01-11-2014, 11:46 AM
Rashik was surrounded by the dim glow of a hundred small lights. Server rooms were always warm, but the battery went out on the coolant system of his gear, and he'd worked up a sweat just sitting there waiting. The screen he watched obsessively might have something to do with the rise in temperature also.
His second Wallet buzzed an alert. HQ was looking for an update. He summoned a visual, "Nothing to report yet, sir. The target definitely logged into his unit, but before I arrived, he'd logged back out again."
Rashik moved the device alongside his first Wallet, which was currently being used to hack into the Building's security monitors. The camera he piped to HQ only revealed an empty hallway watching the top floor penthouse. "The log shows his keycode was used to access the top floor. I have to guess he went to the party hosted up there. Records indicate the property is owned by a Privilege."
The man on the other side of the virtual tunnel said to keep him posted. Rashik was about to cut the connection, but movement caught his eye. "Wait."
The penthouse door opened. Out filed the target in the company of a woman. They proceeded out of sight of the camera's angle.
Rashik linked HQ into his earpiece, "Target visualized,"
he said, and hurried to pack up his gear. The voice spoke, "You are authorized to engage at all costs."
Rashik knew what that meant. "Acknowledged,"
he said and muted the link. He couldn't afford to be distracted when facing a god.
The last plug to pull was the Wallet's connection to the security feed. His hand was literally on the port when the door opened again. He hesitated in time to witness the exit of someone he had no idea was barricaded up in there. Palpitations thudded his chest with adrenaline, and all thoughts of the first target dissolved.
He threw himself down once more and rerouted the cameras to the building's first level exits. The feed couldn't load fast enough, but he panned through them all until coming to the exact same entrance he'd used himself to gain access. It was the entrance where building service technicians, janitors, and the like used as a check-in. Ritzy brats couldn't allow themselves to witness the working class coming and going like necessary little bottom-dwellers.
Personnel and black cars waited just outside the door. The Ascendancy's motorcade, small as it was for this obviously impromptu trip, waited out there. Which meant Rashik had to get to him before the man tasted fresh air.
It looked like he had one, two, no three agents, he counted, with him. It was the best opportunity the Atharim ever had to get to the man.
There wasn't time to draft a plan. Which meant Rashik had to go with his gut. The Ascendancy was already on the elevator. He programmed a quick series of unprompted floor stops, often enough to raise CSS's suspicion. They'd move from the elevators to the stairwell, then, to take up alternate emergency routes. In the event of an actual emergency, they'd head for the last point of exit. Rashik would know where. He'd been studying this building for weeks, waiting for Jaxen's return.
His fingers raced a split second behind the gears flying through his head. Hacking into closed circuit security feeds from the server room was no problem at all, but accessing the maintenance and plumbing annual test took longer than he'd like. With a sigh of relief, he programmed the sprinklers to go off on level two, which included the stairwells, for two minutes from now.
He then grabbed his gear and headed for the roof, intending to beat the Ascendancy there.
****
Once himself and the three CSS agents were safely dropping closer to the surface of the Earth, Alric discovered the bag of drugs in his pocket. Although neither witnessed the actual planting, Nikolai knew the culprit nonetheless. A curious thing to attempt something so dangerous. If it was a message, Nikolai would leave it to the more than capable Security Services to decipher it.
After the second stop at floors unpressed by anyone on their side of the elevator and absent of persons on the other side, the agent whom had been posted at the penthouse door called the team on the ground. Nik tuned them out for the standard procedure it was.
It had not escaped his notice that Oriena left with someone else. It was entirely possible that she and young Mister Marveet were a couple faithful to one another, but knowing Scion's honorable examples, Nikolai doubted it.
The departure of other couples signaled the precarious point in the night when inhibitions had been lowered enough to make hasty decisions, but had not yet deteriorated into a haze of meaninglessness. Nikolai refused to objectify himself to the point of wasting his own time any longer and thus was returning to the Kremlin. He sensed the value of his presence decreasing by the minute, and he had won what he had set out to accomplish. Not to mention the performance fatigue nipping at his heels. Pretending, for instance, to recognize some model so as not to appear out of touch with today's popular culture was annoying beyond compare. Apparently Spectra Lin was today's Cindy Crawford. He could care less.
After the fourth unprompted stop, even he noticed the unusual activity. Compact within the elevator, thoughts of the evening faded into a heightening of attention. A nervous calm of sorts. "Is something wrong?"
He asked.
The CSS Barrier agent answered, "Nothing obvious, sir, but we're rerouting your remaining descent to the stairwell."
Nikolai frowned, and spent the next few moments buttoning his coat in preparation for what might be about to come. Almost simultaneously, he and Alric drew deep upon the power always within reach. Anything from a technical glitch to an outright ambush and they were prepared.
Power more thrilling than any drug coursed his veins. It popped hairs on the back of his neck. It filled his lungs, thicker than the heaviest smoke, but drew upon the source of it until he was just short of having to strain to keep it in control. Nearby, Alric was a shadow of himself, but together the two men wielded enough power to level the city. Which would only be an extended feat of what he'd accomplished only once before. He was fond of Moscow, and would not appreciate being forced to such extreme measures. Then again, he downright loved his Siberian temple home, of which nothing remained but graves, but there were no boundaries when it came to protecting himself.
A CSS agent explored the hallway beyond before signaling it safe to file from the elevator, but before the doors were closed behind them, Alric, quickly followed by the second agent, shoved him back inside. "The second floor sprinkler system just malfunctioned,"
Alric relayed coolly and punched new commands into the elevator control panel. His partner moved Nik to the back corner, drew his firearm, then positioned himself as a human shield between him and the door. "The Knights give three minutes to ALA extraction."
Although a hundred floors overhead, the high-speed elevator would beat his primary helicopter unit, Airlift Alpha, to the helipad on the roof. As Nik watched the digits rise higher and higher, it wasn't the delay that tightened his chest. He'd rather face whatever enemy was sabotaging the building than streak through the sky with nothing but blades to remain airborne. Heights made him extremely uncomfortable.
The Knights kept the ground and motorcade secure meanwhile, but Nikolai had expressly ordered they maintain a low profile to do so. He had not wanted his presence widely advertised, and there was nothing like special forces sweeping every corner to alert the media to his presence. Therefore, there was only one team, himself, a quartet of CSS, and a handful of undercover Directorate Group A men floating around, but even Nikolai was unaware which they were.
The rooftop exit seemed in order. Every architectural detail was illuminated by flattering yet functional lighting. A memory shred a hot sliver through his brain, however, and Nikolai made sure to study what was overhead, but neither man nor beast fell from above. A steel door led out, and all was quiet beyond.
His tactical training kicked in, and Alric fearlessly left to secure the exterior. The body shield that was the second agent ordered Nik to remain behind him and follow close. With the heightened senses, Nik strained to hear anything out of the ordinary, but upon tasting the cold night air, all he heard was the thin howl of the wind. The airspace covering Moscow City was empty but for the far light of ALA's approach a half-mile out.
Upon his exit, Nik hadn't fully secured the door, and when the wind suddenly gusted it open with a bang, the two Barrier agents snapped toward it. Startled by the sound, Nikolai ducked only a few inches, and a sniper's bullet whizzed through the dark above where his temple had been a split-second before.
It planted straight into the skull of his Barrier Agent. The force of the impact flung the man aside and sprayed the side of Nik's face with hot blood.
Nik lunged as shots peppered the cement around him, and thought frantically how to best end this. Shielding himself would not save Alric, nor sate the pulsing need for revenge for this ambush. He had to find the sniper and annihilate him.
Flame and pressure, the toys he could so easily twist underground, exploded from his body in an arc of blue-green light hot enough to incinerate anyone in its path. It trailed black billows like a jet streaking white vapor through the bright sky, and obscured both him and Alric from the assailant's scope.
"Coward! Face me like a man!"
His order went unanswered, but he quickly shifted a few steps away as another shot streaked toward where the sound of his voice had originated. Whoever this was, their mission was to be pursued at all costs. That sounded like only one group of fucking radicals to him. Alric, now at his side, interrupted with a whisper. "They're on the roof. Not in another building."
How he could tell, Nik had no clue.
He sent a second arc of blue-green fire knifing the air but taller and broader this time. With it, he scoured every fucking inch. The helipad, the slopes of the building. Even the spire itself glowed momentarily like a giant lightning rod scalding the heavens. Black mist billowed hellishly. Nikolai's heart pounded betrayal.
A rifle clattered on the cement. But it was a panicked scream that answered success. Through the foggy darkness, a man-sized bonfire suddenly glowed orange. Burning, the assailant ran from his hiding place and into full view. Before he could smother himself, Alric fired three bullets into the man's chest. He dropped, a sickening bonfire, dead, but Alric planted another in his skull anyway.
A snarl of disgust curled Nik's lips. "Put him out."
He ordered, voice numbed of sympathy. Alric put out the flame as he had from himself on the day they met, and quickly ushered Nik from the pad so ALA could land. Knights leaped out, both to fan the perimeter and to get him on board.
The wind from the blades beat the remaining tendrils of smoke from what remained of the sniper's clothes. A quick investigation by the White Knights that jumped onto the scene found the man's discarded gear. Only one Wallet survived the torching, and a minute later it was held up to Nikolai's face while they soared over the city streets toward the Kremlin. The dim light drenched his face in shadow, and the slick liquid of the dead agent's blood colored one temple and drained down his cheek and neck.
It was this face the receiver saw and his voice numbed of emotion the microphone recorded when the feed launched toward its home base. Nikolai knew exactly who would be on the other side. It was time to take a new tactic with his enemies.
"Know this, Holy Regus of the Atharim. I am the worst monster to walk this world, but you will never succeed. I allow you to exist, and do not tempt me to come after you."
He angled the camera toward his forearm, where a rolled-up sleeve revealed bared flesh, and inked therein was the vaguely recognizable shape of eternity itself: a clawed, shredded, and scarred ouroboros.
<small>((Alric written with permission))</small>
His second Wallet buzzed an alert. HQ was looking for an update. He summoned a visual, "Nothing to report yet, sir. The target definitely logged into his unit, but before I arrived, he'd logged back out again."
Rashik moved the device alongside his first Wallet, which was currently being used to hack into the Building's security monitors. The camera he piped to HQ only revealed an empty hallway watching the top floor penthouse. "The log shows his keycode was used to access the top floor. I have to guess he went to the party hosted up there. Records indicate the property is owned by a Privilege."
The man on the other side of the virtual tunnel said to keep him posted. Rashik was about to cut the connection, but movement caught his eye. "Wait."
The penthouse door opened. Out filed the target in the company of a woman. They proceeded out of sight of the camera's angle.
Rashik linked HQ into his earpiece, "Target visualized,"
he said, and hurried to pack up his gear. The voice spoke, "You are authorized to engage at all costs."
Rashik knew what that meant. "Acknowledged,"
he said and muted the link. He couldn't afford to be distracted when facing a god.
The last plug to pull was the Wallet's connection to the security feed. His hand was literally on the port when the door opened again. He hesitated in time to witness the exit of someone he had no idea was barricaded up in there. Palpitations thudded his chest with adrenaline, and all thoughts of the first target dissolved.
He threw himself down once more and rerouted the cameras to the building's first level exits. The feed couldn't load fast enough, but he panned through them all until coming to the exact same entrance he'd used himself to gain access. It was the entrance where building service technicians, janitors, and the like used as a check-in. Ritzy brats couldn't allow themselves to witness the working class coming and going like necessary little bottom-dwellers.
Personnel and black cars waited just outside the door. The Ascendancy's motorcade, small as it was for this obviously impromptu trip, waited out there. Which meant Rashik had to get to him before the man tasted fresh air.
It looked like he had one, two, no three agents, he counted, with him. It was the best opportunity the Atharim ever had to get to the man.
There wasn't time to draft a plan. Which meant Rashik had to go with his gut. The Ascendancy was already on the elevator. He programmed a quick series of unprompted floor stops, often enough to raise CSS's suspicion. They'd move from the elevators to the stairwell, then, to take up alternate emergency routes. In the event of an actual emergency, they'd head for the last point of exit. Rashik would know where. He'd been studying this building for weeks, waiting for Jaxen's return.
His fingers raced a split second behind the gears flying through his head. Hacking into closed circuit security feeds from the server room was no problem at all, but accessing the maintenance and plumbing annual test took longer than he'd like. With a sigh of relief, he programmed the sprinklers to go off on level two, which included the stairwells, for two minutes from now.
He then grabbed his gear and headed for the roof, intending to beat the Ascendancy there.
****
Once himself and the three CSS agents were safely dropping closer to the surface of the Earth, Alric discovered the bag of drugs in his pocket. Although neither witnessed the actual planting, Nikolai knew the culprit nonetheless. A curious thing to attempt something so dangerous. If it was a message, Nikolai would leave it to the more than capable Security Services to decipher it.
After the second stop at floors unpressed by anyone on their side of the elevator and absent of persons on the other side, the agent whom had been posted at the penthouse door called the team on the ground. Nik tuned them out for the standard procedure it was.
It had not escaped his notice that Oriena left with someone else. It was entirely possible that she and young Mister Marveet were a couple faithful to one another, but knowing Scion's honorable examples, Nikolai doubted it.
The departure of other couples signaled the precarious point in the night when inhibitions had been lowered enough to make hasty decisions, but had not yet deteriorated into a haze of meaninglessness. Nikolai refused to objectify himself to the point of wasting his own time any longer and thus was returning to the Kremlin. He sensed the value of his presence decreasing by the minute, and he had won what he had set out to accomplish. Not to mention the performance fatigue nipping at his heels. Pretending, for instance, to recognize some model so as not to appear out of touch with today's popular culture was annoying beyond compare. Apparently Spectra Lin was today's Cindy Crawford. He could care less.
After the fourth unprompted stop, even he noticed the unusual activity. Compact within the elevator, thoughts of the evening faded into a heightening of attention. A nervous calm of sorts. "Is something wrong?"
He asked.
The CSS Barrier agent answered, "Nothing obvious, sir, but we're rerouting your remaining descent to the stairwell."
Nikolai frowned, and spent the next few moments buttoning his coat in preparation for what might be about to come. Almost simultaneously, he and Alric drew deep upon the power always within reach. Anything from a technical glitch to an outright ambush and they were prepared.
Power more thrilling than any drug coursed his veins. It popped hairs on the back of his neck. It filled his lungs, thicker than the heaviest smoke, but drew upon the source of it until he was just short of having to strain to keep it in control. Nearby, Alric was a shadow of himself, but together the two men wielded enough power to level the city. Which would only be an extended feat of what he'd accomplished only once before. He was fond of Moscow, and would not appreciate being forced to such extreme measures. Then again, he downright loved his Siberian temple home, of which nothing remained but graves, but there were no boundaries when it came to protecting himself.
A CSS agent explored the hallway beyond before signaling it safe to file from the elevator, but before the doors were closed behind them, Alric, quickly followed by the second agent, shoved him back inside. "The second floor sprinkler system just malfunctioned,"
Alric relayed coolly and punched new commands into the elevator control panel. His partner moved Nik to the back corner, drew his firearm, then positioned himself as a human shield between him and the door. "The Knights give three minutes to ALA extraction."
Although a hundred floors overhead, the high-speed elevator would beat his primary helicopter unit, Airlift Alpha, to the helipad on the roof. As Nik watched the digits rise higher and higher, it wasn't the delay that tightened his chest. He'd rather face whatever enemy was sabotaging the building than streak through the sky with nothing but blades to remain airborne. Heights made him extremely uncomfortable.
The Knights kept the ground and motorcade secure meanwhile, but Nikolai had expressly ordered they maintain a low profile to do so. He had not wanted his presence widely advertised, and there was nothing like special forces sweeping every corner to alert the media to his presence. Therefore, there was only one team, himself, a quartet of CSS, and a handful of undercover Directorate Group A men floating around, but even Nikolai was unaware which they were.
The rooftop exit seemed in order. Every architectural detail was illuminated by flattering yet functional lighting. A memory shred a hot sliver through his brain, however, and Nikolai made sure to study what was overhead, but neither man nor beast fell from above. A steel door led out, and all was quiet beyond.
His tactical training kicked in, and Alric fearlessly left to secure the exterior. The body shield that was the second agent ordered Nik to remain behind him and follow close. With the heightened senses, Nik strained to hear anything out of the ordinary, but upon tasting the cold night air, all he heard was the thin howl of the wind. The airspace covering Moscow City was empty but for the far light of ALA's approach a half-mile out.
Upon his exit, Nik hadn't fully secured the door, and when the wind suddenly gusted it open with a bang, the two Barrier agents snapped toward it. Startled by the sound, Nikolai ducked only a few inches, and a sniper's bullet whizzed through the dark above where his temple had been a split-second before.
It planted straight into the skull of his Barrier Agent. The force of the impact flung the man aside and sprayed the side of Nik's face with hot blood.
Nik lunged as shots peppered the cement around him, and thought frantically how to best end this. Shielding himself would not save Alric, nor sate the pulsing need for revenge for this ambush. He had to find the sniper and annihilate him.
Flame and pressure, the toys he could so easily twist underground, exploded from his body in an arc of blue-green light hot enough to incinerate anyone in its path. It trailed black billows like a jet streaking white vapor through the bright sky, and obscured both him and Alric from the assailant's scope.
"Coward! Face me like a man!"
His order went unanswered, but he quickly shifted a few steps away as another shot streaked toward where the sound of his voice had originated. Whoever this was, their mission was to be pursued at all costs. That sounded like only one group of fucking radicals to him. Alric, now at his side, interrupted with a whisper. "They're on the roof. Not in another building."
How he could tell, Nik had no clue.
He sent a second arc of blue-green fire knifing the air but taller and broader this time. With it, he scoured every fucking inch. The helipad, the slopes of the building. Even the spire itself glowed momentarily like a giant lightning rod scalding the heavens. Black mist billowed hellishly. Nikolai's heart pounded betrayal.
A rifle clattered on the cement. But it was a panicked scream that answered success. Through the foggy darkness, a man-sized bonfire suddenly glowed orange. Burning, the assailant ran from his hiding place and into full view. Before he could smother himself, Alric fired three bullets into the man's chest. He dropped, a sickening bonfire, dead, but Alric planted another in his skull anyway.
A snarl of disgust curled Nik's lips. "Put him out."
He ordered, voice numbed of sympathy. Alric put out the flame as he had from himself on the day they met, and quickly ushered Nik from the pad so ALA could land. Knights leaped out, both to fan the perimeter and to get him on board.
The wind from the blades beat the remaining tendrils of smoke from what remained of the sniper's clothes. A quick investigation by the White Knights that jumped onto the scene found the man's discarded gear. Only one Wallet survived the torching, and a minute later it was held up to Nikolai's face while they soared over the city streets toward the Kremlin. The dim light drenched his face in shadow, and the slick liquid of the dead agent's blood colored one temple and drained down his cheek and neck.
It was this face the receiver saw and his voice numbed of emotion the microphone recorded when the feed launched toward its home base. Nikolai knew exactly who would be on the other side. It was time to take a new tactic with his enemies.
"Know this, Holy Regus of the Atharim. I am the worst monster to walk this world, but you will never succeed. I allow you to exist, and do not tempt me to come after you."
He angled the camera toward his forearm, where a rolled-up sleeve revealed bared flesh, and inked therein was the vaguely recognizable shape of eternity itself: a clawed, shredded, and scarred ouroboros.
<small>((Alric written with permission))</small>