Issue #78 – Delved Too Deep (Une Mascarade Brisée Part 1)

The Descendants Vol 7: The New World

• Issue #73 – Give Thanks
• Issue #74 – Bit Part Bad Guys
• Issue #75 – Kaiju for Christmas
• Issue #76 – Silicon Soul, Adamantine Will
• Issue #77 – Date Night
• Issue #78 – Delved Too Deep (Une Mascarade Brisée Part 1)
• Issue #79 – Tome of Secrets (Une Mascarade Brisée Part 2)
• Descendants Special #7 – The Curtain Rises
• Issue #80 – Bitter Work
• Issue #81 – Kin, Speed and Ducks
• Issue #82 – What To Do With Your Downtime
• Issue #83 – Avalon Rises
• Issue #84 – Darkness Falling
• Descendants Annual #7 – First Frost

Delved Too Deep (Part 2)

Five hours earlier, Deep Twenty-Three Facility

If anyone happened upon it, Deep Twenty-three appeared to be a high-tech drilling platform. In a sense, it was—only the drill had been put in place to carve out a base deep in the heart of the mid-oceanic ridge rather than to quest for resources.

One and a quarter miles beneath the surface, activity was frenetic as the dozens of Project Tome employees and operatives worked to bring the facility’s latest mandate to fruition.

In the command center, technicians called out the statuses of whatever systems they were responsible for to the facility’s Director, Ephraim Thames.

“Power plant output is at optimum levels, capacitors at ninety percent charge and climbing.”

“Pingback reports that we are outside of all satellite visual range with a ninety-five minute window.”

“Automated turrets all checked in.”

“Colonel White reports his force is in the lift and ready to deploy.”

It was the monthly troop rotation and supply run. Routine, but also the most dangerous. Forty mercenaries, six armored vehicles and dozens of boxes of food, fuel, parts and ammo were shipping out and thirty mercs plus their latest ‘acquisitions’ from Faerie were coming in.

Every eleven hours, when the facility was outside of the visual range of satellite surveillance, the gate was opened to collect reports from the outpost and recover any dead or wounded. Contact between Earth and Faerie at those times lasted fifteen minutes.

During rotation, contact could last an hour or more—a lot of time for something unfriendly to find its way across.

Thames checked the monitor receiving feeds from the primary lift ferrying the mercenaries tot he surface, then the one watching the gate platform itself. Because no one wanted to be trapped a mile underwater with the kinds of things that lived in Faerie, the gate opened on an isolated platform on the rig where hopefully any intruder could be shot down or forced into the ocean where it would drown.

At the moment, said platform looked innocuous enough; a flat open space where it seemed shipping containers were loaded and unloaded, presumably supplies for the crew of the rig. That changed as the techs initialized the routine to open the gate.

Hydraulic lifts lowered some of the containers into the deck while others split open and folded down to reveal the complex equipment necessary to open a stable astral gate. Some looked like tower speakers arranged in stacks on articulated, telescoping arms. Others were masses of hoses and cables connected to parabolic dishes. Still more were high-powered lasers arranged in exacting patterns.

At the center of the platform, a thirty-foot section of the deck split in half to accommodate a device being raised from below. It consisted of a concrete cylinder with a ramp leading down from it to the deck, flanked by what appeared to be a pair of radio masts rigged with electrodes and trailing thick cables. The cylinder was bisected by a deep groove in the middle as this a someone’s finger.

Once all of that was in place and humming to life, automated turrets on the surrounding platforms rotated to aim heavy ordnance at anything unfriendly or even unexpected that might come through the gate. Last but not least, a modified grenade launcher was raised into place directly across from the cylinder and its precise angle and payload were calculated to a thousand places.

The head technician, a blonde woman with a thick braid hanging down her back double checked the whole thing on her tablet before nodding to Thames. “Gateway apparatus primed an ready, Mr. Thames. The skies are clear and we now have a ninety-one minute window starting…” She waited exactly six seconds. “Now.”

Thames nodded, emotionless as ever. Too many close calls in the early weeks of the facility had robbed him of anything but a wary and meticulous eye for everything involving the operation. “Initialize astral bore.”

Several techs as the control panel for the machine sprang into action, setting various electromagnetic and laser-based devices on the platform in sequence. On the surface, the ‘speakers’ began to vibrate and the air vibrated and hummed with invisible waves and beams of energy converging at a point above the raised cylinder.

As the techs dialed up the intensity of their equipment, the air began to blur like the heat shimmer above a road in summer. It wasn’t long before the minor mirage became more violent, completely distorting the light passing through it until it looked to be a mass of water somehow boiling in air. This finally came to a head as the ‘boiling’ separated like ripped fabric being pulled apart by unseen hands, revealing a rosy sea of light beyond.

The techs leveled off their equipment until it was holding steady and the breech into the astral plane was approximately ten feet across and thirty-five feet high and ringed by a border of boiling air. Minor adjustments moved the rift until it hovered directly over the groove in the cylinder.

After checking readings from sensors embedded all around the platform, the head tech nodded. “Mr. Thames, the astral gate is open and stable at ninety-two percent maximum width.”

Thames nodded almost imperceptibly. He had a bad feeling about this mission, but he had a bad feeling about every mission since his first week on the job. As usual, he pushed it aside and did his job. “Breech to Faerie at the usual site.”

At the remote controls of the grenade launcher, the tech in charge double checked all of the readings coming back from the weapon and its payload. Trial and error had taught them that angle of entry, force of the charge and the timing of the whole thing were key to getting the gate to not only form, but form in the correct part of Faerie. The gun’s targeting computer had over seven hundred valid combinations that opened successful gates, some permanently locked out because of what was on the other side; water, solid rock or worse.

With everything in order, he keyed in the last commands.

The grenade launcher adjusted its aim by microns before stabilizing arms locked into place around it to prevent the muzzle from bouncing. When everything was locked down, the weapon fired once, lobbing a ceramic jacketed shaped charge into the astral rift.

The explosion caused the rift to ripple and twist against the forces keeping it open and stable. The rose light was burned away until it was replaced by a green, chaotic swirl. Arcs of blue lightning crackled off the roiling edges of the open gate, earthing into the cylinder and the radio masts.

Down below, the techs controlling the boring device surged the power going to it and carefully tweaked the relevant frequencies. By fractions, they began to tease the tear between realities back into stability.

“That’s odd.” Thames heard one of the communications operators say.

His unease spiked and he grabbed the back of the young man’s chair. “What’s odd?”

The operator raised his hand helplessly and shook his head. “N-nothing much, sir. We’re just receiving signal. That doesn’t normally happen before the gateway resolves.” No sooner did the words leave his mouth than his console started to chime, red bars outlining various open windows.

Temporarily forgetting Thames, the operator returned his attention to his screens. “Unauthorized access to the restricted frequencies? Password lockouts on the satellite uplink?”

“A spy?” Thames asked, feeling oddly relieved. “Are you saying we have a spy out here?”

“I’m not saying anything sir.” the tech said as faults started to appear on other consoles form other censors. He worked feverishly to work out the source of the problems, but new windows started popping up onscreen: simple white space with marks that looked like short lines at odd angles.

“I have no idea what the hell’s going on,” he admitted as the screens completely overtook everything he was working on. “But… but I’m locked out. All I can tell is that it looks like whoever’s sending the signal is the same one trying to access the restricted communications systems.”

Thames looked up at the monitor showing the gateway, writhing in the electromagnetic grip of the facility’s technology. He knew it couldn’t be anyone or anything on Faerie. Every UAV scout and all of the interviews Tome’s other departments sent indicated that the Faerie peoples were low tech and high magic.

But it sufficiently advanced technology was indistinguishable from magic, and any sufficiently explained magic was indistinguishable from science… could sufficiently advanced magic interface with technology?

“Shut it down.” He ordered, turning to the main console, where the techs were still working to stabilize the gate.

One of them, a young woman with chin-length hair looked up at him quizzically. “Sir?”

“Shut down the gate. The outpost may be compromised. We have to ask for guidance on this before opening that gate again.”

She blinked her big, brown eyes at him. “I’m sorry sir, but we… can’t. Until the gateway resolves, all we’re doing it directing its expansion. We can cut off resolved gates, but a forming one?”

“Then resolve it, but shrink it as small as you possibly can.” Thames was trying very hard to hide his mounting fear. All around him, more people were exclaiming as their consoles started to glitch or throw faults.

“Sir? Sir!” It was the first communications op, who had managed to clear enough of the strange glitched windows to read his screen. “They cracked the password to the master communications array. The dish is tracking, scanning for an uplink.”

“What?!” Thames all but roared, storming back to the man. “You said the lockout stopped them.”

It took some stammering, but the operator finally managed, “It did. They found some way around it. I don’t know what because I can’t access the system.”

“Fire control on all the turrets just went down.” the head technician announced, breaking into the conversation. “IT is also reporting: there are serious data breeches al over the facility, not just here.”

Before Thames could start cursing about that, the female tech from the gateway control called over. “Sir, we can’t get it below ten feet and it’s not resolving. It’s like there’s another gateway control system out that working against us, trying to force it open wider.”

Another of the techs, a middle aged man, nodded beside her, his expression grave. “We’re running everything at full power. As it stands, we’re only going to be able to keep it from expanding for ten minutes. Tops.”

Standing in the middle of the control room, looking at the pandemonium slowly breaking out as the epidemic of glitches and security failures made the rounds, he knew there was no stopping it now. They didn’t have control; whatever was on the other side did.

“Satellite uplink established.” the operator said, voice laced with confusion. “connection establishing with… civilian DNS server? The Internet?”

Whatever that meant, Thames no longer cared. “Can you still access the base wide alerts?”

“It’ll take some doing, but yes sir.”

“Good. Sound general evacuation. Pods, not lifts. And see if you can use the uplink to dial home—let someone know what’s going on here.”

***

Now

“According to what Talbot gave us, four minutes later, they lost gateway control and the gate began to expand.” General Pratt explained over the phone as Laurel reviewed the files on the holographic screen in the Lifesaver’s Inc War Room. There was a recent satellite image of the facility. Part of the main deck had been neatly severed from the rest by the expanding edge of the rift and slid into the ocean. The rest looked like it have been hit by a hurricane.

“Survivors?”

“We don’t know yet.” said Pratt. “Tome’s pods have locators, but it’s going to be a race to beat them to any survivors if there are any at all. Officially, there was an explosion on a drilling rig and the Navy is deploying for search and rescue. They’ll be requesting aid from the Descendants since your group is only a few hundred miles from Norfolk.”

Laurel looked at another satellite image and frowned. “Unofficially, we’re hunting.”

“With drone support from the USS Gore. Possibly more, seeing how big it is. That isn’t going to be a problem is it? I assumed ‘thou shalt not kill’ excluded monsters.”

Her frown didn’t leave her face. “This ‘monster’ hacked a highly advanced digital security system with what is almost assuredly an incompatible operating system, General. For us, ‘Thou shalt not kill is likely going to be in full effect.”

“It’s approaching US waters and we both saw what it did to that rig, Codex. You know what our playbook says about that.”

Codex called up several pages of online forum chatter about the glitches. “That is your job and that fact is why we have the luxury of looking for a third option…”

“And that is?”

The pages weren’t helpful; mostly people complaining about slow service or garbled screens. Some people who had websites were complaining about their servers being bogged down. So far, all that told Laurel was the whatever was accessing the web was doing so by brute force and without any set pattern. So it knew what the internet was, but not how to look for what it was after.

“I don’t know that yet. We’ll try to get out in front of it and minimize civilian casualties in case we neither find that third option and you don’t manage to kill it. Besides, nothing we have by way of powers compares to a properly targeted bunker buster. Do you have a heading on where it might make landfall?”

Pratt paused as he checked on that. “It hasn’t changed course since we got visual. Landfall will be sixteen miles south of Meridian Beach, Georgia.”

Within seconds, Laurel had a simulation playing on her screen. “That puts the town within the radius where the winds will top the strongest recorded hurricane gusts. If you need us, General, that’s where we’ll be, assisting in the evacuation.”

“You really don’t think we can kill this thing short of a nuclear weapon.” Pratt said; a statement, not a question.

“General, in my experience, the creatures depicted in our modern fairy tales might well be based on the actual beasts and peoples of Faerie, watered down by time and superstition. Every time we hear or encounter one, they are far different and more powerful than the stories would suggest.”

Laurel consulted the satellite image again. According to the scale, it was some three hundred feet from snout to tail. Image enhancement revealed that it was covered in brown-green scales the size of compact cars except for the thick veiny membranes stretched between its three sets of wings and had a forest of horns, some taller than small houses stop its wedge-shaped head.

“Now apply that understanding to a dragon.”