The drive she dropped had some interesting images on it. They showed a burned out site from an aerial perspective. It showed signs of green regrowth. The GPS coordinates imprinted on the image indicated the site was about 45 minutes away by car ride. Spark identified it as the site of her laboratory. Blitz didn't recognize it but admitted if he was ever there he may have been sedated or unconscious.
Next up: we were going to hit the school.
We rented the motel room for two extra nights and left our hostage secured in the bath tub to be found by room service after we were long gone.
We took the last evening ferry across the river then meandered around town as the light died and evening took over. By the time we got near the campus via winding roads it was night. The soft glow of a video screen could be seen reflecting off the glasses of a security guard in a booth at the gate. The older man glanced over at us and hopped off his stool. He walked over to the van and motioned for me to put the window down. "Can I help you? It's after visiting hours." I held up the expired visitor's pass we'd obtained the first time we came here and he conceded the point. "OK, just check in with me on your way out." He went back to the booth and seemed to write down our info in a log book.
The campus was quiet on a week night. Since it's a military academy, it was pretty low key anyway, only a few students out and about. I parked in a lot with other vehicles to give us a little cover. No time to waste so we moved out straight away. Clock said 10 p.m.
"I knew under normal circumstances I don't have to say this but given what happened with Albina make sure your head is here tonight," I told Blitz as we walked toward the building.
Spark had found a side door to access the site. The walking path dipped and curled around a corner to the side door, which was just a heavy exit door with a small window in it. There was a dim red light on the door from the outside. Spark tried the door hesitantly. It was not locked. She checked for additional security and found none. Blitz went Astral, peeking in the door as Spark opened it for him. The inside was a whole different world. It was just as mundane in its shape but there were strange vibes. All of a sudden Blitz seemed to just figure it out, like he'd been in here before. People in the next area beyond this hallway, he motioned. Light was coming from that direction but there was no sound. It was a sitting room or a library. But we did trip a motion sensor on the door. Blitz motioned us toward the people ahead intent on quick physical subdual. Spark bent at the knees and started sneaking up. She arrived to see a big room, an antechamber of sorts before an office or dorm. A Trid was playing on an old view screen in the middle of the room. Two guys were sharing a couch and another guy was in a chair. They were all asleep. Another hall went off in one direction and a few doors also left the room we were in. An indicator showed stairs up and down. We tried to sneak past the men to go down into the basement. Spark led us, pointing out a few obstacles to avoid. Luckily the thick carpet baffled the sound of our movements. Left side door, up. Right door, down. We headed right. The glow of an orange light on the wall spilled over us. The stairs down were marble with metal along the lip. The old wooden railing was probably expensively crafted decades ago. There was a motion detector at the bottom of the stairs, which we high stepped over.
We'd reached the lowest level. Spark got out some equipment to hack the door lock. The door opened into darkness, though we could see ahead there was another orange security light. There was also the faint hum of what was probably an air purifier system. We arrived in an open finished basement. Several low circular pieces of furniture sat around the room, most with people on them in repose. Most of the people had lights and wires from devices hooked to them. They all seemed in some type of suspension. The monks? Hard to tell if any of these people were from the temple. Some cables ran to the wall where a terminal was located. Spark moved to it swiftly and I walked between two people to one with only a few gadgets attached to them. I looked at him, hearing the breathing. He was in a tank top and athletic pants, an outfit most of the people in the room were also in. He sat in lotus position, breathing slowly and twitching infrequently. He was asleep. The gear seemed to be enhancement like neural boosters, but of an arcane or hermetic nature as evidenced by icons where a brand name might usually be on such equipment. I called Blitz over to show him the runes. He seemed to react to it with memories of his own experience.
Spark was searching for evidence of her old research being used here. She had found some bits of her Project Red Spark on the system.
There were a dozen test subjects, men and women alike. One, a male, had a device on his forearm, a sort of bracer. He also had a datajack that ran to a computer device. Spark tried to deactivate his seat, #9, at the terminal, so we could get him out. It was a 30-minute deactivation cycle, Spark said. She could try to speed it up to just 15. Do it, we agreed.
We had those 15 minutes to search out Spark's project. The far door should have led us to it. But the door was locked. There was a panel next to the door. When Spark tried to hack it, an alert of a breach attempt went off. Then the screen went blank and there was a faint dimming pulse of the lights in the basement. I moved to Subject #9, unlimbered my crossbow and snapped it into place with a bolt ready to fire. The subject's breathing was shallow and he was still twitching a bit.
Then Spark shot out the door's glass with her silenced pistol - POP, POP, POP. She punched out the spiderwebbed glass.
Blitz moved toward the door we came in, seemingly investigating something there but he came back our way soon after with nothing to report.
"I know you would be back," a Russian man said to Spark as she exited the basement room. A shot rang out and Spark reeled back into the doorway, shot in the chest plates of her armor. "I'm surprised you waited so long," the man continued. "What did you think you'd find, that you could leave with?" Spark replied, breathing hard. "Enough to stop you. To stop you from getting your greasy palms on it and corrupt my research." He replied: "Augmented selection is all corrupt. Did you think you were being virtuous? We were all playing with fire." Spark returned fire, literally, shooting Maxim in the chest, in the same spot he shot her.
"Take it. Take your files. You can't stop this thing," he chuckled through bloody teeth. "We have all we need."
Blitz ran to the scene. Spark was on the ground. Maxim was in a swivel chair. Both had been shot in the chest. His computer screen was positioned facing us. Spark shot him again, hitting him and silencing him. She moved to the terminal.
Meanwhile, Subject #9 was slouching, leaning. He was coming around.
Spark downloaded as much as she could and then tried to delete as much as possible.
The subject was awake by then, gasping. His cyber eyes were glowing eerily as if lit from the inside. In slow, halting Ukrainian he spoke. I called Spark over to communicate.
"We're getting you out of here," she told him. "Why?" he said.
We started withdrawing, Blitz on point. I helped the man to his feet. The sounds of maybe two people coming down the stairs toward us rang out. We hid. The footfalls stopped at the landing above us. I handed off the patient and told Blitz to follow me. I lunged into the hallway and fired my crossbow at one guy with an Ares Predator. He fired too but I hit him in the neck and his shot went wide. Blitz followed me through the doorway and made a finger gun, using it to focus on casting a spell at the other guard. A blast of energy hit the guy and knocked him off of his feet.
I ducked back to take the patient by the arm. I was bracketed by Blitz and Spark. The guy I shot surrendered and let us past. Up the stairs we went, and we could hear the third guard shout the names of his two fellows. "Whoever is coming up, slow it down. I will use deadly force," he yelled.
"I will too!" Blitz shouted back as he exited the stairwell toward the guard. He cast another spell as the guy fired on him. The bullet went wide. The spell knocked him over, pinwheeling him against the door jamb. Time to bug out. It was surprisingly quiet outside. No sirens? Well it's not like the black site would want to make a scene, I thought. We got to the vehicle and prepared to depart. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the patient was alternating between groggy and reacting swiftly and almost in a preprogrammed manner to the gun shots and other stimuli. He was big and powerful but surprisingly agile.
Who is this guy? Blitz said his magical signature is that of a physical adept. In speaking to him, it doesn't seem like he was one of the monks. He was from another city in Ukraine but it was hard to tell if he was being up front or telling stories. The only other thing we learned from him was that he was a martial artist. He was semi-lucid so it was hard to get a lot of information out of him. But he said he joined the program willingly.
We talked about where we would take him. Spark suggested we take him to the monks as evidence, which sounded good to us. When we met up with the monks they were happy we rescued someone but were obviously disappointed we didn't get any monks out. They met us at a prearranged location. We dropped him off and gave them the information as best we could.
"This is an effective first step in rebalancing this catastrophe that's been happening," one monk told us. He gave us a credstick and sent us on our way.
Spark sat with her heaviness after the importance of the mission. She had killed Maxim and denied the Russians her research.
We had GPS coordinates and satellite images of where Blitz's mother might be. He handed it over to me noting that he didn't know much about the place, the site of Spark's former lab. It looked like scorched earth but nature had reclaimed some of it, like fences grown over and parts of the asphalt cracked and green. But we wouldn't really know until we saw it for ourselves.
I found a route that left the main roads a few kilometers before the site. There was a service road to a power hub down an old gravel trail barely capable of accommodating a truck. It wound through the woods. Inbound we saw just how disused it was.
"You guys feel that?" Blitz asked but there was nothing to feel. Magic users are strange. Maybe it was the psychic juju from where we were headed.
We got within sight of the place, through the tree line. The towers of the power hub loomed ahead of us. We were there.
A small hangar was on the site, with other smaller prefab buildings huddled together nearby. Bombed out was the motif, per the satellite images. We couldn't see any more from our position.
Looked like we'd be on foot the rest of the way, as there wasn't room to drive. We got through an old compromised fence, stepping through it and out into the air where the creepiness was palpable.
With my gear secured I let the focus on the work push the creepiness to the margins. I led the team via a path through the underbrush. There was evidence of recent activity here. I got us up to a pair of old water tanks to snoop a bit. There was a small military car parked nearby. It was matte black and bore no markings or emblems to designate it as an official government vehicle. I checked my watch and saw that dawn was coming too soon. The first few birds were waking and chirping.
Spark snuck out to check on the vehicle. With thermographic imaging she saw the engine was cold. "They came in from the front," I mentioned quietly.
Spark trotted out again, looking for tracks. About 10 to 12 meters away she stopped when she kicked a glass bottle laying in the dirt. She heard voices and movement, and she looked for a place to hide. She ducked behind some kind of rack that had been grown over with brush. Two guards came out of a nearby building speaking German.
"I don't know who would be snooping around," one said. "Let's check it out." I whispered to Blitz: "Two from the building on the right." Blitz: "I guess I have to test these gloves some time! Stun? We split up. You distract them and I hit them from this side."
I set up a shot to shatter the guards' vehicle window. POP, POP. One guy ran toward the vehicle to inspect the noise. Blitz stepped out of his hidey hole and extended his hand with the glove on it. The two guys were close enough to each other that his spell flashed out toward both. One guy was dazed but still looked about for what was causing all this ruckus. The other guy stumbled about looking in our direction but not directly at us. The two men looked like operatives but without being loaded out with gear.
"What the hell?! They got you too?! DREK!!" one yelled. Both men were grabbing at their guns. Spark was still the entire time.
I stepped out and fired my Predator III at the guy further from the car, with a clear shot and unconcerned with staying hidden. I fire without a silencer, and hit him center mass. He went down in a heap, unmoving.
Blitz also stepped out from behind cover, and threw more magic at the other man. He hit the side of the car and slid down the side and into the gravel.
Spark popped out and headed to the building door to secure it. It was still open.
I checked the tires to see if they were run-flats, which they were not. So I immobilized the vehicle by slashing two tires. Blitz, meanwhile, was checking the car's doors, which were unlocked. We dumped the body in the passenger seat and put the stunned guy in the back, zip tied and gagged. The only things Blitz found in the car were a walkie talkie and a go bag.
We could hear static and intermittent voices coming from the building, but only faintly and totally unintellegeble.
Spark went inside and found an analog short wave radio set up, empty coffee cups and a wall-mounted household computer with intercom, as well as a rifle. A pair of chairs and a small couch are also there. She tried to hack the computer. The radio chatter was benign and uninteresting but a strange voice seemed to come in over top of the chatter from time to time, as if phasing in and out.
I sent Blitz inside while I scuttled the car, hiding it along the side of the building. I flagged down Spark when she emerged from the building. We brought the captive inside. He came to, and we shoved him down onto the couch.
"You didn't have to take down Hans," he said in German. We asked him who he was working for. "I don't even know his name. Mr. S? I think he's downstairs." Then he realized he probably shouldn't have shared that much.
"Cooperate and you'll walk away from this," I told him. He said he wasn't going to stop us, "but what's down there might. I don't know what's down there but it's magical stuff. Not nice." He told us how to get there but didn't know who was down there. "It's some kind of old military research or something like that."
Spark asked Blitz: "Do you have a sense of whether your mother is here?" He said he wouldn't really know until he was in her presence.
How can we get in there? What's there? "I like you Blitz," I said, "but I'm not storming the beaches of Normandy to rescue your mom without knowing what's down there." Were there vents? Other ways to get in there? The guy, who I learned later is called Tim, points us to a panic button wired to the wall. "We never had to pull it."
The other two went check out the area to see if there are any vents or secret doors, etc. I sat with Tim. No reason not to be polite. I planned on both of us surviving this so I just chatted with him.
Spark and Blitz had plenty of success. Spark found a power box. Blitz found a sunken driveway that descended underground. There was also a set of big metal doors, which Tim told us about, but those were locked from the inside. We made a plan: Spark would cut the power while Blitz and I set an ambush at the doors to see if someone came out to check on the outage. Hopefully we could pop them and then infiltrate through the doors they came through.
Go Time. Spark cut the power and hid. Blitz and I hid at the ambush site. A few minutes passed with only the sound of movement beyond the door. Then a door screeched open and footfalls came our way. Blitz heard the radio on my belt chime. From a few meters away we saw two guys come up, carbines in hand. One motioned the other toward the power box in the distance.
We let them pass us as the door hung open. I shot one in the back of the head with my crossbow. Blitz blasted the other with a spell, flinging him forward into the dirt. He tried to struggle to his feet but I jumped on him and pinned him in place, slitting his throat with my big knife. Blitz grabbed the walkie from me. "Can't you hear that?" he asked me. I shook my head negative. There was nothing. He pushed the button and listened. I still heard nothing.
Spark headed our way. I checked through the doorway, seeing stairs descending. We went that way, using our cyber eyes (and Blitz's natural low light vision) to travel in the dark. There was a burnt smell in the air from when the site was razed, with a dampness mingled in. A faint drip-dripping lingered in the air ahead. At the base of the stairs I headed into the corridor beyond. Cables of all sizes ran along the walls, even hoses and rundown plumbing. Some original, some new.
Ahead was an opening in the wall, doorways on both sides. More sounds: steam hissing and sizzling, a low hum off and on.
Blitz had the walkie to his mouth, whispering "Why?" He paused, then told Spark: "We gotta turn the power back on," and turned to retreat.
I saw a shimmering coalescence advance on me from up ahead. The burned smell sharpened as it approached, becoming acrid. "Spark: get on the power! Blitz: help me with THAT!" I barked.
Elemental?! I thought that that was what it was, and then pondered how to kill it. I drew my Predator III and fired on it, hoping bullets worked. It seemed to absorb the bullets and I could hear the metal of them tinkle on the concrete under the magical entity. It dimmed in its brightness, however, so maybe it was wounded?
Spark fired at a second Elemental beyond, deeper in the corridor as she retreated past me. Blitz sent a magical attack at the one I shot. The thing bursts in brilliant light but did not return to form.
A light show beyond me at the doors ahead seemed to feed the Elemental Spark had shot. As Spark turned to run she stopped and her hands went to her throat. Blitz commanded of me: "Stand back." He advanced to attack the Elemental. The attack seemed to peter out as it hit the thing.
I turned and ran, intent on turning the power back on. Even if we freed Spark, it would take too much time. For whatever reason the power needed to be back on immediately.
While I was gone, Blitz cast more and Spark freed her rifle and gun arm enough to break free of the magical beast. Blitz led them to a doorway to a dank basement, a big open area.
Meanwhile, I found the breaker and flipped the switch, slamming the box door closed before turning to run back the way I came. I returned to the site of the fight but found an Elemental and no sign of my teammates. "Are you guys still alive?" I asked hesitantly into the group comm. Blitz only advised me to head to the third door on the right. I hugged the wall but the Elemental moved to intercept me. I just put my head down and ran. I succeeded in dashing past it and I caught up to the other two in my group, to find Blitz guiding Spark along. I took the Elf's rifle and allowed her to lean on me as the mage led the way through the darkness. We seemed to be coming to the epicenter of the initial fire that ruined the place these few years ago. We could hear the Elemental still trailing after us. Blitz turned and unleashed a vicious spell at it, reducing it to a slight shimmer that no longer felt the need to pursue us.
"Power's back on," I told them. Blitz, in a sort of lingering haze, merely mumbled, "Yeah." He started to walk faster. Our comms flickered to life, crackling and hard to hear. "She's here!" Blitz shouted emotionally. I hand Spark her rifle back and drew my pistol.
"Otto, my son, I'm so sorry I left you those years ago and looked the other way while those bad things were happening." It was a woman's voice from deep in the basement. My fellow Ork was running by now. "It doesn't matter. I found you!" We arrived at a back wall, dimly lit. A tank sat there, clear glass and tall and square. Floating in the tank was an Ork woman. Her dark hair floated loose, and tubes ran into her nose. She was in a sort of wetsuit. Machines surrounded the tank.
"Once I started down this track, there was no way I could come back."
Blitz stopped short of the tank. "What is this? What happened?"
"I was Patient Zero."
"We have to get you out of here."
She gestured to a console and explained that the tank, which was about two meters wide and three meters tall - was mobile. "Look how tall and strong you've become. I can feel the power in you," she said to her son.
"It was all to find you," Blitz replied, frantically looking around for a way out. "Is there a vehicle? We're getting you out of here."
She motioned and lights came on. It seemed we were near the loading dock we'd seen earlier from above ground. "Who are your friends? I sense their power as well."
Spark introduced herself. "I also was a former guest at this facility."
"This is Topo. He got us out of here," Blitz tells her in reference to their original exodus from this house of horrors.
"I'm glad you made a profession out of this but you made two friends in the process," she said. Her voice had a remote quality, like she was beyond human at that point, post-human. It was spooky but amazing. Haunting and captivating.
"It wouldn't have happened without you. Now it's my turn." He asked if she could leave the tank, but she was unsure of the answer.
I took the time to head back up to free Tim, and asked him if there was a vehicle that could move her.
Spark spent some time on the computer system to learn what had happened to Blitz's mother. Could she be moved? Also, to assuage her own conscience she checked to see if any of her own research had helped lead to this. But no, it had not. In fact, this was FAR beyond what Spark had envisioned. So she destroyed anything on the system that could allow this to be done to an unwilling person. She said later that she was had the realization that she got her research back and took revenge on someone she hated and all that didn't matter compared to doing what we did that day.
Blitz opened the bay doors while asking his mother what should be taken with us and what should be destroyed. He also asked her what had happened at the site. She told him about an attack by the Russians, who had taken it over and nationalized the research. She had been off-site and then come here knowing it was no longer a viable site. Her volunteerism went far past intent so she sequestered herself to make this process wasn't used on anyone else. She'd been here in secret ever since. Maybe she and Spark could engineer a way to undo the process, they all wondered.
"No matter what state she's in, she's my family and she's back. And Spark and Topo are my family too. And I'll do anything to keep them all safe."
