The Architect Codex

Inferno - Change of Heart

"What do you mean, 'until it was too late'?"

He clenched his jaw tightly, and sat back in his chair once more.

"About seven years ago, there was an attack. I was seventeen at the time, I'd never seen anything like what happened that day before then. A bomb went off in a tram station, a terrorist attack that was intended to kill a high-ranking IMC official in the vicinity. Besides him, the blast killed a lot of people ... my mother included." He crossed his arms. "The Militia claimed responsibility. Called all those innocent deaths, 'collateral damage'."

His two interrogators glanced in one another's direction, seemingly reaching a silent understanding. Gates turned back to him. "Go on."

He exhaled deeply. "Not much else to tell. I had nowhere else to turn, nothing else to lose. I needed a purpose, and I wanted revenge. Joining the IMC offered both. It gave me a chance to establish peace on the frontier, to save others from the same kind of tragedy I went through."

She seemed to process that answer, then grabbed a chair from behind the man and pulled it up to the table before setting herself down in it. "Maybe you still can."

He raised a suspicious eyebrow.

Clasping her hands together and setting them on the table, she leaned in. "I'm sorry for what happened to you, truly. The Militia isn't a group of saints, and I'd be the first to admit it. But I can say with certainty that its end goals are far more justifiable than the IMC."

He snorted derisively. "Yeah, everybody thinks their side is the right one. Of course a Militia captain would-"

"I'm not Militia."

He closed his mouth, and furrowed his brow in confusion.

"Dimitri here and I are both part of a freelance unit called the 6-4," she explained, gesturing towards the man and herself. "Technically, we don't really have a side."

"You're mercenaries," he muttered, "but you fight for the Militia? Why?"

"Because it's right," she said with an air of finality. Looking at Dimitri, she gave a small nod and the man brought out a data-pad which he tossed over to Tobias. Hesitantly, the latter picked it up and examined the screen.

"What is this?"

"What we usually show to people like you, people who think that the IMC have their best interests in mind," she answered vaguely.

He pored over the contents of the tablet before him, namely files upon files of classified data belonging to the IMC. "Where did you get these?"

"Don't act surprised that we've got an inside man, I'm sure the IMC's got one or two as well," Dimitri said with a smirk at Tobias' question. "The point is that you know that these come directly from the ones you've proclaimed as a savior to the frontier. We can argue our case all day, but I think it works better for you to learn it from them."

He couldn't believe his eyes as he searched every line, read every string of words that provided the context for these files. Here was one about a colony on the planet Troy, G21. Everyone had been told that the IMC responded to a Militia presence on the planet, but these files said otherwise; they proved that the IMC had been the instigators, that they'd set Spectres loose on the colony and slaughtered them to test the automatons' capabilities.

There had been rumors of that, but it had always been dismissed as Militia propaganda. He'd never imagined ...

He continued on, noting that some of the colonists had been taken for experimental testing somewhere, the file didn't say. Now they were experimenting on live human subjects? He read past it, swallowing these uncovered secrets with the desperation of a starving man.