From darkside.buggeroff@buggeroff.sandwich.net Wed Jun 20 22:29:10 2001 Newsgroups: alt.barney.dinosaur.die.die.die Subject: Op: sUcK - Changing of the Guard (Seg 3) From: "Nemesis the Feral (NYAR!)" Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2001 23:29:10 -0500 NOTE: Because of the narrow scope of this Operation, the project is closed to public participation. However, if you are a member of TRES Corps and interested in the possibility of joining the project, contact darkside@sandwich.net. This Operation is a work in progress. +-----------------+ | Operation: sUcK | +-----------------+ Changing of the Guard Authors: Nemesis the Feral (NYAR!) Shadur t'Kharn katster --- ****** TRES Headquarters, Colorado Day 2, 12:00pm, Mountain Time ****** The TRES Command staff filed lazily into the completely refurbished meeting chamber in the the ellipsoid perched atop the TRES command pyramid. Admiral Davies stood with her back to the entrance, looking out over the courtyard. It was a bright, warm afternoon, and the sunlight spilled through the ellipsoid's wall-sized windows, cascading over the Second-In-Command's body and face, whose dire expression quickly offset the cheeriness of the scene outside. A new crisis had quickly arisen, and with Grand Admiral Marburger on leave and unreachable, the weight on her shoulders could indeed become heavy. "Gentlemen," she said, after everyone had seated. She turned around to face the long meeting table, silhouetted dramatically by the picture windows. "We have a problem." Admiral Bond's expression mirrored Davies' almost perfectly. "A number of TRES outposts up and down the west coast have been obliterated by a weapon of unknown origin--" Admiral Felton rolled his eyes, drumming his fingers on the folder in front of him. "I think we can all guess what th'origin is, Admiral Bond. TRES doesnae exactly have a lot o' enemies." Admiral Bond gritted his teeth. Admiral Davies peered between the two of them and stepped up to the table, glancing down at an LCD screen set below the dark glass. "Luckily," she cut in, just as Bond opened his mouth to say something, "most of the outposts were all but deserted..." A frown creased her mouth as she scanned the list. "...save for one. Achilles. We lost eighty personnel there. The reports are giving us the same description that Admiral Felton gave us a few days ago." She looked between Bond and Felton. "Do we have any idea what did this yet?" Admiral Bond shrugged. DarkSide slid the folder in front of him across the table, which came to rest at Davies' fingertips. "As best as Captain t'Kharn has been able t'guess, an' 'e asked me t'relay tha' 'e still doesnae believe it, is tha' soomethin' somehow created a," he frowned for a moment, "'pin-point gravity well o' astronomical strenth' which pulled an' condensed everythin' in range int't, creating th' 'rocks' found at th'epicenters o' th'sites." "A what?" Admiral Bond asked incredulously. "In short, something made a miniature black hole," Shadur t'Kharn interrupted, stepping out of the shadows in a corner. "No, I'm not kidding, and no, I haven't got a clue /how/ It is doing this, and yes, that's supposed to be impossible." He paused and gave everyone in the room a long, hard look. "Something's still doing it." Admiral Bond was already starting to rise out of his chair and demand to know how an unauthorized intruder could have gotten into an eyes-only briefing, but Shadur cut him short by gesturing at the holoprojector in the base of the table. It clicked on, and a gently spinning globe sprang to life, and Shadur continued speaking in lecture mode as the blinders lowered, darkening the room. "Welcome to Newton 101, gentlepersons. Basically, mass attracts mass. The more mass, the more attraction." A radial framework appeared around the globe in several layers, then the image zoomed in on a piece of the surface, where a few blocks and primitives appeared to resemble structures. "Now, because basically the only thing big enough to cause notable gravity fields to anything except the tides in these parts is the Earth we're standing on, all we notice of this is a pull downward." To emphasize his words, several arrows pointing down appeared in the air, with '9.81' beside each. "Now what basically happened was this," Shadur went on as a single point appeared above the ground between the buildings, a number larger than the U.S. national debt beside it. "As I said, Newtonian physics don't allow for gravity without mass. This apparently is just that: A gravity well that's not related to an existing mass." Concentric globes with field strengths sprang into being centered on the point. Everything inside the outermost globe began to fragment and stream toward the point until all that was left was a now-familiar crater with an irregularly-shaped rock in the center. The projection remained for a few moments more before vanishing, and the blinders came up again. Admiral Bond's JihadLinker beeped, and he flipped it open. An unhappy expression painted his face. "Like I said, theoretically impossible, even with Jihad technology. It wasn't Ye Basic Lyran magic, because that would've stuck out on the B'harnescope like a blind carpenter's thumb in winter." "Th'ultimate question is, why 'asnae HQ been hit yet?" Admiral Felton offered. "Fer that matter, 'ow long befer it is?" Silence reigned for a good few minutes. Admiral Davies sighed. "So that's it." Admiral Felton nodded slowly. "We need t'get GA Marburger back here, pronto. Problem is, we 'ave no way t'contact 'im." Admiral Bond twiddled his thumbs before him. "That's not entirely true... I've had a security detail posted with him for some time." Felton raised an eyebrow. "He couldn't have been pleased wi' that. So you 'ave contact wi'em, yes?" Bond frowned. "Not exactly." "Not exactly?" Davies eyed him curiously. "We lost radio contact with the guards five minutes ago." --- "This is your KFRC up to the minute traffic and weather report. It's a gorgeous day in the City, 85 degrees currently, sunny, and looking like a good day to go out to the ballpark. However, watch the traffic coming off the bay bridge, and it looks like there's a major fire in the SoMa area that is snarling traffic to high heaven. A major chase in the Castro and Mission districts has traffic through there stopped short, so folks, please consider alternate routes. This has been an up to the minute traffic and weather report, stay tuned for Don Parks' show on KFRC 99.7." Katze Brenner shifted her position on the bench in the arbetorium atop the San Francisco public library. [Heh, typical day in the City. 'Specially since the Giants still have the lead in the NL West...] She flipped to the next page in her book, frowned at the page, and started typing in the laptop she had set up on the bench next to her. Her pace quicked to the song playing in her ears, and she half sang along with Jim Morrison. "o/~ Break on through to the other side! o/~" An incassent beeping broke through her singing. Katze looked up and sighed as she saw the videoconferencing request flashing on her laptop screen. She stopped the RealAudio feed of KFRC and grabbed the microphone. She quickly adjusted her 'Linker, which was acting as the camera and the modem at the moment, and pressed the 'Enter' key. "Katze here." A very serious looking Admiral Davies appeared on the screen. Katze blinked. She had, of course, met the Admiral before and even worked together under the auspices of the Triumvir's Office. However, Trium meetings usually occured at set times, and an emergency would have some flonkie in the Trium's office doing the calling. What was up? It had to be important, because she'd filed a Do Not Disturb this morning before heading to San Francisco. "Ahh, Lieutenant Brenner. Sorry to bother you, but we have a bit of an emergency and you're the closest agent to the scene." Katze nodded, waiting to hear just what was needed. "We need the Grand Admiral. Last we knew, he was in San Francisco. That was before his security team went missing." "Wait a second. You're telling me the Grand Admiral consented to a security team?" "No, he didn't. But the fact of the matter was that there were guards posted on him, and we can't reach them. You need to establish contact with the Grand Admiral and get him to call HQ." "Great. If he doesn't rip my head off first. Got any idea where he was?" "It's called..." Davies looked offscreen questioningly, and then back. "...Castro Street. How long will it take you to get there?" [Castro Street. It figures.] "About ten minutes." "Okay. We'll expect a report in an hour." --- Katze emerged from underground underneath a huge rainbow colored flag. Castro Street...it figured the Grand Admiral would be hanging out up here. Not only was it just an interesting place to see, it was the heart of San Francisco's gay community. Of course, it was the perfect place for him to blend in. She stood on the corner of Castro and Market, trying to figure out where she would go if she was vacationing here when her eyes were pulled down Castro Street to a cacaphony of blinking blue lights outside a place simply labeled "Harvey's" about a block downhill of where she was. A few policemen were busy plastering the intersection with yellow crime scene tape, and a couple of folks were chalking a body in the street. She weaved her way through the gawking crowd down the street, catching bits of conversation along the way "...shame shooting up Harvey's..." "...you catch the ass on that cop?" "Just came out of nowhere..." "...had guns under their coats...like that one film...y'know, the Mesh?" "...it was an Only in SF moment." "and the tall blonde guy just grabbed his buddy..." Katze grinned and stopped to catch the end of that statement. "...into Harvey's. The gunmen followed them in there shooting the whole time. Wonder what they did?" The grin turned to a frown. Gunmen after DeadLock? This did NOT bode well. It was obvious something had happened to Harvey's by the way the police were going nuts with the crime scene tape, and by the rumors, DeadLock was somehow involved, but she didn't understand. She stood and watched the cops for a bit, trying to think of some way she could convince them to give her the information. Reporter? Nah, they could shoo her off too easily. FBI agent? She'd need to produce ID fast, and although she could get ahold of FBI identification, it wasn't feasible in the next hour. What could she do? And then the answer came to her. She ran up to the nearest police officer, who was guarding a chalk siluhette and a gun. "Officer, I'm sorry, I got here as soon as Mitchell called me. Where is my husband?" The officer blinked. "Your husband? Who are you? And who's Mitchell?" Katze looked at the gun on the ground. It looked familiar, but she couldn't quite place it. But that wasn't the important thing at the moment. "My husband, officer. He was so into baiting gays, and I warned him this would happen! I warned him! And now he's missing!" The officer looked at her. "Miss, I'm sorry. You're gonna have to calm down, take a few deep breaths, and tell me. I don't understand." "My husband, officer. Him and his friend Mitchell like coming to the Castro to bait gays. He thinks they're unnatural. And I warned him they weren't gonna put up with his crap for much longer, but he insisted it was fine -- and now he's probably full of bullet holes! That's what Mitchell said over the phone." They had moved ever closer to the tape barricade and Katze got a closer look at the gun. She tried desperately to keep a poker face, or at least from keeping her real thoughts from surfacing. But she could just imagine tomorrow's daily paper with a picture of the TRES seal and the headline "New Terrorist Group Shoots Up Castro." It had to be picked up before the police could proclaim it evidence and shout about it on the evening news. But how? She had the officer's full attention and any attempt in that direction would land her a "Tampering With Evidence" charge. The officer looked concerned and Katze had to keep from blurting out what she'd just thought about. "Ma'am. I'm sorry. I didn't realize. What's your name?" "Janice Haaten, sir." "And your husband?" "Arvid Haaten, sir. He's a big blonde Sweede." [C'mon...leave me here and go get your supervisor.] The officer glanced around, pushed his glasses up, and wiped his brow. "Ma'am..." Katze stared at him. "...umm, I think I'll go find a supervisor for you. This could be our big break!" Katze nodded. The second he had her back to her, she scooped up the TRES gun on the ground, using her sweatshirt to pick it up, and held it for a second. It looked like any normal object would, but it led Katze to wonder. Why was it pulled? What threat was the Grand Admiral facing? Shuddering, she checked the safety (which was on, as if the officer had been in the process of drawing the gun), wrapped it carefully in her sweatshirt, and put it in her backpack. Standing back up, she practiced her annoyed look until the officer she had been conversing with returned with another man, dressed in street clothes. He held his badge out for her to inspect. "Investigator Scott McHale, ma'am. Officer Jones here tells me that your husband may have been involved in this altercation, and indeed, we've got reports that a big blonde man was involved." McHale pointed off in the distance at a plume of smoke. "The shootings here led to a car chase through the Mission District and to that warehouse. It somehow got set on fire, and the FD has just managed to get that out. The rest of our bodies from here and the Mission have been shipped to the morgue already. I can take you out to the warehouse, see if he's there, but you'll have to answer some questions for me." Katze thought this over, agreed. "Questions first," McHale said. "Now...you said your husband was a gay basher..." --- McHale looked up. "No further questions. Now, you heard the radio, the FD found no bodies in that burnt warehouse. So he's got to be at the morgue if he's dead." He motioned her in the car, and then got behind the wheel. Katze sat back, just listening to McHale chatter, as they drove back downtown, towards where Katze had started from. The morgue sat in the basement of the Hall of Justice. McHale led her down a dreary concrete flight of stairs to the basement. The morgue, suprisingly, lived up to expectations. The cement and cinder block walls were dank and clammy; the lighting was low, flickering florescent bulbs that looked as if they may not have been replaced since 1975. Katze followed Investigator McHale deeper into the bowels of the building and past the officer on duty. He motioned for Katze to follow him. They passed a room with bodies piled on every table, and Katze inwardly winced. But McHale didn't even seem to notice it. He kept walking, and soon enough, they ended up in an office occupied by a dark haired mousy looking man, with bulky black glasses. A white lab coat completed the ensemble. McHale tapped his shoulder. "Nikolai?" The man refused to look up. "What now, Scott?" "I called this in. This is Janice Haaten, and she's looking for her husband, who was involved in what we're terming the Castro Street Massacre. His name's Arvid." Nikolai shrugged. "I've got better things to be doing, but I'll help." McHale turned to leave. "I'll be at the Hall. I hate things like this, too much paperwork involved, why we needed half the damn police department." Nikolai waited until the door shut and then jumped out of his seat. "A plague sweeps the land," he stated calmly, staring straight into her eyes. Katze blinked. Why was this mousy pathologist giving her the Jihad ID code? But she recovered quickly. "But we hold the innoculation." "Good, good, I thought so. Now I don't want to know who you are or what organization you represent, but I've been expecting a Jihaddi. Let me show you why." He lead her back to that room with bodies piled on tables and wove his way to a certain body. Katze looked at the horrible disfigurement that had killed this guy and winced. She'd seen pictures of the aftermath of a Claw[tm] attack, and it was never pleasant. She almost pitied the poor spongie. Nikolai held out a small plastic card. "I found it in his wallet," he said, with a shrug at the body. Katze took it. It was a simple ID card, but it suddenly made Katze shake. She had a similiar card with different color borders, but the same crest. She struggled to control her emotions as she wondered what had happened out on Castro Street. "William Chase Avery, Corporal, Intelligence," she read off the card. The next question came out with a bit of a squeak. "He's a Jihaddi?" Nikolai nodded. Katze looked at the body again, confused. It had to be DeadLock's doing, but Maenads were usually pretty good at distinguishing friend from foe. It didn't make sense. What had happened? Where was DeadLock? He handed her two more ID cards. "I salvaged these. You might want to take them before the cops find them." He looked around the room. "One of the other two looked just like this guy...in terms of lethal wounding, I mean. The other one was shot. Anyway, I'll let you look for the body you're looking for. Nobody from this afternoon's chaos has been filed yet, they're all on the tables. This one was quite a mess." With that, Nikolai fled for his office, leaving Katze alone with the bodies. She started walking through, keeping only her actual looking at the bodies to a quick scan of the face. The questions around Corporal Avery bothered her. Why would DeadLock go after his bodyguards, even if he'd specifically requested not to have them? Wouldn't he be more likely to try to shake their tail? What had happened up on Castro Street? She pulled out the other two cards and looked at the names. Seargeant Gerald David Jenkins and Ensign Takuro Moriami. And all three of them were in Intelligence. So how did two TRESsies end up dying under their own Grand Admiral's hand? It was the intractable question. She had continued to wander past the bodies as she worked on this problem, until the sight of something derailed her train of thought. A body was lying on the table, and the crown of his head looked like it had been blown away. Katze was unable to supress the twitch, and wondered how that had happened. And then she stepped in it. A slimy sluglike trail extended across the floor, and her foot caught in it, causing her to almost fall. But she caught herself at the last minute. [They really need to clean this place,] she thought. Then she noticed that a similiar trail was coming off the table with the body she was just looking at. A closer examination of the wound revealed there was little to no blood, and that slimy trail seemed to come straight out of the head. Post-mortem wound from something burrowing out of the head? Katze shuddered at the thought. Based on the clothes on the body, the guy was most definitely a spongie. What the hell was the Wyrm doing now? She traced the trail all the way to the other side of the room and found an open vent into the air conditioning system. Whatever had been in that guy's head had managed to slither into this dark air conditioning vent. She stood up and looked around the room for a flashlight. Finding one not obviously in sight, she raided the earthquake kit stuck to the wall. And in there, along with measly supplies of water and a first aid kit, she found one. She flicked it on to test it, and was disappointed at the weak beam. It would have to do, though. She lifted the grating up further, so she could see in behind the flashlight, and flicked it on. The weak beam of light reflected off the metal joints, and Katze saw a flash of motion, almost like a very fast sluglike creature was trying not to be seen. However, she wasn't sure if she was just imagining it or if there had actually been something there. Shuddering inside, Katze quickly finished the search of the bodies for DeadLock, and finding nothing, left the morgue as quickly as possible, thanking Nikolai on the way out. --- "And that's how it stands." Katze finished. "DL is nowhere to be found, the police are looking at the incident as a couple of gay bashers who took it a bit too far, and the Wyrm's probably up to no good, as usual." She glanced around the atrium where she had started the day, and then back to Admiral Davies on screen. The Admiral nodded. "Thank you. We'll take it all in consideration." The videoconference link faded into nothing, leaving Katze to think about the day. Not really wanting to think about it, she fired up the RealAudio feed of the Giants-Rockies game and immediately caught the score. "Rockies 6, Giants 5. Bottom of the eighth. Katze listened as the Giants took the lead and then the Rockies tied it. The Giants had one more chance to win in regulation, but the side went down quick, so the game was headed in extra innings. Then the RealAudio feed had died. The urgent messages icon was flashing, so Katze quickly went through the notes. The first was a general notice to TRES personnel that Admiral Davies was assuming field command for "the duration of the crisis." The second contained a field promotion to lieutenant commander and future orders. "Great, fscking spin duty," she muttered upon seeing it. But the spin team wouldn't be here until tomorrow, so Katze decided it was probably best to get dinner, return the gun to the local TRES outpost, and go home. --- The remnant of the Barney Slayer turned slowly in its sealed glass case, casting the light spilling down from overhead around the darkened chamber of its temporary home. Even in its shattered state, the blade still radiated with splendor. The council of mages had said that the sword was slowly regenerating, as all magical weapons have a tendancy to do, but they couldn't surmise how long it would be before it was once more whole. DarkSide sat in one of the cushy chairs that had been arranged around the chamber, as he often did these days, chin rested in the palms of his hands. It was quiet here, restricted access. It gave him a chance to think. He studied the blade carefully, a frown beginning to tug the corners of his mouth downward. With Owsen missing or worse, and the 'Slayer shattered, the Jihad had no means to a final confrontation with the Wyrm. And if It was indeed behind behind these new attacks, the best they could hope for was to hold It back. And now Marburger was gone as well. He couldn't be raised via JihadLinker[tm], and efforts to locate him physically had failed. The heavy vault door behind him hissed open, and a shadowy figure stepped through the narrow crack. "Davies has made the decision," Shadur started, sidling up behind DarkSide's chair. "She's announced that she's assuming full command of TRES." DarkSide looked over his shoulder and mock-glared at Shadur while the latter slid into a chair. "This is a high-sec area, /Captain/, Admirals an' Maenads only. Security'd eat yer balls fer bein' in here." Shadur shrugged nonchalantly. "Pompous-boy wants to keep me out, he better design something that will do the job. Besides, you weren't about to come out." A smirk. "Ye /do/ realize that Admiral Bond does get t' see everythin' th' cameras in here record? Not worried about a court-martial fer bein' insubordinatin'?" "Well, I would be if not for two things," Shadur grinned, counting off on his fingers. "One, I'm not his subordinate. He won't court-martial me because if he did he'd have to admit he hasn't managed to keep me out of *anywhere* for the past five years. And he doesn't want to admit that to anyone. Two, the cameras *do* have to record me doing this first." DarkSide glanced up at the camera in the ceiling corner. Sure enough, the light was out. He nodded slowly, his eyes not leaving the twirling blade. "So who's gettin' second-in-command?" "She wants you in the chair, DS. She figures you've been involved in the crisis du jour from the start, so it'd be best if you were there to keep her advised." DarkSide sucked in a good lungful of air, exhaling it in a nasal sigh. "Well, shite." It seemed like the thing to say. "Hey, at least you get to skip the ceremony," Shadur snickered, trying to lighten the somber mood a bit. "Yeah, ain't field pr'motion grand? Beh." The Admiral rose from his seat, silent save for the creak of leather. "Of course ye know, this means I now 'ave th'authority t'keep ye involved in th'aforementioned crisis du jour, don't ye?" "Yeah, imagine my elation," the man-dragon prodded back, turning back to the hardened steel exit. "Briefing at 1500. Be there, dragon, or I'll hunt ye down and tag yer scaly arse." "You'd have to find it first. Whydoncha come over to the labs for the briefing? I have a feeling I'm going to be a might busy for the foreseeable future..." --TBC -- --Nemesis the Feral (NYAR!) Grand Admiral Felton, C-in-C, TRES Corps Jihad 5000 Lord of the Race The Corps is Mother. The Corps is Father. Trust the Corps.