The Dark Edge Chronicles - Hardwire

Chapter 18: The Table Round

Camelot: once the mythical home of King Arthur, the mystical last great king of the Britons, it was now the name for the Avalon nation's advance fire base of operations, where the newest psionic nation would direct their rebellion and counterattack against the Brotherhood. But, from its outside appearance, Camelot didn't even hint of what it hid within its reinforced walls.

From the outside Camelot was a modest sized house in the Northwest residential section of Calgary, with a decent-sized yard, both front and back, the lawns shaded by several medium sized trees planted in aesthetically pleasing locations. But, just like the small farmhouse in the Lyon countryside, the house was a front for a much larger complex buried deep underneath the ground the house sat on.

The house itself, a two story early colonial in brick, with white and green trim, served to house the members of Avalon that were currently on duty at Camelot. Its facilities included five bedrooms up and two bathrooms, with an additional bedroom downstairs. The downstairs floor also included a family room, a living room, a dining room, the kitchen, a den (used as Mordecai's office when he was there) and two more bathrooms, as well as a utility room, a small, compact gym, a pool and a hot tub/sauna in the basement. The tight upper complex also sported a two car garage, with a loft above the garage, as well as a gazebo in the back and balconies off the second story bedrooms.

In terms of protection, the walls were reinforced with the same densified concrete used in the construction of the safe havens and were further strengthened by static psyken grids embedded into the concrete and heavy wards. The windows too had been densified into a completely transparent crystal that was both bulletproof and resistant to psyken and pyroken energies, effective armor against whatever the Brotherhood may throw at them. Further reinforcement with static grids and the whole was a house transformed into a veritable fortress.

And that was just the outside of the building. The inside structure was similarly reinforced and strengthened and was under intense surveillance of key areas from both standard security technology and passive psionic constructs. In addition to static security, active sweeps, keying in on the brain patterns of the people authorized to be in the house, were also used. Mordecai had learned much from his penetration of the Brotherhood facilities, both the one in France and the one here, in Calgary!

Located behind the fake fireplace in the den was the entrance to the extensive, reinforced underground complex, a la the Bat Cave, that was the heart of Camelot. The subterranean complex contained shelters, bunkers for storage, training areas, recreation areas, a power plant, a surveillance center, a small, but amazingly ell equipped medical bay, a mess hall and other areas and equipment essential for a covert base to remain operational.

The whole of it stretched nearly a full kilometer away from the central entry shaft beneath the house, a vast array of chambers that resembled the greatest of any underground military construction of the reigning world powers. It was from this place that Avalon would fight its war and so it had to be properly equipped.

Melanie frowned as she gazed at the Mordecai-designed surveillance screens, utilizing lone gunmen technology, the screens filling the surveillance room affectionately known as the Peep Hole. Each screen was connected to a series of monitors, both psionic and standard, that were scattered all over the world for the purpose of tracking Brotherhood activity.

These, in turn, were linked to a massive supercomputer lone gunman A.I. buried in the heart of Camelot's underground complex where it coordinated not only surveillance, but every other activity that kept Camelot alive. The A.I. was known as Merlin, in keeping with Avalon's general theme. And the particular screen that the British-born blonde beauty was watching was currently locked onto the ESET Mindfire's location.