Path of Transcendence Omnibus II, page 57
Special Agent Jones reveals a faint smirk. "Those faggots pretending to be soldiers were giving them a wide berth. They seem to be scared half to death by those Draugr."
"Can you obtain or draw an accurate floor plan or layout for this missile base?"
Special Agent Jones frowns for a moment before nodding. "Maybe, but I'm not sure I can do it without setting off alarms."
I look at Dacbold. "Can you keep an eye on him for a few days, and give him a hand searching, using Delphi?"
Dacbold grins. "Sure. You don't mind hanging out with me, do you, Clarence?"
"You keep calling me Clarence, and once these chains are off, I'll knock that smirk right off your face."
Dacbold snickers and displays a grin that would make a clown envious. Moving to where Special Agent Jones is chained, Dacbold puts his foot on one of the chains, and bending down, he takes a firm grip and straightens up.
Screech! Snap!
Dacbold casually drops the end of the chain that is still attached to Special Agent Jones ankle. "I told you, I'm not the human I once was, anymore. I am a Dvergar now. You can think of me as superhuman."
With his eyes wide open and visible shock, Special Agent Jones stares at the torn chain. "How strong was that chain?"
Dacbold shrugs. "It could've held 10,000 or 12,000 lbs. It's not anything special as far as steel chain goes."
Dacbold has become stronger than I had realized. If he can tear a chain that can hold 12,000 lbs., he could probably lift a similar amount over his head. Among the players caught in the Great Fuck Over, the average Combat Adept types could have lifted around five to eight hundred pounds over their heads. For the strongest ones, they were probably pushing fifteen hundred pounds, maybe a little more.
Since returning to the Battleground of the Damned in my real body, my own strength has been growing radically with my increase in mass and physical bulk. Right now, I would guess that I would be capable of doing the same with about five thousand pounds, or so.
Special Agent Jones levels his stare on Dacbold. "You still haven't told me who you were when you were human."
"Michael Kowalski. Major, United States Army Corps of Engineers."
Special Agent Jones squints. "Girishk, the winter of '37."
Dacbold nods. "Yep, that was the first time we met."
Leaving Special Agent Jones in Dacbold's care, I return to the office I have been using. Most of the searches that I had Delphi running are complete, and I bring up the location of Thorrin's MTVR. It disappeared after leaving a mansion outside of Phoenix, Arizona that is registered as being the property of a Consuela Alvarez. Considering the kind of money that people living in that neighborhood have, the house having no connections to the normal social camera network is not surprising, but that is no bar to Delphi's monitoring. Unfortunately, while I can access several devices with cameras, there is no stored footage on any of them, and the mansion is currently unoccupied.
I set up a search routine to attempt to track it based on traffic patterns, but I am not holding too much hope for success. There are too many roads in that part of the country that have minimal amounts of traffic.
I also start new searches centered on the Five Families. There seem to be a lot more people who may be aware of Taereun on Earth than I had once thought. Just how extensive are the networks of people who were aware of the self-proclaimed gods of Taereun?
The volume of data related to the US government and its possible connections to Woden's followers is massive. After looking through it for several hours, I come to the conclusion that I cannot be certain of what parts of the government are under their control and what parts are not. The only thing that I can be certain of is that there appear to be several factions fighting over control of the United States government. There are three fairly clear agendas that seem to unite different government bureaucracies and the politicians that support them. There is also possibly a fourth faction at work, but its apparent operations are so shadowy that it is hard to tell if there is any coordinated control behind them.
Woden's followers are obviously in control of the FBI, but the majority of the FBI employees appear to be in the dark about who is really in charge. The Special Agent Jones pair were apparently in the dark right up until they came face-to-face with Woden's followers in South Dakota. In a more general sense, they seem to be using the Department of Homeland Security to further their agenda. Their control also appears to extend to all four branches of the military, at least what little remains of them.
The second faction seems to be using the Department of Health and Human Services as its power base. On the surface, they are reliant on the welfare state for their power, but the truth should be more along the lines of their manipulating the poorest and least educated segments of American society.
The only obvious points of control for the third faction are the IRS and the Federal Reserve. At first glance, this faction would appear to be in the weakest position, but on Earth, those who control the money control the society.
The big question is which of these two other factions does Mikumi belong to?
A soft beep from the computer terminal alerts me that Delphi has completed one of the search routines. When I check, it is the first phase of my searches into the Five Families. After making a cursory scan of the information, I smile.
The Five Families are apparently working for all three of the obvious factions and probably have ties to that shadowy fourth faction. They do not appear to have any ideologies or loyalties to anyone. As long as they can make money, they will whore themselves out to anyone. I suppose when you come right down to it, there is no difference between a con man or a fence in the back alleys of the cities in the Battleground of the Damned and the highest echelons of the elite businessmen here on Earth. In the end, the only thing they care about is lining their pockets, and they will fuck over anyone and everyone to do it.
I am not sure if any of this information is useful, and I send it all to a Delphi connected tablet that Dacbold is using. He knows a lot more about the politics and history of America than I do. Maybe, he will be able to make something of it. I include what I could track down regarding Thorrin, as well.
Mixed in with the data related to the military, there are documents relating to the sale of the Iowa, the New Jersey, the Gerald R. Ford, and some thirty other smaller ships to the nation of Iran. Other than Iran being an Islamic nation, there was never much taught about it in my high school and college social awareness classes. With his background, Dacbold might be able to shed some light on why a ship sold to Iran would wind up in the Battleground of the Damned.
*** Central California – Earth ***
Return: Day 346
August 9, 2078
(Brand)
The sound of a bell ringing in my ears wakes me up. I turn my head to the side, and a pair of eyes the color of honey Amber meet my own. Elan's head still rests on my arm, which she was using for a pillow, but the alarm from her wards has already awoken her as well.
Elan closes her eyes momentarily and frowns. "They are trying to be subtle and come in from the roof. There are only two of them, but their spells are preventing me from gleaning any further information."
"I'll deal with them. How accurately can you track their position?"
"If I do not run around, I can monitor their location to within a hair's breadth of their actual position."
I rise from our bed without waking Angelique. In near silence, I don on my armor and strap on my weapon harness.
Based on Elan's report of the intruders' positions, I exit the building through a door more than a hundred yards away from their current location. It is extremely unlikely that they will have heard the door open and close.
As I slip into the Shadow of the Od, the pain that hits me is even more intense. I do not know what is wrong with me, and I do not have the leisure to try and figure it out. With my jaws clamped firmly together, I swiftly and silently ascend the side of the building. As I slip over the low wall surrounding the roof, I duck into the shadows cast by one of the HVAC units.
*They are to the west from your position and moving in a zigzagging pattern away from you. Every … two or three … yards they stop and use Power to do something. I do not think it is a spell. It is probably something more like an Adept's ability.*
I move toward the west, but as I close the distance with the intruders, I do not see anything.
*You are less than twenty yards from the nearest one. He is directly in front of that large AC unit to the left of your path of travel.*
Where Elan said the intruder is, nothing is visible.
Steel is pain. Steel is cruelty. I activate my pattern sight spell, but I still do not see anything.
*I cannot see them. Even using pattern sight, there's nothing there.*
There is a momentary silence on our whisper channel. *If I try using any other spells, I will probably alert them. You are a Smith. Do you know any spells to see heat?*
Beneath my helm, an involuntary frown turns the corners of my lips downward. *I know a few spells for detecting and seeing temperature, but I'm not sure how effective they will be with temperatures at this low of a level.*
The spell I choose is one that gives vision in the infrared spectrum. Because I tend to judge the temperature of metals based on their color in the visible light spectrum, it is not a spell that I normally use. It takes me longer to cast it than my pattern sight spell, and the pain from channeling my Power makes it feel like my Body, Mind, and Soul were being crushed together.
As the spell affects my eyes, my view of the world changes to a gradient of blues. Like I expected, the spell is not well-suited to the low-level temperatures of the world around me. Other than the active HVAC units, there is barely enough of a differential in the ambient temperatures to allow me to see the surfaces and outlines of the equipment on the roof, but it does reveal a very faint darker blue roughly human shape by the HVAC units.
*The spell sucks for how I'm using it, but I can vaguely see one of them. I'm trying to find the other one.*
Because I keep checking the position of the first intruder, it takes me five or six seconds to locate the second one. With the limitations of my infrared vision spell, I cannot tell how they are dressed or armed.
As I draw my swords, the nearer intruder spins around with his arms moving as though he is drawing a bow. As I charge forward at an angle, he tracks my movement and releases.
The instant the arrow clears the bow, overlaid against the blue scale of my infrared vision, its pattern becomes visible. While it is moving several times faster than a bullet from a handgun, with my blades in hand, I only need a flick of my wrist to deflect it.
The archer springs backward. The arrow he releases in midair is perfectly timed to synchronize with that fired by the second intruder, but I still easily knocked them both out of the air. Despite their attacks, their invisibility is not broken, and they remain nothing but darker blue patches against the background of the active HVAC equipment. If the archers move where there is nothing putting out higher heat to silhouette them, I might lose sight of them
With his jump covering more than 20 yards, the first intruder lands on top of another of the large HVAC units. As the first intruder lands, the second one makes a leap of his own, and they both fire another pair of arrows at me.
Ducking low, I charge after them and deflect the arrows with roof blocks from both of my blades. The force of the unexpected explosions slams me onto my belly on the roof, and I sloppily roll into cover behind another piece of equipment.
To my surprise, no further arrows come at me, and I scramble into a crouching position to scan the rooftop. Neither of the archers are in my line of vision.
*Elan?*
Irritation fills my whisper channel with Elan. *They both jumped straight up, above the level of my wards, and I lost track of them. I do not know what they did or what happened to them.*
I spend another thirty minutes searching the roof and the surrounding ground and buildings, but I cannot find any trace of the two intruders. I do find two of the arrows that were fired at me, and they match the ones used on Dacbold and myself.
*As near as I can tell, they're gone. This makes no sense. What the fuck were they after? Why did they try to break in? How did they go invisible to your wards? If they had a way to be undetectable to the wards you're using, why didn't they use it in the first place?*
Elan's irritation fills the whisper channel. *What I am more interested in is how they are becoming completely invisible to my spells. The way I warded this building, there are not many ways I know to hide from detection, and all of them are extremely Power intensive to use. Whoever those two intruders may be, they are extremely adept at stealth techniques.*
After warning Dacbold and Valcrit about the intruders, I return to bed, but I do not sleep. I spend the remainder of the night staring at the ceiling tiles and thinking about all the enemies I have faced over the decades. In the Battleground of the Damned and the Lands of Despair, there were no lack of people with extremely strong stealth abilities and spells, but nothing that I have encountered is on the level of those two intruders. Even, a better form of infrared vision would only be useful at night. During the day, there would be too much interference from the sunlight, and everything would be a blur in the infrared spectrum.
* * * * *
*That human has the soul of the killer and deeply buried pain. I am surprised by how much his aura resembles your own. It seems that there are others, beside yourself, on this Earth that are not mindless sheep.* As she observes Special Agent Jones from the corner of her eye, Elan has what could almost pass for a smile.
My party is gathered in the conference room for breakfast, and today, Special Agent Jones has joined the group.
Dacbold raises his eyes from the tablet on the table in front of him and looks at me. "I never thought about it, but if Woden is really the god of conquest and subterfuge, him being Allah is easy to see."
I do not hide my confusion at Dacbold's words. "I don't get your reasoning. Islam is a religion of peace, so why would a god of conquest and subterfuge be behind it?"
Dacbold and Special Agent Jones look at each other, and Special Agent Jones has a disgusted look on his face. "For someone with a low genius IQ, he can really be stupid sometimes."
Dacbold's face shifts into an expressionless mask. "Modern education."
Special Agent Jones snorts and looks away. "We should just kill all the teachers and university professors. It would help clean up America."
"It wouldn't be enough."
Looking back at Dacbold, Special Agent Jones glares. Though, for him, a glare is pretty much his normal way of looking at someone. "It would make me feel better."
I am a little surprised at how well the pair of them are getting along. They almost seem like a pair of long-lost brothers that have been reunited.
"What am I missing?"
Considering the anger radiating from him like the heat of a forge, I'm not certain what to make of Special Agent Jones' laugh.
Dacbold frowns. "You teachers and the media have been lying to you for your entire life. The only peace that Islam offers to a nonbeliever is the peace of the grave. Even compared with the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages, Islam is far and away one of the most violent and antagonistic religions ever conceived. The Aztecs would've probably given them a run for their money but I can't really think of anyone else that would."
"I still don't get it. I know America spent sixty years trying to conquer the Mideast, but everything we were taught in social awareness portrayed America as the aggressor."
Special Agent Jones snorts. "You don't know shit about Islam, and you don't know shit about the Mideast. You never had boots on the ground over there. Their whole religion is based on killing the unbelievers, and anything goes as long as it promotes the spread of Islam."
Dacbold turns his eyes back to the tablet computer in front of him. "Islam has a practice called taqiya. It was defined as the principle of practicing the dissimulation of outward conformity permitted Muslims in a hostile or persecuting non-Muslim environment for the sake of their personal safety. At least, that was the Webster's definition for it. When you deal with them, you learn that it means if you're not a towel head in the same sect as they are they will lie to your face and stab you in the back.
"Before I joined the Army, I went to college. I had a friend in my university engineering department. At least, I thought he was a friend. He was an Islamic. He was Indian not a camel fucker, but I learned the hard way, an Islamic is an Islamic. We went to the same classes, hung out, played sports and computer games together, chased skirts together, pretty much all the things you would do with a friend. Then, near graduation, out of the blue, the guy looks me straight in the eye and tells me that because I do not worship Allah I deserve to be killed. I'll never forget the way he looked at me and the cold, murderous hatred in his eyes. He was never really my friend. It was all just make-believe because he was living among unbelievers. That's a form of taqiya."
Dacbold sighs. "After I was deployed in Afghanistan, I saw what taqiya really was. They would tell you one thing to your face, and behind your back, they would be trying to rob you blind or kill you. It was the same thing happening over and over, but for them, there was nothing wrong with what they were doing because we're unbelievers."
Special Agent Jones turns his glare and my direction. "I've never been a genius, but I've always learned about my enemy. Both inside American borders and around the world, I spent a lot of years hunting down towel head terrorists. While I was on stakeouts in shit-holes you've never heard of, I started reading the Islamic Quran, hadith, and sira.
"In the Quran, chapter 3, verse 28 says, 'Let not believers take disbelievers as allies rather than believers. And whoever does that has nothing with Allah, except when taking precaution against them in prudence. And Allah warns you of Himself, and to Allah is the destination.' It would've been a sin against Allah to be real friends with a nonbeliever."
