SANITY LINE
Episode 07 - Questions
“I understand if you’re upset.”
Vidcund slowly removed his augmented reality sunglasses from his face, holding them at an idle angry in his free hand, the autofile clutched in the other. “I am holding in my hand, figuratively speaking, anyway, a file that pertains to basically my entire life, my raison d’être, if you like, and I find that truly massive sections of it are redacted.”
“It’s more clearance than anyone’s ever been allowed regarding the original Project Moses, Vidcund. It’s more access than even I get.” Stamatia was careful to keep her tone even and flat, just as Vidcund was doing. An outburst like this was quite out of his character – but today was the sort of day that tended to change that, and she was prepared to excuse it, if only to keep a qualified agent. She couldn’t recall having ever met anyone with a past quite like Vidcund’s, but then… the only secrets people hated worse than the ones being kept from them, were the secrets about themselves.
Vidcund glanced at the page again, returning his glasses to his face so as to read from it. “After the Anfangsburg Tower incident, subject – that’s me, by the way. I must say I love being referred to as ‘subject’. After the Anfangsburg Tower incident, subject was sedated by an Enforcement Department team, lead by someone I can’t identify because it’s redacted, and transferred to secure facility 17A. The only reason I can tell you it’s that facility is because I’m floating there reading it on the far wall, because on this document here, it’s fucking redacted.”
He waved the document in her face, forgetting for the moment she had no way of reading it – the file was loaded on his glasses, not hers. “I’m not even allowed to be told the parts I already know!”
Stamatia sighed. “Let me see what else I can do about getting you better information, Vidcund.”
“Thank you,” he said, throwing the autofile sheet back into the stack on her desk, as he prepared to leave.
“Where are you going?”
“Anfangsburg.”
The Facility Director’s eyes narrowed down into fine slits. “Vidcund, regardless of everything that’s happened, you still have a job to do. If you want psychological relief, you’ll have to file a debriefing report.”
“I am going to Anfangsburg because that is where my job is. Gloria Creena is there.”
“How do you know?”
“Read your HUMINT briefings,” he said, dismissively, and closed the door behind himself.
---
PROJECT MOSES ABSTRACT
IN 19██, researchers for ███████ ███████████ began work on human cloning, continuing research from previous Projects: DAPHNIA, ABRAHAM, and GHELLER. Research was focused on continuing the work of Project Abraham as part of the overall Prophet Program, intended to create a ███████ ███████ which would serve with the firm’s private security.
Two versions of Project Moses went forward. The first resulted in a single viable subject, Subject 13 (nka Professor █████ ███████), and was considered a failure after [2 pages redacted].
The second version produced ███ subjects, who were remarkable for a shared identity – a trait that was purposefully cultivated. This version of the project, MOSES II, came under Agency Division control after the incident in Anfangsburg.
---
Anfangsburg was one of those teeny tiny towns on the side of the highway that you’d miss if you blinked – not that it mattered, because it was, as Scion had put it to Prince, on the road to nowhere. Once a relatively thriving company town for a mining outfit (Alakgur Minerals), the 20th century had not been kind to it, and ever since the 60s, the town seemed to be struck on the regular by disasters of one kind or another. Nobody lived here anymore, if they could help it. The census population lowballed it at a fat goose egg – but there were plenty of people who, like the Grey Angels themselves, came here to live under the radar and all but entirely off the grid.
Niles considered that numbly as he smoked another cigarillo while James pulled off the highway entirely. The scientist had never much approved of smoking, but after a few initial arguments on the subject and one too many insistences to pull over so that the cop could have his vice, James had stopped arguing.
Former cop, Niles reminded himself. He’d turned in his badge, intentionally or not, the day that Vidcund Därk had hastened along his retirement behind the unforgettable feeling of 9x19mm Parabellum rattling around inside one’s abdominal cavity. He was pleased, at least, to have felled the bastard, before he found out that that victory was less than complete.
Didn’t stop him from keeping a detective special under his overcoat, or indeed, quite a bit of the rest of his equipment. Handcuffs, pepper spray… even a few things he wasn’t supposed to have, like a CS grenade.
“Then what are we doing here? What’s so important it couldn’t have been a phone call or a message or something?”
James shrugged, pulling his sweater back on as he put the car into park. “There is, as you may or may not have known, a memorial here to the ’67 outbreak.”
“Who would want to visit a memorial to a disaster that wiped out a whole town, built by the people that made it worse, no doubt?”
“I don’t know,” the geneticist replied, stepping out of the car while his partner in crime did the same. “And neither does Archangel. But he would really, really like to.”
Niles hauled their two clamshell cases out of the trunk as he looked up to the monument (leaving a third box behind), which they had parked in the shadow of. It didn’t look particularly like anything, to him – a flying wing of monoliths, maybe, tall and white, and about the only thing in this town that looked remotely clean. “… Archangel is paying us our usual rates so that he can have a few pictures of a reminder of a government fuckup?”
“You’ll learn, eventually, just how good his hunches usually are.”
Niles tossed the stump of his smoke to the ground, and in looking down to crush it under his heel, his rising sense of contemplation immediately caught James’s attention. The scientist stepped over to him, asking, “What is it?”
Before their feet, a three-armed figure that was quite familiar to Niles as the object of his perimortem obsession, graven into the cement surface of the memorial’s terraced base as though it were there by design.
James smirked somewhat, and took one of the cases from him, setting it down to open it. “I told you his hunches were good.”
---
While ritual for the Cult of the Sleeping Eye was everything, and full of pomp and decadence which would put the Catholic Church under Borgia to shame, among the three elders, matters were much more informal. They had their meetings wherever it was convenient, and did little more than lounge about, enjoying a good meal of whatever was available, legally or otherwise.
“I have been consulting our sand tables,” Baha was saying, in his typically pompous fashion, “And I believe I have located the un-accounted-for seal.”
This captured Gloria’s interest immediately, and she stopped picking her teeth to look at him. Baha was referring to the oldest problem the cult had faced, apart from the Great Infidel and the Shar-kin. As their final act before fading into the obscurity of history thanks to the cancerous perversions Gloria and Crowe had infested their sources of power with, the White Keepers of Tererra had enacted multiple seals across what was now the Union’s territory. These seals were as plugs in a dam, stopping up those points where magic, and Those who bled it, could enter the world.
The unfaithful masses of the world thought of the legend, as they knew of it, as heroic self-sacrifice on the part of the White Keepers, and those that continued to uphold the tradition were as powerless as every other hedge wizard or would-be neopagan, and viewed accordingly. Just another hokey ancient religion, in an age that was leaving even the grandest of those behind.
Many of the seals were accounted for. A few had already been broken during the cult’s more recent heyday in the 90s. Three remained – one lost to legend, one known-but-well-defended in Kraterburg, and one, also known, that was at rest beneath one of the many museums in Terrerra. The Wellspring, it was called, was one of the more significantly-placed seals, but there was little need to act against it yet, as it was poorly defended.
“Oh?”
“There is a Great Seal, or so I estimate it, in Anfangsburg. Would you like me to investigate it?”
“No, dear. We must be subtle” Gloria turned her head slightly. “Crowe, my sweet?”
The great mountain of a man, rippling disproportionately, lifted his proportionately-diminutive head from the skull he was holding.
“Would you like to go to Anfangsburg and break a Great Seal?”
He gave a slow nod, and rose, lumbering off, lowering his head to squeeze his massive shoulders through the archway. Gloria watched him go, with a mixture of a mother’s concern and amusement on her face. “… It won’t be long for him now, I think.”
Baha watched him go. “Why do you suppose he is changing so much more rapidly than the rest of us?’
“He is simply more connected to Him than the rest of us,” Gloria said, taking on her ecclesiastic air. “But don’t lose faith now, little brother. Soon, we will all be one in Glory.”
---
Driving was out of the question, in Vidcund’s estimation. He was growing somewhat disoriented and distracted, for now that he knew the truth of his many bodies, he felt the need to check in on all of them, his consciousness shifting around like a housefly, if only to identify little more interesting than feeding, before blinking to the next life. He wondered, without overly caring, what his momentary shifts in perspective was doing to the autonomous minds of those bodies. After all, there was a point when he had been so invested in one of his clones that he had thought it was his only body, while Drache, who was, by all rights, as much Vidcund Därk as any of the others, certainly seemed to carry on as normal.
The revelation of his true identity, or state of being, however you chose to look at it… it had opened up more questions than answers. He was certain the answers to many of those questions were, themselves, questions, or would be, once he had come to contemplate them.
Anfangsburg was too remote and unimportant to have a dedicated facility, he would have thought, but as it turned out, it did – a small one, dedicated to, as near as he could tell, general purpose surveillance. It wasn’t even particularly concealed – it was listed as a Air Self-Defense Force radar installation for Space Division, probably to excuse the extensive sensor infrastructure that had been emplaced there.
Even better, it was minimally staffed, mostly automated, and the one person who worked there was one of his. And so, as he had done before, he retreated, thinking his way back to the tank, to that supreme sense of relaxation that came with the weightlessness of full emersion. Then, he just had to reach out and touch that star with his mind, and ignore the unease of knowing there were other things moving among them.
These were all analogies, of course. Even in his later career, when he had gotten quite used to this, he would not have been able to tell you how it had functioned, because it used framework no normal human possessed. It was like trying to learn how to light up your thorax – the human mind couldn’t comprehend those motions, because it didn’t have those systems.
But either way, he stepped out into the still, foggy air of Anfangsburg without the slightest care for who this body had been, when it wasn’t being him. It didn’t matter. This Vidcund, like all the others, had existed for the sole purpose of being there when he needed it.
What he needed it for, he wasn’t entirely sure yet. He was off of his balance; experiencing sensations of doubt in himself he’d never had to deal with before.
Somewhere out there, he suspected, was Gloria Creena, or at least a sizeable portion of her cult. That gave him a job to do, an objective, a purpose.
Did his role in the world have to change merely because his perception of his place in it had?
He checked the load of both of his handguns and then set off down the road toward the town proper. Walking, perhaps, was best. For now, anyway.
Once he sorted these feelings out, he thought, he might put in for some upgraded vehicle requisitions.
---
Dr. ██████ ██████, an employee of the original company, was the primary researcher on the second phase of Project Moses. An expert in the genetic coding applications of Teleneurology, Dr. ██████ was also a part of the research team in the original project. In a debriefing for Agency Division, ██ stated the goal was to “create one or more ‘hives’ of enhanced human subjects and research their usefulness in teamwork-structure settings.” Dr. ██████ then went on to state that “in respect to Subject █, we succeeded tremendously. Perhaps too well.”
Dr. ██████ was treated with amnesiac drugs and, after suitable recovery, now works for █████████ ████, in their biowarfare development department. His files and communications are monitored continuously by Agency Division to ensure that research into similar projects is not pursued.
---
Scion glanced once around the immediate area before lifting his mask as he looked down at something on the ground, to get a better look at what looked like a patch in the stone that made up the terraced base of the monument. He lowered it back into place before rising again. “… You’re the detective. What’re you thinking right now?”
Prince had stood back somewhat, studying the relationship of the three-armed figure to the monoliths themselves, if there even was one. Scion liked his mask, probably because he’d designed it himself. Nice and plain, with nothing to really mark it out at all. A fitting departure from the glaringly unique masks of most of the known Grey Angels, which he was certain Prince appreciated. “I’m thinking.”
Scion let him think on in silence, still convinced, in spite of probability, that there was something more to find here. Prince watched him poking around like a kid’s conception of how a detective behaved, before interrupting him with a non-sequitur. “You’re a medical expert, right? What happened in the outbreak?”
“Well, see, that’s sort of the thing,” Sicon said, picking his way carefully back over to Niles, so as not to step on the lines, “Nobody can agree. We know the pathogen, and we know the vector of transmission that brought it into town in the first place, but those two details don’t agree. Personally, I think the outbreak was a weaponized pathogen. The local airfield had a weather station, which had an isolated rainwater collector that was monitored and drained. Even though the airfield was closed during the outbreak and that station wasn’t being actively monitored, a sample of rainwater from that collector was still contaminated.”
“You can’t get sick from the rain, Doc.”
“And yet, that was exactly what happened here. I-“
Scion suddenly stopped speaking, turning sharply in another direction. Niles was baffled by the sudden outburst of what had looked like paranoia – every detail of the veteran Angel’s posture and action suggested flight-or-fight reaction, and Niles was surprised that Scion did not appear to be in any way armed.
Calmly, he pushed the fringe of his grey overcoat aside, so that he could rest his hand on the grip of his snub-nosed Special. “What is it?”
He couldn’t see the smallest trace of threat, and then, suddenly, a Jersey barrier launched itself off of the nearby highway from a cause Niles could not see for lack of a proper line of sight. The shock of the moment froze the former detective in place. It was headed right for him!
Scion remained a lucid participant in events. From the corner of his eye, Niles saw the man reach for his own neck with his left hand, sweeping in a broad gesture with his right. The barrier, now burning with violet balefire, suddenly and sharply altered course, now landing in the lawn far to their right.
An improbably large figure appeared at the edge of the over-passing highway, and Prince brushed aside his own questions to clear leather on his snub-nosed revolver, which no longer seemed weapon enough.
Answers could wait. Though he didn’t realize it just yet, the Battle of Anfangsburg had begun.
---
Crowe was an angel of judgment. His duty, for which he was well rewarded with all the decadences he could still imagine, with every whim satisfied, was nothing more than that. He was Glory’s standard-bearer, his judge, and, more often than not, his executioner.
He was, by now, almost subsumed by his duty, the tattered remnants of his Super-Ego clinging to the barest awareness of his senses. He was a creature of the Id, entirely given to instinct and burdensome automata – a puppet in the hands of his god.
What was left of that super-ego contrived to place a puzzled frown on his face as the block of concrete he had hurled suddenly burst into flame and threw itself into an entirely different path. The smaller of the little men down near the Seal – it had to be the seal, just look at it! – had done something. Some sort of magic, like Baha.
Crowe snarled. He couldn’t abide that. Magic was for the weak.
---
It was the sound of rending concrete and iron that had set Vidcund into a run. The large figure had gotten his attention, but for some damn-fool reason, he’d written off the presence as a case of a hitchhiker and a bad sense of perspective.
When he watched the man pitch the chunk of barricade like a damn softball, however, that got the Agent’s immediate and undivided attention. He still had, by his estimation, the better part of a kilometer to cover before he reached the figure, but anything that both could and would throw around parts of civil works was the sort of thing they paid him the big bucks to stop.
Hell, for all he knew, that was the sort of thing he was made for.
Identity match. His glasses flashed at him, throwing a highlight around a profile of the man’s face. Subject is Suspect A from the assault on the Abject facility.
Vidcund pushed himself harder. He had forgotten about Abject, in all the later drama. That an enemy he had failed to vanquish before had finally appeared simply incensed him all the greater. Reaching into his coat as he ran, he plucked out his collapsible batons, flicking them outward to their full length with a practiced flourish.
Bullets had failed to attract this man’s notice in the past, but Vidcund was willing to bet he still knew a trick or two.
---
When Subject 13 (MOSES I) was debriefed following the revelation of his identity, he commented that he was fully aware of his role in MOSES I, and had long suspected not just the existence of a MOSES II, but that Vidcund Därk (then an employee of ███████ ████) was the subject thereof.
Subject 13 presents incredibly marked Teleneurological development, along with classic manifestations of psionic abilities including telekinetic and telepathic powers. For safety reasons, he has been forbidden all contact with Subject Därk until the completion of testing in MOSES II and the full extent of teleneural development in the same has been understood.
---
Niles was, above all other things, a practical man while sober. He had his principles, but was no paladin, allowing himself to set aside many of them when it was necessary. In this case, the immediate threat of the giant who had bounded down to meet them, strip of safety barrier clutched in hand, had allowed him to set aside his usual, principled curiosity.
Scion had magic powers. Demonstrable paranormal abilities – the kind of thing that Archangel expounded and Niles had ridiculed. The revelation would bear stern questioning later. For now, however, there was a more pressing set.
There was no difference for Niles, and never had been, between a paper target and a human being, when it was a question of public safety. That last part, he supposed, was all that really separated him from the truly depraved, from people like Archangel and the people the Angels preyed upon. As he set his left foot, and rose his weapon in both hands to line up that classical sight picture, the thought crossed his mind that maybe the distinction was only in his head.
The first shot pounded out of the shortened barrel at a speed too great for Niles’ eyes to catch. He saw only the effects, a sudden reddening of the flesh of the attacker’s bare chest as the shot hit up and to the left of the breastbone. It was a perfect shot, should have been lethal in seconds, but the berserker didn’t so much as flinch. The second shot flared, and Niles fancied that he could see it exiting the barrel, a dark blur among flame. Scarlet blossomed from the shoulder, just above where the heart should have been.
The target lowered his stance somewhat, for no other reason than to give balance as he raised the strip of steel he was wielding behind him, ready to strike. Niles instinctively knew he was out of the range of a swing, and so the third shot went out too. It carried a piece of the giant’s jawbone and probably a few of his teeth off into the distance with it, and garnered nothing more than a roar as Crowe raised his weapon in a high, over-the-shoulder arc.
As Niles darted to the left, he felt the strangest compulsion, turning abruptly on a heel and running at something of a backward angle. His left hand left its supporting position on the grip – even running around, he’d have to be blind not to be able to hit a target that size one-handed – diving into his pocket to get a hold of the car keys. Shots four and five poured out one right after the other, but Niles didn’t look to see what he had hit – or even if the giant was still focusing his aggression on him. He was too busy slotting the keys into the lock on the trunk, and throwing the trunk open, not entirely sure why he had.
As instinctively as he had known to do that, he knew to take one giant step to the left.
Scion suddenly turned his gaze toward the car. Niles marveled at seeing him, this frail geneticist, his hands upraised to block a blow from the steel beam that never quite touched him before glancing away. James Derrida was not a big man, and while the inhuman masks of the Grey Angels tended to give them an imposing quality, they did nothing to amplify your physical intimidation.
Scion lowered a hand toward the car, and beckoned, and Niles understood why he had stepped aside as a cloud of tiny, glowing ball-bearings fired from the trunk as though by a shotgun. As the swarm turned in the air and closed in on the giant, Prince suddenly realized why Scion’s face was a sea of stars.
---
Crowe felt himself lifted and thrown. It had been a long time since anything like that had happened to him, he realized dimly. He bounced off the pavement, sliding for a while, buffing his back on its standpaper surface.
It was difficult to say how badly he was injured, because he wouldn’t have called it badly at all. He had the strength and constitution of his God, and could feel that being shifting around inside of him, a hundred little fingers stitching up his wounds.
He chuckled darkly as he stood back up, as effortlessly as a creature of his size could be expected to. He had, after all, absorbed a great deal of the shrapnel that Scion had thrown at him.
“Tiny little man… you’re all out of tricks.”
---
Vidcund mounted the metal barrier that separated careless drivers from the fifteen foot drop off of the overpass as effortlessly as he might have turned a corner. Running was a matter of placing one foot in front of the other, speed granted you balance, and precision was the name of his game.
In his passing, the Deviant had bent a considerable portion of the rest of the barrier outward, in the same direction he had been travelling, before it had snapped off to give him his weapon. Vidcund could get a little more lead time this way.
At the end of the barrier, he planted both of his feet. Inertial mass and his weight dragged the point of the break downward. Spring action brought it back upward, and, being at rest than he was when he was fast, Vidcund was propelled skyward.
He dropped from the sky like a lancer, coming in from high, landing hard and fast with his leading leg between the Deviant’s shoulder blades, and letting his momentum do the rest.
---
At some point during the testing process of MOSES II, the Subjects achieved total collectivity. The precise mechanism was not studied completely, or else the records were lost. Shortly after reporting this collective awareness, Subject 001 attempted to resign from his position with ███████ ███████████, resulting in [7 Pages Redacted].
When Agency completed its investigation, it was confirmed that Subject 001 was the only surviving Project MOSES II clone. He was sedated and treated with heavy amnesiacs, before being transferred to █████████. Further testing is scheduled and organized under the name of Project AEGIS. <Reference classified above your level.>
---
The fall of Därk, and his incredibly daring leap, had knocked the weapon from Crowe’s hand, causing it to fall over sideways, severely damaging the front end of the car. Niles heard James wince behind Scion’s mask – that had been his money that paid the rental fee, and making the insurance claim would not be easy, given that the man who had rented it was dead in the 80s.
To his surprise, however, he watched Scion hurrying away, jogging down the road that passed under the highway. If for no other reason than a general lack of understanding how he would be able to fight the giant if his revolver was useless, Prince tucked the weapon under his jacket and turned to follow.
“Where the hell are you going?”
James glanced at him, and gestured for the man to speed up. “There are exactly two things in town that are of any significance. We were just at the first.”
“Right, with the monster, and the Agency assassin.”
They paused. They were at an intersection anyway, and James wanted to look back at the fray without his mask on for a bit of a better view. “… Right. One of two things is going to happen. Mister Bond flattens the monster and then his friends show up and they secure the area, and everyone in it. Or the monster wins, and starts tearing apart the monument. He’s there to destroy it.”
“How do you know that,” Niles asked, watching Scion replace his mask and break back into a jog.
“The same way you knew to open the trunk for me. Come on. We’re going to go check out Anfangsburg Tower.”
“Why?”
“Because that’s where Vidcund Därk was going, before he saw us,” James said quietly, “and I want to know why.”
“So, why aren’t we waiting to find out why?”
“Monster can’t win,” James said peacefully, turning down a row of homes whose peeling paint and broken windows marked them as abandoned. “Too many Agents.”
---
Crowe was getting frustrated. He had barely stood when that impact from behind had flattened him against the ground again, and while he was happy that whatever had struck him seemed to have bounded off again, that didn’t take away the annoyance of having to pick himself up. The Blessing of Glory had made Crowe grandiose and mighty, but his impossible, inhuman bulk did him no favours when it came to speed or agility.
After all, he thought, wasn’t Glory so mighty that he need not engage his enemies in combat, but merely exterminate them? What obstacle could be so great as to not be removed?
He picked himself up off of the ground, snarling somewhat. The skin across is great, claw-like hands contracted until the sharpened points of his phalanges emerged.
Why, it was the little man from the Abject Facility… the one who had so arrogantly presumed to give him orders!
He would, certainly, enjoy this.
---
Vidcund registered only peripherally as the other combatants in the fight broke away. He trusted in the ability of his glasses to have recorded their faces, possibly even identifying them for later follow up. After all, this was the sort of thing Agency covered up on a more regular basis than you might have guessed.
He continued a few paces forward before abruptly rising up onto the balls of his feet and pivoting, hard, transmitting his momentum into the ground through his heels.
As he watched the Reality Deviant lift itself up from the ground, he was less surprised to see it changing than he was surprised to see how similar it remained. Mutation-in-vivo had been observed, however improbable as it seemed under classical understandings of biology, but it was usually on such a grand scale as to render the creatures affected unrecognizable, as the body of Professor Johanson in his apartment bathtub had been.
But this suspect was… surprisingly human-looking. True, his arms were now too long, and his body entirely too large in general. Vidcund half suspected that broad, under-biting jaw with its carnivorous array of teeth wasn’t the product of standard Darwinian mechanisms, either.
He could hear Crowe’s skin stretching, groaning as it retracted across the man’s fingers, and that deep, guttural chuckle.
“Are you scared, little mortal?”
Vidcund allowed himself a slight roll of the eyes, as his thumbs depressed the small switches in the grip of his batons that electrified them. “Not particularly.”
It was, after all, just another day at the office.
---
███████ ███████████ records suggest that a certain number of MOSES II clones can be allowed to safely “synchronize”, allowing the dominant personality in the group to integrate with the minds of the lesser members of the “unit”. This renders the said lesser individuals as semi-autonomous drones, capable of basic tasks but ultimately taking their cues from the master, who may even be giving them subconsciously.
However, Dr. █████ goes on to theorize that there is an upper “safe” bound for such integration, a critical mass at which the dominant personality attempts to override the others entirely, resulting in [DATA EXPUNGED], which █████ blames for overriding Subject 001’s ████████████, resulting in the Anfangsburg Tower incident.
Before this, the pre-Agency records suggest that Subject 001 underwent a period of █████████, with symptoms including [2 Pages Redacted].
---
Night was falling by the time Scion and Prince reached their objective on the far side of the small town, and Prince had gone so far as to extract a police-issue flashlight from his pocket, and shine it around. He was surprised to find the tower in question to be an abandoned office tower. It didn’t seem to fit in with the town, at all. Without really counting he guessed the structure at over twenty stories.
It had seen better days, too. Most of the windows were blown out, and those chunks of the façade that hadn’t fallen away completely showed signs of fire damage around the upper floors.
He fanned his light over a signboard on the lawn as they picked their way toward the main entrance. The lettering had been removed (he supposed, given the lack of any evidence of fracturing in the fasteners – they were simply absent), but the slightly darker paint beneath where the letters had been were readable enough to a keen eye.
“Slipher Corporation. Slipher had an office in Anfangsburg?”
Scion paused at the door, which had turned out to be both intact and locked – the sole clue Niles needed to know there was something particularly strange going on there. “It was their corporate headquarters. I’m surprised you didn’t know that.”
Prince shined his flashlight through the glass doors, revealing that the lobby – or at least what could be seen from here – was just as ruined as one would expect. There was concrete, and drop-ceiling panels, and broken glass everywhere. Scion continued. “They bought out the town after Alakgur Minerals collapsed, along with all the rest of their holdings. The town, the old mining office, the mine itself. They put a ton of money into this place.”
Wordlessly, Prince handed the flashlight over to Scion, who immediately shone it onto the lock itself. Strictly speaking the profession of detective and locksmith had no proper legal overlap, but Niles had learned sometimes it was expedient to bend the law a bit.
And, seeing as he now lived quite literally outside the law, with no legal identity to be incarcerated under, he didn’t mind a little bit of breaking and entering. While he worked the lock, he pressed Scion for more information. “I vaguely remember this now. Chief Exec was never found, building bombed to shit with every sign of foul play?”
“That was the official version. In the ten years since, I’ve done a little digging myself. I never did make a visit to the grounds themselves – I always assumed they were under some kind of surveillance from Agency. I think I might have been right.”
The door swung open, and Niles was very relieved to realize he had been correct, and no alarm equipment had been installed on it, nor was there any sign of life in the motion detector with the cracked cover that hung in the corner of the vestibule. As an afterthought, he locked the door again behind them.
“You say official version like you don’t believe it.”
Scion chuckled behind his mask. “I don’t, Prince. For one, I have a personal interest in Slipher Corporation. I’ve always paid their movements rather close attention. They used to employ some heavy-hitting security. In the 90s, they were even awarded PMC contracts and licensing. Called themselves the Sirens.”
“Siren PMC was a Slipher subsidiary?” Prince cast his light around the lobby. It was already quite dark, but Scion seemed not to mind it a bit. Perhaps he’d hidden light amp hardware in his mask – though personally, Niles doubted it. That sort of equipment was bulky. “I guess that makes sense. I mean, they stopped operating around the same time Slipher broke up.”
“It never did. They still file their T2s when they’re supposed to. The stock isn’t publicly traded any more, and none of the parent company’s services are in effect. They pay an atrociously low amount of salary, and about half of their subsidiaries – all the well known ones – were either liquidated or sold off to other holding companies. About the only well-known one that’s still in business is Magnusson Arms.”
Niles considered that. Something about the lobby was nagging him. Many things. He couldn’t see a single scrap of paper – lots of glass, lots of cement, lots of virtually everything else that would compose an office building. There was no sign of water damage, either, which made him wonder where the paper could have gone. Dry paper should have lasted a lot longer than ten years.
“So, what do you think happened?”
“I don’t know… but now that we’re here, we’d might as well find out. The old corporate layout information showed a security office on the top floor. We should start there.”
Niles nodded, and drew his Colt, which had been reloaded with a speedloader. “I’ll take point.”
“You won’t need that. We’re alone here.”
Frankly, he wasn’t in the mood to take Scion’s word for it.
---
Tired would have been a good word for it. It was somewhere between being tired and being bored. Crowe could not focus his attention on the world around him, on the tiny man who moved so boldly and assuredly, swinging his stinging twigs around as though he brandished the most threatening weapons in the world.
He was in pain, wracked with it. The strings inside him, which his God pulled, writhed and shivered with each tiny blow. It was wearing him out.
Eventually, he took a knee, and felt his heavy eyelids lowering themselves.
He’d rest for a minute. Just a minute, that was all.
---
Vidcund could not recall having felt so tired, not in all his years of service to the Agency. He had, as near as he could tell, burned through the rather limited battery life of his batons, but he’d kept fighting anyway. Each blow brought with it a new bruise, a new broken bone, a new internal rupture which the Deviant’s body, however it was sourcing the power that operated it, would have to regenerate. He could inflict wounds of that nature much more rapidly and efficiently with the batons than he could with his handguns – bullets were for killing things outright, not necessarily taxing their regenerative responses – but it was tedious work.
As Crowe finally slumped and fell still, the agent took in a truly deep breath, breathing from the deepest edge of his diaphragm, what some would refer to as tanden breathing. It helped tremendously, and he noted with some satisfaction that the engagement had only been a half an hour – an eternity in combat, mind you.
He was perspiring. Heavily. He’d probably already begun to slip into dehydration. To his surprise and annoyance, he nearly forgot procedure, turning to leave and return to the highway when he realized he’d not verified the death of the Deviant in the first place.
He turned, noting with satisfaction that even under his glasses’ Kirilian filter, the thing showed no further signs of life. Reality Deviants and their disposal were his bread and butter, regardless of the nature of their transgression. In his mind, those who practice arcane perversions were no more or less guilty than the monsters they spawned, or indeed those that they became. Like a man who had lost his appetite, this familiar, homely taste had snapped him out of it.
Regardless of what he had been created for, or what those who had created him were persisting in engineering him to do, it was beyond question that he was meant to be here, now, doing this. He believed, as most zealots do, that he was somehow specially selected for the role. That nobody could outperform him.
He pulled his phone from his pocket and dialed. “Stamatia. I need a D&R team at the Rains monument in Azuldorf.”
“What the hell did you do?”
Vidcund looked over his shoulder. “I found one of the Deviants who attacked us at Abject. HUD identified it as Suspect A.”
“It?”
“There was a… change. Listen… there are loose ends left.” Vidcund glanced in the direction of the road down which the Grey Angels had escaped. “There were two members of the Grey Angels PMC-slash-criminal-syndicate that Suspect A had engaged. They vacated the scene once I engaged.”
Stamatia’s tone had something of a lost quality to it – a rare situation for her. “Negative, Agent Därk. Your Task Force has the Rains Monument as a priority protected site. Hold position.”
Vidcund sighed, his frustration paramount. The car, at least, had a reasonable chance of helping him track down these particular loose ends later. “… Understood.”
---
Upon Agency confiscation of the project materials, leadership in Project Moses II was assumed by Team KETER, under the leadership of [Classified – “White” Clearance Needed], hereafter Keter Lead. Keter Lead, in consultation with the balance of their team and with the full project materials and debriefing reports from former project participants, decided that the neurological safeguards were unnecessary, arguing, in their official report, “It was the suppression of that which was the cause of the Anfangsburg Incident. Specifically, when the teleproprioceptive criticality event of ██ /██/████ occurred, the subsequent removal of the neurological safeguards – vis a ███████████ █████ – resulted in the mental instability and (frankly justified) blowback that formed the motivation for the incident. Before the criticality, the Subject could only be relied upon to make procedural choices. Now, it seems to be the case that it is capable of moral judgment, as well.”
In their report, Team KETER recommended limited reactivation of the project. Subject 001 and ██ newly-produced clones were administered amnesiac drugs and underwent Prosthiothymesiac Treatments to install false memories, specifically pertaining to and their reasons for joining the Agency. All were issued Agency identities. Subject 001 was sequestered at Site 17A, Subject 002 was assigned to the Abject Facility and had his personality overwritten with most of Subject 001’s traits before being put on ███████████ medication. This was done to test the dominant personality’s suitability as an Agency operative. The remaining ██ clones were issued similar medication and given entirely new identities.
Team KETER requested permission after 12 months of testing to cancel the medication regimen for several of the units. This request is still pending approval.
---
“What is it about abandoned buildings that’re so damn creepy?”
Prince considered Scion’s question for a long moment. The corridor they needed to traverse was in poor shape, punched through in places entirely, whether by weathering or by some function of the incident itself. This upper floor was heavily fire damaged, at least toward the centre of the building, but around the periphery it seemed all but untouched.
This was yet another detail that didn’t jive with Niles’ expectations of what a burned-out hulk of an office tower would look like. Especially given the fire damage visible on the façade of the building, and the great extent to which most, if not all, of the windows had been blown out. This superlative suspicion, combined with incongruous holes punched into what survived of the building’s drywall, left Prince with an altogether different assessment of events.
“I dunno. They’re like caves, I guess, just made by human hands. Only its worse, because nothing in an abandoned building looks like it’s supposed to.”
Scion nodded, and began to pick his way across what was left of the floor. “Well, then, what does this look like?”
Niles followed, walking less timidly than perhaps he should have. “Like a goddamn firefight, not a fire. I mean, that much is obvious. I’m just trying to figure out how many people were involved.”
Scion paused, and reached a hand out to help Prince stay stable as he transitioned back onto solid ground, if the new, less damaged section of floor could be considered any more structurally sound than that which they had just left. “That’s not what’s bothering you though.”
“It’s what we’re not seeing,” Prince said. “Not one scrap of paper, not so much as a calendar on the wall... hold this.”
Scion took the offered flashlight, and Prince holstered his weapon so that he could again attack the lock that was barring their progress, continuing his rant. “I can’t shake this weird feeling that there’s a reason for it. No computers, either. That could be a question of looting, mind you, or Slipher salvaging whatever they could out of here, but... I don’t know. Taken together it seems suspicious.”
---
Azuldorf Copper Mine had been lucrative enough in its day – an open pit, gouging the top off of the mountain that was part of the land claim. In the years since the mine had closed, the forest was already reclaiming the scar of the open pit, but some wounds ran deeper.
Before Alakgur had come to mine copper and other minerals from the fertile, volcanic earth of the northern Terrwald, before, indeed, the formation of the Union, the Terrerans themselves mined the same hill. Near its base, all but indistinguishable from a natural cave, the opening of this ancient mine still persisted.
Getting into it and plumbing its depths was a chore that was not for the weak of heart, but that was a phrase Gilbert Troy would not have used to describe himself. He was a young man, possessed of that remarkable combination of a need to prove himself and a lack of adequate respect for hazards. Besides, what would he, one of Glory’s chosen, have to fear from what was, essentially, an old hole in the ground.
Master Baha had always told Troy that he had promise as a sorcerer, from within the first hours that they had met. Gloria, too, had said the same thing, when Master Baha had introduced them. There, he thought, was a match made in the heavens! Gloria had taken a shine to him immediately, filling his ear with whispers of sedition against Master Baha if only he followed her instead. He could be her right hand, if only he’d give her her undying devotion.
Devotion that would be rewarded, he hoped, with the carnal rituals of elevation in Glory’s own order. He needed only come here and perform for himself their ancient rite of initiation, of the joining of the halves.
He could think of some other halves he’d like to join.
It had taken him the better part of the day to reach the heart of the mine, that hollow chamber with the root-bound slab of granite he was told to expect. The roots were striking, to him, coming up from the floor, even here so many hundreds of feet underground.
He reached into the bags, he carried, extracting from each a polished, silvery hemisphere.
Repeating the mantra he had been taught, he brought the domes together.
---
“Hey, you guys use charge batons, right?”
The Decontamination and Containment technicians who were busy trying to figure out how to get all ten feet of Crowe onto a stretcher paused in their labour and looked up. “Uh, yes sir.”
“Trade me charge packs.”
The two looked at each other, and then back to Vidcund, who could already tell they were going to be less than perfectly helpful. “Yours are dead, right? What if we need them?”
Vidcund looked toward the perimeter. He was impressed with Enforcement’s thoroughness – the tarps they’d erected over the side of the bridge to prevent anyone from looking down at what was happening, as well as the SWAT uniforms they’d stolen from the Tererra Police Department. He wondered what the excuse would be this time, and who would get framed for the hostage taking in which a bunch of people literally nobody had ever heard of died.
Still, it was as good an excuse as any.
“Okay, do you see the big, angry-looking Enforcement agents with submachine guns and grenades?”
“Yeah?”
“If something gets passed them, what’re a couple of mortuary technicians with electric batons going to d-“
Before the quip could be fully enunciated, the ground shuddered and quaked beneath Vidcund’s feet, causing him to lose his focus for a moment. The plateau of the monument buckled and cracked – bits of marble facia shattered and fell from the columns, and for a singularly confused moment, everyone present expected something much more significant than an earthquake to occur.
When it was clear that nothing more significant than a few spilled cups of coffee and some damaged trophies was about to happen, Vidcund looked to the technicians. “... So, how about it?”
“Yeah,” said one, staring at his feet. “Sure.”
---
“Goddamn it, James, get this fucking thing off of me!”
Scion grunted, fighting to get either arm free from under the server rack that had fallen on top of him. He only needed one. “Easier said than done. I thought the Azulkrater was supposed to be dormant.”
“It is.” Niles groaned. As near as he could tell, he wasn’t injured – but time could change that. The section of ventilation wasn’t exactly heavy, but an edge, which had already been broken, had bit into the ground with significant force – the former detective supposed he must have been extremely lucky. “The Geological Service is supposed to have the whole damn region wired up with seismometers. If there was going to be an eruption or an earthquake you’d have thought we’d have some advance warning.”
James chuckled. “That’s not really what seismometers are for.”
With a final effort, he managed to free his left arm, and brought it again to his neck, feeling along the device snuggled against and wrapped around it, hidden by the collar and lapels of the Grey Angel’s rather iconic jacket. Finding the catch he was looking for, he depressed it, and was rewarded with a ping in the Bluetooth headset he had tucked behind his ear.
A moment’s concentration and the server rack righted itself. He scooted well away from it before standing up, and, with a gesture, freeing Niles.
Prince got up and dusted himself off – he was covered in crumbled drop-ceiling and what had probably been fireproof insulation. “... You ever going to tell me how you keep doing that?”
“I thought you were the detective,” countered Scion, scratching at his neck again. “Come on. We should get out of here before the aftershocks hit.”
---
Kline particularly enjoyed this time of year. While he took great pains to avoid any form of contamination of his personal library – the one at the country house, mind you, not the Grand Librarian’s Collection at the National Archives – it was both therapeutic and practical to periodically dismantle it for a good cleaning. He was aided in this effort by two of his closest associates – the Tindalos Brothers – who were presently studiously packing away the books out of their barrister’s shelves and into temporary cases, which they would later use to move them en mass to his binding room for inspection while the set about sanitizing and drying the cases themselves. Kline had quite the collection – some 2,000 volumes of various ages, including numerous manuscripts that he’d bound for his own convenience, plus two cases of scrolls not unlike wine-racks, and a full case of material waiting to be evaluated and catalogued.
In spite of his prodigious ability to squeeze the most out of every tick of the great universal clock, he’d scarcely had the time for much anything apart from the Great Work lately, which was why, even now, he took the time to participate in it, sharing a glass of wine with Professor Coultier, from the Regional History Museum. As yet, Coultier had yet to discover either the great import of what was buried beneath his facility, nor the fact that Kline’s Brotherhood had penetrated that particular sanctum, and now had the effective upper hand.
“Have you ever wondered, Malvolio, what became of the Cult of the Sleeping Eye after Gloria Creena was detained?”
If the sudden shift in the conversation – which had previously been on the importance of separating food and beverages from written materials – had bothered Coultier, he tried not to show it. Like many members of his family, he had certain wisdom beyond his years, a premature full-grownness of awareness, though he was far more mature than either of his siblings in Kline’s estimation. “No,” he said cautiously, as if concerned about the nature of the question. “Not beyond a certain minimal curiosity. I’m old enough to remember just how bad the 90s were. When you’re reading the news, it’s hard not to look for connections to the past.”
“I felt much the same way,” countered Kline, pouring just enough more of the red wine to reach the most bulbous level of his glass, before taking the glass to the window. “Far from a professional interest, but I did spend some of my time learning what I could about the surviving cultists. There weren’t many – not in the upper echelon anyway. It proved to be a short study.”
The younger man moved with Kline, taking in the view. This home was in the heart of the Terrwald, off logging roads he somewhat doubted were properly mapped. It had a pretty good view of the river valley below it, and you could see the various volcanic mountains (some dormant, and some merely biding their time) in the north. A good view, in Malvolio’s estimation, if not a somewhat limited one. “Short studies can be just as valuable as longer ones, assuming we learn something from them.”
Kline smirked. He rather agreed. “Quite so. What I did learn was that there is one relatively high-ranking man in the organization who remained unscathed. Legally, he had committed no crimes, and he was connected well enough that he mostly just faded into the background, becoming something of a living curio.”
Malvolio sipped his wine. “You sound like you might have kept an eye on his movements yourself.”
“Merely as a security concern. As you understand, he was a high-ranking member of the cult. I had my concerns he might try to repeat their past performances.” Kline gestured vaguely with his wineglass. “As it happens, however, I learned more than I bid on. It seems there are a series of locations the cult considers important enough to keep an eye on – or I should say, the fraternal order this man had established consider important enough to watch over.”
Another sip for the curator. “And this was important enough to keep your busy attention occupied.”
“If only because the process of their own searching never really stopped, so it remained at least a somewhat interesting use of-“
Kline found himself reflexively reaching out behind himself, stabilizing his rather aged sense of equilibrium as the floor shook beneath his feet. For a moment, he feared an eruption, as the side of one of the more distant mountains had belched out fire and dust, until he got his bearings and realized that particular mount had no business being the least bit volcanically active.
Immediately, the older of the Tindalos brothers, Socrates, rushed into the room, his exaggeratedly gaunt expression furrowed deeply with a mixture of concern and distantly-focused anger. “Did you feel that, Professor?”
“Of course I felt it,” Kline snapped, no doubt concerned for the continued welfare of his books. “That earthquake might have damaged the foundation.”
As if on cue, Plato came through. He was the younger Tindalos brother, apparently by quite a margin, though he was every bit as gaunt and wiry as his elder. He made his way through the kitchen and into the stairwell leading to the “basement”, much of which was actually above-ground structure, with the house built into the side of a hill, as it was. Socrates took no notice of this, narrowing his eyes toward the mountain.
“That,” Malvolio said evenly, taking the rest of his glass in one mouthful, “was no mere earthquake. I should know, I’ve experienced a few.”
“I agree,” Socrates looked to his master. “Excuse me, Professor. I wish to look into the matter.”
Kline waved a hand dismissively. “Fine. Go. Report back to me if it really is unusual.”
Malvolio’s mouth drew out into a fine line. If this was an artificial incident, he could think of only a few ways to produce such a shock.
---
Slipher Tower stood out to Vidcund among the locations in Anfangsburg, though he could not quite put a finger on why, which wound up bothering him more than any one other factor about the day. His intuition was good, and he was inclined to trust it, but normally he could at least put half an ounce of reasoning into the equation to explain the impulse.
Standing in the shadow of the remains of the building, however, inspired such a powerful sense of déjà vu that Vidcund could not help but take a peek inside. Finding the door locked was no impediment – not with fresh foot-prints inside to tell him there was more to this story than what met the eye. He forced the lock quickly and moved inside. Automatically, the augmented-reality interface of his glasses subtly amplified the lighting.
Must have been an update since last time...
Carefully, quietly, he picked his way among the broken glass and papers, following the path of the building’s previous visitors.
---
Subject 13 (MOSES I) reported an incident on ████/██/██ wherein they approached an individual without conscious awareness or distinct personality, in the course of the original project. This individual, Subject 13-1, was a lobotomized human of otherwise premium physical health who had had near-complete removal of the prefrontal cortex of the brain. Subject 13 reported significant curiosity about this individual shortly before attempting to establish telepathic communication.
The resulted contact was observed, and immediately upon the establishment of a teleneural link, Subject 13’s EEG readings showed a significant increase in activity related to perception and fear – this was confirmed with polygraph readings indicating stress response. Subject 13 was quoted as saying “███████” before entering a fugue state. For the remainder of the test, Subject 13 increasingly insisted upon being watched and repeated frequently that they were “not alone” in the test chamber – obvious since 13-1 was also present.
Ten minutes into the test, Subject 13 declared that they were unable to break the teleneural link, and 13-1 was terminated by lethal injection. Subject 13 would experience a lapse in consciousness for 10 hours. After waking, Subject 13 was thoroughly non-co-operative in debriefings about the experience.
A transcript of a successful debriefing, produced under the influence of sodium thiopental, exists, but is classified above your level.
---
“So, you’re saying you’re psychic.”
Scion had to chuckle at that. “When you put it that way, it certainly does sound rather ridiculous, doesn’t it. Not to mention the obvious fact that I am, to the full extent of my knowledge, the only living one. Granted, I certainly haven’t met all seven-and-some billion people on this big ol’ mudball, either.”
Niles sighed. Psychic wasn’t really all that much of a stretch, really, granting that necromancy seemed to be very evidentially real as well. He felt somewhat as though he had fallen through some crack in reality into an alternate dimension filled with strangeness, but this was hardly an accurate perception. After all, what was strange, other than something being counter-intuitive – by that definition, anyway, the strange happened more often than not. “Well, shit. You been reading my mind this whole time, then?”
“As a general rule, I try not to read minds at all when I can help it. It’s not exactly polite.”
It wouldn’t be, which had been what Niles was trying to imply anyway. By now, however, a whole array of varying clues was beginning to come together in his head. “The collar you’re wearing under your jacket helps with that, then?”
“Observant. Yes, it does. It’s an application of AEGIS technology.”
A frown behind Prince’s mask, as the pair finally entered a stairwell, which, as in most buildings, seemed so much more sturdily built than the surround. “AEGIS is a military technology, isn’t it? Something to do with missile defense for warships?”
“Maybe. I’m referring to something else. Aetheric Generalized Influence System. It’s Agency tech, developed to basically block and/or channel various energy signatures – the sort of thing you’d generally call magic.”
Niles, here, stopped dead, and Scion had made it to the next landing before pausing to look up at him. “... Relax, Prince, I’m not an agency spy. Archangel would have killed me by now if I was. Suffice it to say that there’s no security system that can’t be broken, and no such thing as a secret technology that gets field deployed. Now’s not the time for a history lesson, and even then, I’m the wrong person to give it. I didn’t design the damn thing.”
Prince considered that for a while before reluctantly following. The building had gone from silence to noise, groaning in protest at what was no doubt a slightly different position than it had had before the quake. “Who did, then?”
“Faceless. You haven’t met him yet. He’s pretty much our go-to-guy for all things tech. Someone found some older-style AEGIS hardware and Faceless made his improvements, then figured out how to make it useful for me. Honestly, I mostly use it to tune everyone out.” Scion looked to Prince. “Get a few dozen people in a room all talking at the same time, and you’ll have some idea of how loud it can be for me, even when nobody’s speaking.”
Niles’ head was buzzing. The building was groaning, and swaying, and he couldn’t be sure if it was his senses playing tricks on him or the building itself, given how utterly unconcerned James seemed to be by the development. All it really did was make him nervous, fill him with that tight-chested feeling of confinement, and harden his resolve to exit the building as expediently as possible.
A door slammed closed in the depths, and James put out his hand to arrest the junior Angel’s movement. They listened in silence for a moment for the sound of footsteps on the stairs, and then looked to one another.
As he had before, with the trunk of the car, Niles suddenly had the idea that it was better to find another stairwell, and silently followed Scion out, careful to close the door behind them.
---
Sailing on the Lake of Clouds was no more difficult than doing so on any body of water, provided you had a suitable craft and a comprehensive knowledge of the associated piloting techniques. For her part, Maria considerably lacked the latter, but what she lacked in expertise, Maria-as-Cassilda could command of others.
And it was only here, alone with the mindless, fleshy sailors that piloted her craft, that she could look back upon earth as one might look upon a stage from a high balcony, commanding at a gesture of her gloved hands for the clouds to part, and reveal to her a shimmering, wavering image of the Monument at Anfagnsburg, and the battle that had recently transpired.
The boat tipped slightly, and she did not have to look behind her to know that the Phantom, her servant-ambassador, had joined her aboard the boat. “Now, then... he does look familiar, doesn’t he?”
“I believe that may be one of the men we chased through the city.” The Phantom’s voice carried a measure of intrigue – Maria suspected he might actually have been impressed. “I wonder how he managed to cross the starry void and dodge death in a single gesture.”
“A mystery to solve in due course,” Cassilda countered. Maria disliked the line – she felt the grammar was forced, theatrical. Carcossa was increasing its hold. “... I am more concerned with the state of the monument.”
“Your vision is a few hours behind the mark, my lady. The monument was unharmed.” The Phantom extended a scroll toward her. “His Majesty the King.”
Without truly thinking about it, she turned to take the scroll, with its yellow ribbon and unmistakable seal. It was a dreadful fate indeed, to fall into the hands of the King in Yellow.
---
The sense of Deja Vu in the tower only increased as Vidcund adventured deeper into it. It had gone from that sense of having seen the lobby before to an increasing awareness that he knew the building and its layout. He found himself anticipating cameras and detectors where they had used to be – most looted or wasted by time. Quite a few showed signs of having been fired upon, as part of whatever gunbattle had erupted in the building however many years previously it had been.
He found himself in a reverie, and fancied he knew some of the men and women who had sat at these desks, that he could have called them out by name, if they were present.
His ears rang, for a moment, and then, as he stepped back into the stairwell, he became aware of silent shuffling, of a door being gently closed. He was not alone, and that knowledge filled him with curiosity. The two Grey Angels from the conflict he’d broken up at the monument were still at large, and hunches being what they were, he’d have been willing to bet he knew where they were, now.
He hustled up the stairs at a run, trusting his Agency conditioning and physical fitness regime to carry him up the stairs against the protest of aerobic muscle and cardiovascular systems. He hit the door that had been freshly closed – he could see it by the disturbed layer of dust on the ground, and yanked it open, barging through as he slowed to a walk to get his bearings.
The building groaned. There was a great amount of scraping of metal. For a moment, Vidcund feared imminent collapse, but then, as his feet remained stable, he realized something else had happened.
---
One observer from MOSES II (as carried out by ███████ ████) reported that all subjects from the same as █████ Subject 001 were possessed of a keen sense of intuition. During combat suitability testing, Sub 001 and his ‘siblings’ were said to have a remarkably keen sense of tactical calculation, reaching beyond standard intelligence analysis techniques. Such hunches were believed to be a manifestation of lingering teleneural ability, as they seemed to focus chiefly on estimations of the number and disposition of enemy forces, and prediction of their behavior.
The accuracy of this report is questionable. Agency currently believes it to be a skill rather than a manifestation of abnormal brain activity, due to much of the accuracy being lost after Subject 001 was inducted into the Agency version of the program.
---
The great rending of metal didn’t help Niles nerves, as he immediately planted his feet and reached out with his free left hand to brace against the wall, in spite of the fact that nothing had moved. Scion might have chuckled at this, had he not begun to be particularly quiet, and gestured for Niles to do the same.
The two shared what might have been a significant glance, were they not masked, and listened carefully to the continued sounds of rumbling and clanging. They were standing adjacent to the central column of the tower, through which the bank of elevator shafts ran, and as they listened, they became increasingly aware that the sounds were localized in that column.
Quietly, and leaving Niles with the distinct impression he should do the same, Scion reached under his jacket for a concealed weapon – a rather nicely-maintained and not the least bit customized FN Five-seveN. Niles was impressed. That was a practical weapon, not a hand cannon or a phallic augmentation device.
Carefully, they picked their way around the corner to the elevator doors, which were already being wrenched open. Niles found his vision swimming, and the throbbing in his head increased to a fever pitch. His heart was pounding in his throat, and sweat slicked the inside of his gloves, which were coming together in front of him to put a proper grip on his little snubnose revolver.
He had never seen anything like this monstrosity before. The bone-tipped hands that had pryed open the elevator doors had certainly a striking resemblance to human, and the central mass to which they were connected certainly bore some resemblance to a human torso, but human chests and faces were usually not stretched across the nucleus of a mass of throbbing, writhing, groping tentacles.
The monstrosity slithered into full view, and that face turned toward Niles, and as fear wormed around inside his mind and his heart threatened to explode from overuse, singularity of purpose welled up to overtake it all. The human body was one of reflex and habit, in spite of the arrogant claims of the mind’s dominion. He didn’t need his brain to tell him to line up the iron sights and fire.
As it turned out, though, he never needed to fire. Before he even had his weapon up into position, gunshots rang out, all but deafening in the confined space of a corridor, roaring like cannon fire one after the other in a litany of mankind’s dominion.
Without touching him, Scion tugged Niles after him as he turned to flee. Whoever was shooting could handle this on their own, the Angels thought together. This was beyond their paygrade.
---
Crowe’s anger swirled, howling in the back of his mind. He had come out for blood, immersing himself in the great hymn of Glory, forsaking his humanity to embody the very Glory of Mankind. In return, his God had heaped every blessing upon him. He had become unstoppable, invincible!
And yet, that same wheedling banker who had humiliated him at the Great Seal had followed him here, here to what should have been his new nest, and was, in his invincible impudence, firing at him with those toy guns that had done so little to stop him even before he had been given this final ordination.
Crowe laughed, a great basso note that rumbled throughout the building’s structure, and reached out to crush this miserable bastard.
---
Vidcund could not have been less surprised to find his handguns producing little more than amusement in the Deviant that had emerged from the elevator shaft, and had already begun to walk back down his cross-corridor when he had started firing. After all, he had demonstrated before, time and again, that reality deviants increasingly needed greater and greater expenditures of force to dispense with.
That being said, he did have a plan. If he hadn’t, he would not have been a Special Director, a candidate for Grey Clearance. He was, now, as he ever had been, what he considered to be the best that Agency Division could possibly have had to offer. That his heritage and origin were now in question did not change that conviction.
Whether he was purpose-made or simply trained, he was the best, the prototypical, the goddamn paragon, and he’d be damned if he was going to let yet another slimy, crawling creature that had stepped into his reality from the land of myth and legend prove him wrong.
He never took his eyes off the creature, though he would have liked to, letting it pursue him full-circle around the octothorpe of hallways until he had come back to the elevator shafts, firing only at odd occasions to ensure that he had its undivided attention. He had, of course, spied the Grey Angels fleeing down a side corridor, but once again he found that something else was a greater threat, a higher priority.
Feeling the slightest of smirks touch his face, he tossed one handgun down the shaft, reached out, and jumped. To his pleasure, he felt the coarse metal of the track on which the car rode sliding between his gloved fingers, and only now realized there was a need to hope that his way was unobstructed and that his gloves would withstand the friction of this less-than-polished service.
He fired his remaining rounds into the creature, which had followed him into the shaft, and discarded the other weapon. It was useless anyway, and now that he knew for certain he had the creature’s attention, he could conduct the balance of his plan.
The elevators, he felt (or recalled), proceeded all the way to the sub-basements, with their engineering rooms and parking lots, the lowest level of which, he knew, was the key to his problem. It was a suicidal mission, but then, so had been jumping into the elevator shaft. So had been killing Drache, than himself, on the brink in Carcosa, for that matter.
What then, was so suicidal?
He landed hard, but running. The creature was not that far behind him, but he needed every second of lead time he could squeeze out. The dust was thicker on this floor than the others – more of it to fall, no doubt, and undisturbed in the search. That did not surprise him.
Once, long ago, in those redacted pages of his life hidden by black ink and amnesiac medication, he had been the ultimate power here. He had secured this building, and he knew what was behind the panel with the combination lock.
He glanced behind himself as he dialled in the combination, watching the creature that was chasing him push aside transformer equipment that was bolted down and wired into the floor as though neither of the proceeding had been true. With significant effort, he tore his eyes back to his work, wrenching open the cover even as he was lifted off of his feet.
At the very limit of his reach, as he was pulled away, he jabbed his fingers into the sockets that housed two red buttons, and was rewarded with five of the most agonizingly long seconds of his life. Then, with a concussion that drew the creature’s attention upward, it all came tumbling down.
---
PSYCHOLOGICAL EXAMINATION OF VIDCUND DÄRK – SUMMARY
Conducted Prior to Acceptance into Agency Division.
Before Teleneural Inhibition and Amnesiac Treatment, Subject 001 exhibited significant disregard for personal safety in combat operations. In spite of excellent training and proven aptitude for identifying threats, the Subject simply disregards them. In his own words, “The presence of many alternate options means bodily safety is important only in the context of the integrity of the whole. When many options allow, the loss of an individual is acceptable. There is no greater harm in losing one of me, than, say, cutting your hair or trimming your nails. It is unpleasant, yes, but mine is an unpleasant business.”
These traits vanished with the introduction of the aforementioned medications. Our current Vidcund Därk is every bit as studiously cautious as the textbook Agent Alex Smith. I am, therefore, recommending Mr. Därk’s acceptance with a clean bill of psychological health.
---
Removing, at long last, his mask, with its sweat-soaked lining, Niles looked back in the direction they had trudged, as he stepped into the back of the car. He was rewarded, as those like him often were, with the impeccable timing to watch as one by one whole bands of building were blown outward, the whole thing falling like a stack of cards into its own footprint, telescoping into its basements.
Driver, the Angel associate who had come to collect them, gave a low whistle, as he brought a fresh cigarette to his lips. “That is some precision demo work.”
“Yeah,” Niles agreed. He hadn’t seen anything to suggest the tower was to have been destroyed. For once, he felt he did not want to know the answer to the many questions this rose.
Nothing could possibly have survived that, which would be a cold comfort in the many insomniac evenings he expected were to come.
Gently, James put a hand on his shoulder. “No point in hanging around, Niles. Let’s go.”
“Yeah. Let’s go.”
Scion sighed, squeezing into the vehicle beside him. “I have a feeling that’s not the last we’re going to see of our man in black.”
“I doubt it,” Niles said slowly. “Nobody could survive that.”
He wanted so desperately to believe that.