Anna let herself close her eyes as she processed the information, feeling her heart pound in her chest and beads of cold sweat drip down the side of her face. From here on, we're in grave danger.

Elsa let out another breath and sat back down in her chair. "Run a scan on all nearby roads and the surrounding airspace. There's no way they passed up an opportunity to kill us."

Anna interfaced with the scanning systems, careful not to let a data signature slip out, and scanned the areas around Cradle Alpha. "Well," she said shakily, "you were right. One convoy with Alpha-level assets coming our way, with a Hummingbird for backup." She couldn't bring herself to face Elsa now. Her palms were sweaty. Her heart continued to hammer in her chest.

"Alpha?" Elsa shook her head. "No Omega-assets? Kristoff's squad or whatnot? They want to kill us with Alpha squads?"

"Scanning again," Anna replied, forcing herself to focus, taking in a deep breath as she interfaced with systems again. "Something seems off about the squadrons' files. Looks hastily registered; my database doesn't have any Alpha squads under their callsigns."

"Then its black ops," Elsa deadpanned. "For all we know they've been studying our physiology and tactics just for a situation where they have to take us down. We have to setup. Shield our mechanized processes from detection and power down non-essential systems. Disable interior cameras and increase firewall encryption; we'll be at a disadvantage if they hack into our systems."

"What are you gonna do?"

"Hunt them down, split them up; if you can give me a rundown of their equipment when they get closer I'll be able to decide on my combat strategy." Elsa started to walk off and paused mid-step. "This is it, I guess."

"What is?"

"We're going to war, Anna," she said, turning back to Anna with a pained look on her face. "We're going to war with the UIF."