The team bedded down for the night, sticking to their usual watch schedule. It was quiet up in the mountains, only the sound of the wind moving the trees. Even the noise of the mining operations to the west were cut off by the ridges and cliffs between them. The minutes ticked by, with nothing to see and nothing to hear.
Marius dreamt.
The chopper banked in a smooth flowing motion, the heavy load slung beneath it arcing out in a controlled swing, remaining dead centre under his fuselage. Slowly he lowered the collective, and the chopper dropped closer to the valley bottom, whipping past at a steady hundred knots. There, the pad was in sight. Carefully pulling back on the stick, he raised the nose and reduced air speed. More by feel than sight, he felt the load swing forward slightly. At just the right moment, he dropped the collective a little more, the chopper sank the last few feet, and the load touched down, gently, to the ground. A signal from the landing officer, and he hit the cable release command, and another load of high-tech drilling gear was delivered to this remote isthmus ready for use. As he banked away, he checked the sensors – yes, the load was absolute dead centre on the pad. A slight smile tugged at his flaccid lips, satisfaction at a job done perfectly. He pulled the collective back, increasing power and the chopper reacted like a race horse, freed of its heavy load. The six-bladed rotor thudded with a distinctive harmony above him.
No, wait, that wasn't right.
Marius woke with a start, then called out in a croaky voice, "Der Hubschrauber!" A moment later his mind cleared a little, and he tried again, "Helicopter, HELICOPTER!"
Hunter turned to look at him, his face just a mass of shadows in the darkened cab.
"Now is not the time to be complaining again. We know you want a chopper…"
"Nein! No, there is a chopper out there. Six blades! SIX! Almost certainly military!"
Hunter jumped through into the back, rousing the others fully awake from their slumber – though Marius' cries had already started that process. Kai asked Marius what was wrong, and Marius quickly explained – he could hear, faintly, a six-bladed chopper… great performance, but fuel hungry. That almost certainly made it a security or military variant. Kai turned to Tadibya and made a circling motion to the truck around them, nodding as she started her spellcasting. She concentrated her power and spun a web around the vehicle, and within a few seconds it vanished from view, blending into the scree slope behind them and the tree they were parked under.
They all crammed into the front of the truck, looking up into the sky and watching for signs of activity, listening as best they could. Marius jacked in, and watched his passive sensors, looking for more information. After a minute of scrutiny they saw it – or rather, they didn't see it. What they saw was a path of occluded stars, as a black, light-absorbing shape floated up the ridge. It was quiet, and the skin seemed to just drink in the light. They watched as carefully as they could, trying to determine details about it from the occasional glint as they caught a reflection not fully damped.
Marius studied his sensors, reaching out with his passive instruments to avoid giving away their position with betraying signals. As more details were sketched in, he realised he was looking at a Yamatetsu Elemental PRX – an attack chopper with a crew of two or three, and up to five combat troops in the rear compartment. Or, and possibly worse news, instead of the troop bay, it could carry a nose-mounted minigun, along with a selection of rockets and missiles in the wing pods, controlled and steered by powerful sensors. That they could not see it clearly, or hold it on sensors indicated that someone had gone to significant effort on the stealth front, and that indicated the crew would be well trained.
They watched the chopper climb over the ridge into another valley, dropping down out of line of sight. A few minutes later it appeared again, climbing over the ridge and dropping into the next valley along. They watched it for a while, as it combed the mountain – looking for something in particular, just doing a patrol, or practicing their night flight skills – the team could not determine.
When it appeared in their valley, they shut down all of their electronic gear, powering down any device they could see and extinguishing anything that made noise. They watched the chopper nose up the valley, flying at a steady pace perhaps fifty metres below the ridge line. Holding their breath unconsciously, they watched as it overflew them without giving any indication of detecting either them or the truck. It patrolled for a while longer, gradually fading away to the south and out of sight.
Yamatetsu was another of the ten triple-A megacorporations that ruled the sixth world – a vast sprawling enterprise that had divergent interests in every conceivable business. But, they were not related to the operation of the dam, nor the mine as far as the team could work out – so why they were in the area, was anyone's guess. Unless it was just a Yamatetsu-manufactured chopper, being used by another company – but even then the stealth of the craft argued against it being a run of the mill security vehicle. The team waited until it had been gone for twenty minutes before starting to unwind and make their next moves.
Aswon and Hunter climbed up the ridge in the darkness, trying to get to a vantage point where they could spot the temple and the large transport vehicle. The climb was treacherous in the dark even for those with augmented vision – some of the finest Swiss optics for Hunter, and a magically enhanced ability to gather light in the case of Aswon, but despite them both being able to see as well as each other, Aswon seemed to have no real difficulty with the climb. In places, he dropped to all fours, and padded across the surfaces or up steep cliffs with surety and speed. One part of the climb seemed particularly tough, but after crossing the scree and shale slope, he fixed a rope to drop back to Hunter to help him navigate around it. When Hunter reached his position, Aswon clapped him on the shoulder, his lips pulled back and the stars showed his teeth clearly against his black skin as he gave a broad grin.
"When you live in harmony, and respect the land, occasionally you may receive a blessing in return."
He pulled his shirt up for a moment, the faint Gecko tattoo almost invisible against his dark skin, were it not for the incredibly faint glow from the magical ink that bound a spell to his spirit.
"I prefer a more high-tech approach personally, a nice bit of tungsten carbide," said Hunter after a moment. With a 'snick' noise, retractable climbing claws sprung out from his palms and each of his fingers, tiny little serrated barbs that would grip and dig into most surfaces. They didn't even glint in the starlight, having been treated with some chemical process that dulled and blackened the surface. Hunter reached up and dug the claws into the bark of a tree, and used that as leverage to swarm further up the slope, Aswon in hot pursuit.
They reached the top of the ridge after about three quarters of an hour of climbing, and looked over and into the next valley – and saw nothing. Just an empty valley. After careful observation, they made their way back to the truck, and reported in. A moment later, Tadibya left her body, her astral form zooming up the cliff with ease, making short work of the journey. Her astral form poked through a set of bushes at the top, using their living aura for cover and she looked down into the valley, blinking in surprise. A few seconds of careful observation, and she flew back the way she came, reuniting with her physical form.
"There's a spell over the whole valley floor, a powerful one. I sense a powerful shield of illusion, of great intensity. Like I can do – but far larger, and slightly more powerful. They have capable mages over there, it seems." As she finished speaking, they saw her gesture again, calling forth mana. Before them appeared a ghostly outline of a small pile of slab rock, forming a crude humanoid shape. Tadibya stared at it intently for a few moments, then it floated out through the roof and out of view.
"A simple watcher spirit. I told it to go up to the ridge and hide in a bush, and watch the valley – if it sees any change in the spell, or spots any people, it will come and tell me at once."
The team looked at each other and sighed. Well, that explained why neither they nor the temple crew had been spotted, it seems. They settled back down to rest, resuming their watches and waited for dawn.
Rousing proved to be hard, with a mountain directly to the east of them – there would be no direct sunlight into the valley bottom at all in the middle of winter, and the sun was going to take a while to climb over the ridge to the east to illuminate any of the land. After a quick breakfast, Aswon and Hunter grabbed more ropes, and spent the next hour putting in aides past all of the tricky sections up the ridge – now, everyone would be able to get up the hill in safety and with relative ease, probably in as little as thirty minutes.
Once the route was laid in, Marius grabbed some equipment and hauled it to the top of the ridge. He set up in a gorse bush on the lee side of a spur of rock, and got some long aerial cables run around the edge of the rock and aiming down into the valley. Working with his communications gear, he slowly scanned all the frequency bands, listening in for chatter and carrier waves. Eventually he picked up a very faint signal – the sort of thing a hand-held set might put out at minimum levels. It was a challenge to get the signal cleanly – it had very little strength, and was obviously designed not to escape the valley.
Hunter and Shimazu meanwhile had worked out some rudimentary hand signals, and started to work their way down the mountain side into the valley. It was slow going as they crawled and slid down the slopes, trying to remain under the cover of bushes, bracken and gorse, or using rocks as cover as best they could. Knowing there were potentially hostile forces in the valley they moved slowly, and it took them an hour to crawl less than two hundred metres. Their patience was rewarded though with a lack of alarm from the camp, as they patiently made their way down the side of the slope.
Eventually they made it down the hundred metres and slid below the spell threshold. Instantly, they could see the van and tents as they had spotted before, along with some people moving around. Turning and looking up the hill, they could clearly see the bush that Marius and Aswon were hidden in – so the phantasm was clearly one-way.
After a moment, they both realised that their rudimentary hand signals were useless – the people up the top could not see them, and could not receive any messages. After a moment to castigate themselves for not thinking of this, they pulled out a pistol and used the laser sight to send a quick message, hoping the red dot of light would be visible to them in their concealment.
They settled down to watch for an hour, seeing various people moving around the camp. Shimazu pulled out a small pad and tucked it under him, starting to make notes, as he and Hunter watched, gathering as much information as they could from their observation point.
First seen was a human male, in his twenties or thirties. Wearing khaki cargo pants and a warm-looking casual shirt, he carried some kind of huge pistol at his hip and a long tube weapon slung over his back. His face was barely visible beneath the bush hat, but he appeared to be a blond, with a small beard.
The next spotted caused a small wince from Hunter, as he saw her. Emerging from one of the tents was a small but broad female, a dwarf by the looks of things. She was wearing a loose fitting poncho that looked like an explosion of paint had happened next to her. Bright, garish and clashing colours blended into one, with lines and ellipses of pastels overlaid over the neon colours. She carried no obvious weapons, but could be carrying an assault rifle under her poncho quite easily, it was that baggy – and the colour scheme made it almost impossible to spot shapes and shadows. Plastic flowers were woven into her hair, and he caught the glint of metal from her hands – probably some kind of jewellery.
A female ork was next to be seen, climbing down from the cab of the transport. They caught a flash of silver from the back of her neck as she swung down and her hair blew in the wind – either data jacks or rigger jacks, it was impossible to tell at this distance – but that meant she probably wasn't magically active, but was likely to have control over some kind of machinery. She was wearing work-like blue denim overalls, covered in pockets, and had a heavy looking pistol in a gunslinger holster on her right side.
Emerging from the back of the truck, with a large crate slung casually under one arm was a brutish-looking troll. Wearing black cargo pants and a huge jacket, he carried a club or bat of some kind hung from his waist. His size made it hard to tell, as it looked more like a cosh set against his three metre height, but the bat looked to be about as long as Shimazu's sword, and would make a fearsome weapon in the hands of someone that strong.
Wearing blue jeans and a suede jacket, the next target they saw looked to be a middle-aged male dwarf. He walked out of the tent and stretched, looking around for a moment, and then grabbed some kind of mini-computer from the tent and started to check off the crates as the troll offloaded them from the truck and carried them to the awning.
Another oddity appeared next – an almost naked female burst out of the tent, ran across to the gazebo and disappeared. A minute later, she ran back into the tent, then out and to the truck. Her skin was almost as dark as Aswon's, and the clothing had an odd look about it – but even with binoculars it was hard to work out what was wrong as she flitted from place to place.
It wasn't hard to spot the next inhabitant – the large-framed orc was only made bigger by the gyromount harness he was strapped into. A long-barrelled machine gun was attached – safely stowed at the moment over his shoulder, but it would take only a quick reach to deploy, and the harness would allow him to run and fire with almost no difficulty. He looked to be wearing a one-piece green jumpsuit under the harness, and spotted a short, military-style crew cut. He looked middle-aged – which for an ork meant that he probably wasn't more than 20 at the most.
A human woman, perhaps mid to late twenties appeared from the temple opening, carefully rolling out a spool of cable. Dressed in jeans and a fleece, with her hair tucked up under a baseball cap, she appeared completely engrossed in her work, and soon had a cable running from inside the ruins back to the gazebo, carefully run around various obstructions and under rocks.
Last of all, they finally saw the person who had been offloading the crates from the truck into the troll's waiting arms – another human male, in his twenties. He looked to be wearing a track suit and trainers, his long brown hair pulled back into a tight ponytail.
After a while, Shimazu and Hunter realized they could not see under the gazebo at all from their vantage point – but if they worked their way around the head of the valley and dropped a little, they should get a better angle on it and might gather some more information. Slowly they crawled around the slope, sticking to dead ground and making use of the foliage and cover as best they could. Eventually they reached a reasonable observation point and settled in again. No sign of alarm was raised, so they appeared to have made it to this position undetected.
The crew down in the valley floor continued to unload material into the tents and and large gazebo – most of it still in sturdy packing crates and military-style plastic shipping containers. Eventually though, some signal caused them to congregate in the central gazebo area.
Hunter made himself comfortable, wedging his back against a rock and peering through some leaves down at the camp. With a twitch of his cheek muscle, his left eyelid retracted, pulling back and exposing more of the cybereye than was normally visible. A small section opened up and the front of the eye extended forwards, tiny fans along the side suddenly kicking into gear and drawing cool air into the internals. Shimazu gave a wince, and stared with fascination at the tiny device – wondering what would possess a person to replace their eye with some crazy machine like this.
Hunter ignored his companion, though, and carefully sighted down at the camp, looking around for something… there! That was ideal. It looked like the door of a scientific piece of equipment, maybe a chemical analyser - but the door was glass, or something like it anyway. He locked on to that, and a beam of ultra violet laser radiation lanced out of his eye onto the glass. The fans kicked up a gear, keeping the lasing chamber cool and the beam steady. A few seconds later, the laser microphone was finished with its calibration, and started to pick up information. As the sound waves from the people speaking radiated out, the pressure hit the surface of the glass, causing it to resonate slightly – the laser microphone picked up those miniscule vibrations, and reverse-engineered it back into speech. The quality wasn't great in this situation, but it was enough to pick out what they were saying.
Hunter started to mutter a low commentary, buffering the information to his radio for later transmission and sharing it with Shimazu.
"Ok, the guy with the rocket looks to be the leader, he's called the team in for some announcement. He knows they don't all believe any more, but it's important to him. Oh, Happy Christmas. He's opening a crate, and there are some people excited by the sounds… right, he's calling a few names out, passing out gifts. Ok, the Ork with the jacks is called Mamma Bear. She sounds happy with her gift, whatever it is. Hmm, the tie-dye monster – no name, also happy. Black naked chick… sounds tribal. Big troll, called Spotlight. Wait, he's asking around. Sounds a little unhappy."
The radio hissed slightly next to them, listening in on the frequencies locked down by Marius earlier.
"Topshot, I know you can hear me. Don't think you're getting out of this. Come on, get your ass down here, pronto."
Shimazu peered in amazement as a bush on the far side of the valley unfolded, and stood. The bush was smaller than he thought – because half of it turned out to be a sniper in a ghillie suit. Carrying a big ass rifle, the figure strode down the hill, and even from here the body language didn't look particularly warm. A single word came back over the radio.
"Oui."
The figure made quick progress down the hill, and Hunter resumed the commentary as more of the gifts were given out. When the figure entered the tent, he heard the sounds of chatting and final gifts being given away, and what sounded like the pop of a champagne bottle. They listened for another twenty minutes whilst the other crew apparently had Christmas breakfast and some bubbly, compared gifts and chatted. The big ork spoke, clueing them in on the leader's handle.
"Rocket, we pushing into the temple today then, or do you want more setup time?"
"Nah, I think we're good to go, Blaster. The overflight didn't spot a thing thanks to our friend here, so I think we're good. Spotlight, set up the gear regardless, but I can't see there being any problems."
Moments later, the figure in a ghillie suit exited the gazebo, heading up the valley side. Both Shimazu and Hunter watched carefully as the figure climbed the slope with sure movements. It disappeared behind an outcropping, and didn't emerge again. No matter how carefully they scanned the area, through binoculars or cybernetically enhanced vision – there was no sign of the sniper. That was worrying…
Hunter and Shimazu worked their way back, carefully. It took them even longer than the approach, knowing that they had a potentially expert sniper out on the far slope, and that forced a change of route to ensure they stayed in cover from the possible observation points. Eventually they got back, and made their report to Kai back at the truck.
The team sat down to work out their strategy for the mission…
