Lash made the silent signal to resume their advance. Mordecai was right. He needed to see Romanescu's extraction so he would be aware that the traitor was once again on the loose.
Oddly the revelation did little more than slightly annoy him. Yes, it was nice to have the Qos Viran-turned-slaver under boot in that holding cell after all they had gone through to capture him.
But now he was being brought here, likely to serve as Demaskieros' protection. Which meant Lash had the chance to face him in combat. Where he fully intended on killing the traitorous filth with his bare hands! The only fitting end for Romanescu, and justice and vengeance both would be satisfied.
A glance up at the wall at the expected interval found the Qos Viran glyph there. According to the embedded information it contained, they had successfully traversed the better part of the passage under the hills and were inside the city's perimeter. Where they now had to watch for Hand patrols.
Easing forward, Lash switched his display to pick up both movement and air displacement. If he had learned anything from fighting the Hand over the last few weeks, it was that they always struck from stealth. And that stealth could be defeated by displacement and motion.
He smiled tightly as his display promptly painted a Hand position in front of them, shivers in the air telling of their moving around before abruptly freezing when his team came into view. He then used a hand in the small of his back to tell his team numbers and location out of sight of the guard post.
A quick countdown then he, Tanis, and Truk simultaneously opened fire. Superheated ceramic hissed almost silently through the heavy air and as one the guards faded into sighted as they toppled over, throwing their stealth cloaks into disarray.
"Every junction from here will be guarded," he turned to say in a low voice. "Switch to motion and displacement on your detectors to spot the Hand in stealth, waiting to ambush or moving to let us go by before stabbing us in the back. We are moving forward!"
With that, he turned back to the path and with his Kali up and ready, he moved forward. Stepping over the dead Hand agents, he was content to leave them where they had fallen. They were a message to any patrols moving through the corridors between the perimeter and the Nocturnum that they were now the hunted.
A handful of steps down the passageway beyond the guard post and Lash was looking at the first patrol they would encounter, an entire squad moving carefully under cloak towards them. Again his hand went into the small of his back to give commands out of sight.
This time he matched the patrol squad one for one with his first squad. A quick countdown and his squad was stepping into a firing line to cut the patrol down with a single volley.
Again Lash moved them quickly past the downed Hand agents. Each sported holes in their heads; there was zero risk of them somehow surviving the assault to rise and attack them from behind. Because of that, they rated no further attention.
Moving more quickly now that they had started taking contact, the Wolfpack slid through two more junctions before coming up against their next guard post. Wanting all his assets to get in live fire before the anticipated running gun battle through the Nocturnum that faced them, Lash rotated his second squad to the front and had them eliminate the guards.
It was a pattern they repeated several more times before a change in the marker glyph pulled Lash up short. Holding up a fist to bring his company to a halt, he summoned a holographic map of the Nocturnum over his wrist control. He then fed in their location and nodded in satisfaction to see they were, indeed, now on the fortress's lowest level.
Plucking a tactical drone off his hip, he tapped it against his wrist control panel to activate it. A dance of his fingers over the interface switched its cameras to motion and displacement and activated its small IR projector. Small, but sufficiently bright that he'd be able to get a good visual feed into his HUD. He then set its distance from home to target to give his unit a good buffer space between whatever the drone ran into, and themselves. That done, he tossed it into the space immediately in front of them.
Sensing that it was airborne, the drone kicked on its quad flight rotors with a nearly silent hum, oriented itself then zoomed ahead to establish the buffer space. At the same time Lash's HUD split to give him a visual of what the drone's cameras were seeing.
According to the map, the lowest level was nothing more than a vast empty space filled with bulk storage, mothballed equipment, and obsolete vehicles. Every time Lash had passed through it before, it had been virtually unguarded. However, now that they had taken contact from the Hand, there was an excellent chance that one of them squawked on their emergency coms channel that the fortress had been penetrated from the secret passages at the bottom. He fully expected the storage space to be crawling with not only Hand agents, but White Flame operators as well.
A look at his chrono allowed him to make a guess on where Narya's Force Recon would be in the implementation of their own penetration from the roof. The plan had them using maintenance corridors to put them into the space above the fortress that was riddled with air shafts, heat exchangers, and humidity traps. Once they got into the maintenance cluster that serviced the castle, they would rappel down to the roof and begin their egress.
If everything was going according to plan, they should be in position to begin their rappelling down to the roof in approximately ten minutes. A quick assault on the roof gunnery and missile positions to eliminate their threat against the NightHawks Darktower intended on bringing into Varos airspace after blowing through the gates, then they would be drilling down into the castle to double the threat against the occupants and half the efforts of the garrison attempting to repel them.
As the rest of the platoon gathered around him, Lash watched the drone scan through the first few meters of the basement storage space. And he let a snort go at seeing the space was literally crawling with Hand agents under cover of their stealth cloaks, as expected. One-trick ponies that couldn't think out of the box, even when faced with extinction. Which was fine by him; just made it easier to anticipate their next move, and slaughter them without mercy in the counterattack.
A wave brought his map back out even as he gestured for his lieutenants and Tanis to gather close. A tap on his wrist unit and the drone's data was populating the bottom level of the image.
"Force Recon will be on the roof in less than ten minutes," he said in a low voice, looking at the helmets grouped around him. "That'll pull some of the garrison out of our way so we can go straight for the throat. But we have two options here: fight our way through. Or avoid as much as we can so we don't burn as much time killing low level rats and having more time to hunt high level traitors."
"Avoidance works for me," Tanis said.
"Me too, boss," Fordricht said. "I know we need to kill all of these pieces of shit at some point, but they're deliberately bunching in an attempt to slow us down so their White Flame reinforcements will have time to get down here."
"I'm with Ford and Tanis, mon amie," Ballan indicated. "I'd rather slip through than hammer through. Especially since we'll be fighting in narrow corridors between mothballed equipment and vehicles. Plenty of cover, but plenty of places for those backstabbers to scratch one of us with those daggers of theirs."
Lash looked over at Truk, who nodded.
"Whatever you want to do, Wolf, you know I'm down for," the veteran nestari said.
The big vampire nodded thoughtfully as he took a second or two to consider which path they would take for either option.
"We slip," he said. "We'll hunt down these rats later. We need to get to Demaskieros as quickly as we can." 'Before Romanescu and his Qos Viran traitors get here and whisk him away!' he silently added.
A wave dismissed the map. Then he was moving through the door and into the actual Nocturnam itself.
The drone quickly became even more useful as its silent hum above the heads of the crouching Hand agents mapped out their locations and the size of their squads. And a corridor that swung around the outside of the basement space that avoided most of them.
A hard left was quickly followed by an equally hard right and the big vampire was sliding into a tight corridor between armored SUVs. Then, without warning, he was abandoning his tactical crouch and shuffle to run full speed down the narrow passageway, feeling the fabric of his clothing brush vehicles on either side as he went in testament to just how close the quarters were.
Thankfully Tanis and his spies, along with the Wolfpack, had been watching for a sudden move like that. So, when he took off, they were quick to follow, running as hard as they could through the space.
With an eye on the drone's feed, Lash saw that the sudden move caught the gathered Hand agents by surprise, freezing them in place with surprise. Which, in turn, allowed the company to pass untouched through their midst, the passageway he had selected to run down too far from any of their positions for them to make their characteristic melee-style attacks with their radioactive knives. So either they broke with their own behavioral habits and toss their cloaks aside to attack with firearms. Or they cowered in place, unable to act as the Wolfpack ran beyond their reach.
Then Lash was at the other side of the broad chamber. A hard right, a wave to send the drone through the door in the far corner and Lash was plucking a flash bang grenade off his belt to toss it into the space beyond.
The bang echoed and reverberated through the space. Then Lash was through, his Kali knocking down the handful of enemy agents that had set up in an attempt to hold the staircase.
As soon as the last one was down, he twisted back to give cover to the rest of his company as they scampered through the intervening space, his Kali cutting down a number of Hand agents that were both closer, and more bold than their comrades and had made a move to reinforce the staircase. Then Ballan, who was their rearguard, was slipping past him and he tossed a fragmentation grenade into the space basically at the feet of more agents rushing forward and nodded in satisfaction when it ripped them into so many bloody chunks of meat and fabric.
"Up!" he tautly directed. "Truk, you're on point!"
"Copy," the veteran warrior replied and he immediately began to climb.
The map had the next floor filled with holding cells, interrogation rooms, and medical quarters to revive and repair damaged prisoners long enough to extract more information out of them. It was also expected; every major vampire holding had a dungeon. It was a standard part of the construction.
As such, it would normally be crawling with guards, much like the holding cells back at Hunter's Fjord were. However, with the traitor making sure their enemies were dead outright, there was very little chance those cells would have a single occupant. Which should translate into no guards.
That being said, logic said it would be crawling with more Hand. If a basement storage area was heavily guarded, a dungeon level would be as well. At least the traitor didn't have the time to fill the cells with bogus prisoners that would try to distract and delay the Wolf Pack as they passed through by claiming to be Ventru taken in the pogrom.
"Wolf, Truk," a soft voice said into his ear.
"Truk, Wolf, go," he replied as the last of his company began the ascent.
"Dungeon level. Cheek to cheek," Truk tersely reported.
"Copy. Where's my drone?"
"Right beside me. Must be at the end of its buffer space," Truk indicated.
"Deploy yours. We need to see how those Hand filth are positioned," Lash directed as he knelt and began tucking more frag grenades under the Hand bodies that liberally littered the bottom of the stairwell, activated and pressure sensors set to instantly trigger as soon as the pressure against them disappeared. If the agents in the storage space got it into their heads to follow, but decided to check on their fallen before going up the stairs, they'd be properly rewarded.
That done, Lash flew up the stairs as quickly as his booted feet could carry him. He didn't want to be in the blast radius when those grenades went off. And in doing so, he moved fast enough that he reached the landing leading into the dungeon level where the rest of his company had gathered before they began going off.
"Nice touch, boss," Fordricht said as he and Lash looked down the staircase to see the bottom now filled with smoke and debris.
"Serves them right for sneaking around like they do," Morel added from where she stood nearby.
Lash returned Morel's quick fist bump as a way of agreeing with her. Then he slipped through the company to join Truk at the door. Seeing him, Truk stepped back and clear of the door to tap his wrist unit. That brought up the results of his drone's scan.
"Clustered," Truk noted as the broad, rectangular space was marked by large spots of red. "No clear lines of egress like we had in the basement."
"Understood. We need to tactically strike at certain clusters to manufacture a corridor. Once we get up onto the next level, which is filled with the fortress's electronics and server farms, we can initiate our electronics counter package."