Authors: Matt Roberts
“Quit it, Carter,” O’Brien butted in again, rapidly tiring of the pointless squabble. “I’d
love
to get off the side of this building before we get noticed, so could we please get moving?”
“You hear that, Sully?” Owyn asked. “We could really do with a way in.”
“I’ve got a weak point eighteen storeys above you. Marking it on your visors. I guess you’d better get climbing.”
“Eighteen storeys?” Shaw was still furious, having yet to make his way up to the others.
“It’s the best I’ve got, man. Next best option is the roof if you’d rather go fifty.”
“Listen to your own advice and shut it, Shaw. Let’s move,” Owyn ordered, the humour having faded from his voice.
“Lead the way, Carter,” O’Brien said.
Owyn swiftly scaled the building, fending off the relentless assault from the wind and rain by pressing himself as flat to the surface as possible, while O’Brien and Shaw followed in single file behind him. From the outside, the point that Sully had marked blended perfectly into the smooth curvature of the building’s outer surface, but a little work with a laser cutter revealed the opening of a maintenance shaft. Owyn called O’Brien up and within a matter of seconds she had unscrewed and removed the metal grate to give them their entry.
It was a tight fit, but Owyn hauled himself through with relative ease and crawled forward to allow O’Brien to follow in behind him. The shaft was comparable to an air vent, with exit hatches spaced at regular intervals into the majority of the rooms on this floor. Once Shaw had finished huffing and puffing and made his way inside, they continued forward.
Owyn opened the first hatch on the vent floor and hopped down into a dark and deserted corridor. A sliver of light had managed to find its way up from the streets and through a window at one end, but otherwise the hallway was submerged in total blackness. He drew his pistol and activated his visor’s thermal view. Even now that they’d escaped the threat of falling, they couldn’t afford to feel any more comfortable. A quick scan revealed no heat signatures and so he gestured for the others to follow him down.
“We’re in,” he informed Sully.
“You do seem a little tense,” Sully said, patching directly through to Owyn rather than the whole team. “Honestly, I really didn’t expect you to be affected. Even after two years of listening to every stupid word that’s come out of your mouth you still manage to surprise me.”
“When I told you to keep it shut, I meant it, Sully,” Owyn replied, although his serious tone couldn’t help but sound a little forced.
“Whatever you say, boss.”
Owyn rolled his eyes.
Splitting off, the team moved through the building’s gloomy hallways towards the stairwell at the far end of the floor. Every corridor was identical to the last, as was every one of hundreds of office doors evenly spaced along them in uniform lines. There were dozens, if not hundreds of these office complexes in New Tokyo alone; evidence of the fact that Altaris’ cities had been constructed to a single formula, meant to promote a perfectly functioning civilisation.
The team knew that surveillance cameras were hidden behind the walls and ceiling at every turn, but they were of little concern. Sully had already taken full control of nearly all of the buildings security systems by using equipment in their suits to hack from the inside out, ensuring that the mission would remain uncompromised. The three squad members converged on the stairwell in perfect synchronisation, and Owyn led the way down.
They descended six flights of steps and emerged into another gloomy hallway. This floor, however, was different to the rest. The walls were reinforced, and more noticeably the uniformity was gone. But for a tiny energy signature this floor and the two beneath it were completely hidden from Sully’s scans – they’d arrived at their destination. Meeting a crossroads, Owyn signalled for O’Brien to go left and Shaw right while he maintained a straight heading.
At every doorway he paused, scanning over each room in turn, allowing Sully to inspect every detail through his visor. Despite all three team members searching, this floor alone had an area of almost 150,000 square feet, meaning they had a huge quantity of ground to cover. To make matters worse, the lack of order made it feel like a maze, and soon enough Owyn began to encounter dead ends at nearly every turn.
After more than ten minutes of tireless hunting and considerable frustration on Owyn’s part, finally the target of his search revealed itself. A large multi-storeyed room opened out ahead. He stepped out onto the balcony and peered cautiously over the edge. The room descended two storeys below, and the base level was fully lit, with a number of shadowy figures patrolling the floor. At its centre was a closed square chamber with walls coloured black. Owyn already knew its contents. Inside was the building’s mainframe; the target.
“Get the others to my location. I’ve got you your mainframe,” Owyn informed Sully, keeping his voice down to a whisper. He then continued to move around the balcony, using every angle to build up an image of what lay below.
“Copy that,” Sully answered promptly.
A few minutes later Shaw and O’Brien joined Owyn on the balcony.
“What’ve we got?” O’Brien asked.
“Twelve men. Four on the ground and eight snipers on the balcony below us,” Owyn answered. “Their gear looks pretty standard so they shouldn’t be too much of a problem.”
“Sounds like fun,” O’Brien remarked.
“We’ll take a level each,” Owyn explained. “Shaw, you stay up here and focus on the snipers on the left side. When I give the signal, O’Brien will take the right side and I’ll deal with the ground troops. Then you’ll need to give me cover in case they send reinforcements.” Shaw acknowledged his instructions with a subtle nod. His mood looked to have improved now that everyone had adopted a focused mind-set. “We clear?”
“You’d better make it quick down there,” Shaw warned. “If they send in the whole damn militia then we aren’t going to be able to stick around to bail you out.”
Owyn was preparing to launch into another argument but O’Brien quickly intercepted him. “Focus on your own job, Carter.” She gave him a cold, stern look and he reluctantly backed down.
“Let’s go,” he said, having resumed a level head.
Shaw began assembling his rifle from the components on his belt upon the uppermost balcony while the other two made for the stairwell. He had four snipers in his sights, all dressed in black and painted on a silver canvas. They all had eyes to the ground, but Shaw knew how quickly they could react. He practiced moving his aim across from one to the next, calculating the time it would take him to take all four down. Once he was satisfied he lined up the first shot and awaited the go ahead.
Owyn meanwhile made his way two floors down and began his approach towards the mainframe. The whole level was absent of darkness, and so he had to exercise new caution. He slipped into the shadows at every opportunity and came to a stop at every corner to listen to the silence before continuing his advance.
A lone guard stood at an intersection around 30 feet from the entrance, attentively watching over the three approach routes. With just a quick glance Owyn could see that he was on edge. He was fingering his sidearm, twitching with every creak of his own boot against the polished surface.
Owyn rolled off the wall and in the same movement squeezed the trigger of his pistol before landing behind the opposite corner. The guard immediately crumpled to the ground, given no time to react as the bullet left the barrel without even the slightest of sounds and pierced his chest, stopping his heart immediately.
Puffing another relieved sigh Owyn pushed on, hopping over the body and taking cover again. He was still too far from the end of the hallway to get much of an idea of what lay ahead, but with no way of gaining a better viewpoint without leaving himself exposed he knew he would have to go in blind. “Whenever you’re ready, Shaw.”
With no hesitation Shaw let loose. He fired four silent shots in quick succession, and before his first target had moved an inch from his standing position the fourth had taken his last breath. On the second balcony directly below his feet O’Brien leapt into action. She lodged a throwing knife in the first sniper’s neck before swinging her foot into the head of the second. As he struggled to maintain consciousness she drew a blade from her thigh strap and swept it across his throat. The other two had time to turn around but saw nothing in the darkness before a bullet pierced each of their foreheads.
Apathetic to the carnage she’d inflicted O’Brien holstered her handgun and stepped back over the bleeding corpses as she wiped her blade clean. “You’re clear,” she reported.
“Copy that,” Owyn responded. “Keep me covered, Shaw.” He then pulled a pair of grenades from his belt and, after another peek around the corner, rolled them down the hall.
As soon as he heard the subsequent click Owyn sprinted in pursuit. He pressed his eyes shut as the explosions let out a blinding burst of light, chaining a bolt of electricity between three of the soldiers. Once the haze had cleared he opened his eyes and easily dealt with the survivor, only to see another group of men rapidly approaching from the opposite corridor in response to the explosion.
Heading straight for the mainframe chamber, Owyn used his momentum to catapult himself upwards and grasp hold of the ledge. Once he’d hauled himself up he lay flat to the surface, taking cover from incoming fire. As the men moved to encircle him, they put themselves exactly where they didn’t want to be. Shaw finished the job with aplomb and Owyn was clear to drop back down to the floor.
“Get a move on,” Shaw called.
Owyn huffed in frustration towards his teammate as he fastened an explosive charge to the chamber door and stood back. Three beeps later the lock burst apart and he was in.
“Patch me in and get out of there,” Sully’s voice rang buoyantly over comms. “Nice work.”
“Just another mission,” Owyn replied with a smile to himself. He stepped inside the chamber and headed for the console, but having taken just two steps further the cold metal of a barrel pressed against his temple, stopping him dead.
AMBROSE
Owyn gritted his teeth and swallowed hard. He scrunched his eyes, cursing himself for not being more careful. As the gun moved away from his head and Lieutenant Ambrose planted it back into his holster he still hadn’t the nerve to breathe. “Never drop your guard,” the Lieutenant said, his disappointment audible in every drawn out syllable. “What gave you the confidence to walk through that door? What assured you the room wasn’t rigged with explosives; that you weren’t walking into a trap?” His anger was muted beneath his hoarse, rugged tone, but Owyn heard it loud and clear.
Still not daring to open his mouth, Owyn stood in silence as Ambrose approached the mainframe’s console and did his work for him. “We’re patched in. Evac on the roof.” He brushed past Owyn’s shoulder and marched out. “Meet me for debriefing in an hour,” he said, not needing to turn around as he disappeared down the corridor.
After standing petrified on the spot for a few moments longer, Owyn reluctantly plodded his way out. When he emerged O’Brien was sat up against the wall ahead of him running a cloth along one of her blades then holding it up to the light to examine the polish. Shaw, unsurprisingly, had already left for HQ, but Owyn was glad if anything – he could do without the mockery right now. Around the rest of the room Sergeant Major Tucker – leader of Charlie Squad – and his team were busily running the clean-up operation; shifting bodies and meticulously removing every lingering trace of the operation’s existence. Once they were done they’d have the job of fabricating a new crime scene from scratch, deflecting the blame far away from ISO and the rest of the military.
With her helmet off O’Brien’s dull-brown hair was revealed, tied into a bun behind her head, and even now there wasn’t a trace of sweat running through it. At a glance she looked skinny and small, but her stature merely masked the thick undercoating of muscle running beneath her skin. She had cold grey eyes edged with a hint of green and what seemed like the same emotionless expression that had been plastered across her face for all of her life. Reading her was like staring hopelessly at a blank page, although Owyn had never had much interest in trying. He knew well enough that peoples’ backstories were often far from pretty. You were better off not trying to uncover what was bubbling beneath the surface.
“How’d it go?” she asked, not offering to glance up from her blade.
“Not a clue,” Owyn answered dismissively.
“What did he say?” O’Brien asked again, looking for a more substantial response.
Owyn diverted her away. “He’s debriefing me in an hour. We’d better get moving so I don’t piss him off any more.”
“Alright,” she said, holding up her hands.
“What’s with the concern anyway? It’s not like you to go for heart to heart talks.”
She looked up with a puzzled expression. “A heart to heart talk. Is that what this is?” She rolled her eyes. “I dread to think what your love life was like.”
“Pretty much none existent. I never had the time for it.”
“I suppose we do have something in common after all, Carter.” She sprung to her feet then followed in Ambrose’ footsteps down the corridor, spinning her knife in her hand as she walked.
Owyn stood for some time, gazing at the balconies above and quietly contemplating. Eventually, having concluded that his thoughts were getting him nowhere, he departed for the roof.
With laboured strides Owyn approached the jet and clambered inside, before Sully ignited the engines and they lifted off.
“How’d it go in there?” Sully asked, almost mimicking O’Brien exactly.
“Just get us back to HQ, Sully.”
Recognising Owyn’s shift of tone, Sully backed down and fell silent. Owyn lay back as best he could and closed his eyes, feeling the power of the engines vibrating through him as the jet cut through the atmosphere and moved into orbit. The next thing he knew was the siren song of the hanger doors as they arrived back at HQ.
ISO was based on an orbital station far above the planet’s surface. It had seven decks and enough personal quarters to house a small army, although in reality the department had a little more than thirty personnel. Owyn had expected others to arrive the year after the first group had begun operations yet even now, more than two years since first setting up on Altaris, they remained a very modest force.
There were no records of the station’s location outside of its own databases and no way of detecting it by conventional means. With technology in such an advanced state, ISO had to do everything possible to remain a secret. HQ was the embodiment of that mentality.
Keeping his head down, Owyn swiftly made his way to the uppermost floor of the station where Operations was located. Operations was a large, open room with dozens of computer consoles lining the walls – although, again, it seemed ISO were severely undermanned to ever make use of them all. In the centre was the IC, the
Intelligence Centre
; a tall round table with a glass top and a holographic image of Altaris projected a few inches above it. Despite its unassuming looks, it was the most important piece of technology that belonged to ISO, as within its circuits resided their collected intelligence, their identities and their mission data. Sully had designed the system to be impossible to hack – such was the delicacy of its contents. In doing so he’d needed to devise a way to make it entirely separate from every other computer system in existence, something that was almost unimaginable in the modern age.
From Operations led a flight of metal steps up to Ambrose’ quarters. Owyn climbed them as quietly as he could, but thanks to the emptiness of the room even the softest step generated an almighty clang. As he neared the door it slid aside and he was prompted to enter. He stepped through and it closed behind him. He was alone.
This was the first time he had ever found himself in here without being under Ambrose’ strict supervision, so he took his chance to look around. On one wall of the room was the station’s control hub – currently locked behind a whole sequence of passwords and other security measures – where Ambrose had access to cameras, communication and every other individual system, all of which could be displayed on a holographic screen which covered almost the entire wall.
As well as the leader of Alpha team, Lieutenant Ambrose was the Commanding Officer of ISO. He was the most experienced soldier of any of them, having fought on Earth – both in and outside the US – for more than a decade before leaving for Altaris. He wasn’t one to boast about his former glories, although imagining the things he might have seen and done in all those years, Owyn doubted there was an awful lot to brag about. Still, it meant that the rest of ISO knew even less about their leader than they did about each other. That applied even to Owyn, who shared the closest relationship with the Lieutenant of all of them – if, in those circumstances, it could be described as a relationship at all.
When Ambrose had first set about building ISO from the ground up he’d handpicked Owyn to be his first Operative, and ever since then he’d acted like a mentor, paying closer attention to his development on the field than any of the other personnel. Now, five years down the line from when Owyn was first selected, Ambrose was giving him a shot at a promotion to First Officer. Owyn wasn’t sure what he’d done to deserve any of it but, given all of that, he couldn’t help but wonder why he hadn’t been given even a peek behind the veil – not even a first name. Of course, secrecy was something the organisation was built on, but it did seem strange – not that he’d say so out loud.
On the opposite side of the room was a full wall window which gave a breath-taking view of the planet below. Owyn stepped over and put his hands to the glass, gazing down onto the surface. Darkness shrouded much of it, but gleaming specks of light pockmarked the land where Altaris’ cities lay. As of yet the planet had nothing outside of its fifteen cities scattered about the globe, and so the lights were well separated and identical – all except for one.
The brightest of the lights was Kyvos, Altaris’ largest city and the culmination of all of the work that had gone into perfecting human civilisation. Kyvos was home to the
Department of Planetary Defence
(the DPD), the main body of Altaris’ military and its most powerful organisation. The city was still young and so Owyn had never seen it for himself, even though it was from there that he ultimately received his orders. There were plenty of images and videos, of course, but Owyn chose to leave it to his imagination, not wanting to take away from his eventual visit, whenever that might be. Unfortunately, ISO personnel were forbidden to leave the station other than on active duty, so there was no telling if that day would ever come.
As Owyn stood gawping at the view he heard the door open behind him. He instinctively spun around, placing one hand over the other behind his back and standing straight.
Lieutenant Ambrose had the look of a veteran, through and through. Sprouts of grey were beginning to show in his hair and stubble of a beard, and the jagged white scar that ran down the length of his face was surrounded by dry, withering skin.
He was the kind of soldier who never left the battlefield; even here he had his rifle slung over his back and a sidearm strapped to either thigh. All of his weaponry was age old. His rifle was an M4 Carbine, not seen in service use since the early 2020s, and as a result it was visibly battered and beaten through the years of tireless service it had endured.
The Lieutenant said nothing at first. He simply walked over to the window and stood a few feet across from Owyn, silently looking out. After a few seconds he spoke. “Why are you here, Owyn?” he asked.
“Excuse me, sir?” Owyn replied, confused by the question.
“Why did you leave Earth and join ISO?” Ambrose clarified.
Still, however, Owyn wasn’t quite sure what he was asking. “It was an opportunity I couldn’t miss out on,” he answered nonetheless.
“Why? Why abandon everything you fought for on Earth and come here? You weren’t like most soldiers. You weren’t fighting to survive. You could have stayed far away from that war without a mark on your conscience. You fought for a reason. Why give up?”
Owyn swallowed nervously. “There wasn’t anything left to fight for,” he said. “We weren’t making a difference.”
“That wasn’t what the people were made to believe. XION’s super soldiers had fought the rebels back. The war was almost over.”
A lump rose in Owyn’s throat and he gritted his teeth. “All we did was drive them underground.” He shrugged. “If you put enough of their heads on spikes then of course they’re going to run, but we were never going to win. We were only making the situation worse.”
Ambrose took a brief moment to think and then continued his questioning. “What about your family? They lived in the forests in Ontario when you were born, yes?”
“Yes sir.”
“Then why did you join the war? There was no conflict there. You had a home, food, water,
family
. Not many people could say that. Why would you ever leave that behind?”
“My parents died before I was 17 and after that I only had my brother. We were both fit to fight and didn’t want to stand by doing nothing.” He shrugged again. “We were naïve. We thought we could help fix everything and we thought that was what the US were trying to do.”
“But it wasn’t?”
Owyn shuffled and looked down at his feet. “I don’t know. Maybe that was what they were trying to do, but they were never going to succeed. It was impossible.”
“Then why follow them here? If they couldn’t succeed on Earth, what more could they do here? You could have just turned your back – gone home – but you chose this. Now you’re as far from home as you could ever be.”
He shook his head and repeated himself. “I don’t know.”
He expected for Ambrose to dig deeper, to try to get something meaningful from him, but instead he turned away from the window and shifted his focus. “You did well today, Carter.”
Confusion continued to grow in Owyn’s mind. He was expecting an onslaught, not a congratulation. “Thank you, sir,” he said with uncertainty.
“That said…” There it was. He knew the praise couldn’t last long. “Entering from the side of the building left a trace we’d rather not have to deal with. Your relationship with Shaw also had a negative impact on both your focus and that of the rest of the team.” Owyn braced himself. “However.” Another change of tune? That was unheard of. “You coped well with every situation and you got the job done. That’s all I can ask of a team leader.”
Owyn’s hopes soared. Somehow he’d done it. “Sir?” he asked expectantly. “Does that mean—” He hesitated.
Ambrose paused for a moment. He didn’t hint at anything with his expression, but something about his drawn out breath didn’t bode well. “Unfortunately not, no.” Owyn was abruptly dragged down. “I wasn’t simply testing your credentials as a leader. I already knew you were perfectly capable. You proved that during your training. I wasn’t just looking to promote you to First Officer, I was testing whether you could act as my replacement.”
Owyn’s despair switched focus in a flash. “Your replacement?” He abandoned the formalities, letting his tone slip. “Why?”
“I’ve been given a temporary assignment on the surface. I’m to leave the station in 48 hours. A standing officer will be assigned to command in my stead.”
He said ‘temporary’ but that was little consolation. Ambrose never liked to be ambiguous. Ambiguity from him didn’t instil confidence. “Why the hell would you be assigned away from ISO?” Owyn protested.