Dee grimaced as she and Duffy eased Mordecai down onto one of the double beds their hotel room had before straightening with a sigh.
"This is so not good, Duffy!" she exclaimed tightly, folding her arms beneath her breasts as she stared down at the writhing man in black. "He was the brains behind this operation!"
"While I'll admit that he's played a vital part in our plans, I wouldn't say he was the brains." Duffy frowned as he turned to the bags they had managed to snag from the luggage carousel before the airport was shut down by the screams of sirens and local law enforcement began to swarm all over the terminal. It hadn't taken long for Lash and his vampires to make that mess he had promised.
The old Brit wondered for a brief moment if the Qos Viran had the skills to extricate themselves from the situation they had pushed into for the sake of getting the three of them free. Then he was jerking the nearest one open with a good grip on the zipper.
"I believe we've played roles just as vital to this operation. And we're still in this thing, regardless of what's happened to our big friend." He drew out a number of small cylinders, no bigger than his hand. "We must continue as if Mordecai was still active, or our schedule is going to get blown to hell!"
Dee glanced over at the ex-patriot Brit as he went on to pull several more of Mordecai's toys from the heavy duffel bag that the man in black had carefully packed before the trip. Of course Duffy made a good point and was completely right. It was just that this situation, this plot to attack the Brotherhood in one of their most-well defended strongholds was so ... so crazy that it had her on a major edge.
Abruptly she sighed, letting the tension drain out of her, leaving only grim professionalism behind. While in CSIS they had done things that, in retrospect, were pretty damn crazy too. Why should this be any different? Just because they were going into an unknown situation, facing unknown and probably lethal defensive power, with as yet unidentified numbers, why worry?
Dee almost laughed at that thought. Yeah, why worry? It was a freaking suicide mission to begin with. What was the worst that could happen? They could all get freaking slaughtered!
Oddly enough, that thought in itself was enough to ease the tension that had been building in her neck and shoulders. They were here to do a job and they might as well get it over with. It was time to get this three-ring circus on the road!
"Right," she said briskly as she quickly stepped away from the bed to where Duffy was offloading the equipment from Mordecai's duffel bag. "You getting the probes ready for launch?" At his confirming nod, she scooped up the holographic projector and stepped back to set it onto the floor.
"Alright, I'll get our mapping gear put together, then!"
It took nearly an hour to set up the equipment that Mordecai had made especially for the two law enforcement officers, to utilize outside his own intelligent information systems powered by the pocket A.I. Paladin. Dee found herself thinking that it was a good thing that the man in black had spent long hours hammering into them how to set the equipment up properly and get it functional. Or they would've spent a lot longer than just an hour!
Sitting back from the assembled projector and A.I. unit that comprised the combined data analysis and mapping functions, Dee made sure the power source was hooked up before gently depressing the recessed stud that activated the device. There was a wash of lights across the unit as power swept through it, powering up its various components. Then, with a soft, almost asexual voice, the unit's A.I. spoke.
"Power up complete, Detective McMaster," the tiny voice from a hidden speaker indicated. "And Daedalus is now online! Do you have a task for me, Detective?"
"Stand by, Daedalus," she indicated before looking over at her comrade. "We're up, Duffy."
"Right," Duffy acknowledged as he reached for the nearest of the dozen small lozenge-like cylinders he had unloaded from Mordecai's duffel bag. Picking it up, he gave the top a twist, activating it.
Humming softly, the cylinder began to rapidly transform itself, parts of itself drawing inward and shifting about so quickly that it was difficult to follow. Choosing not to, Duffy flipped the unit through the open window in front of him. And he was quickly rewarded by a low buzz as the unit abruptly climbed past the window and out of sight.
Duffy then sent the rest of the cylinders out the window, twisting each one by its top before tossing it out until the lot of them were launched. As the last one flitted upwards past the window, he looked over his shoulder at Dee.
"Probes are launched, Tragedy," he reported and Dee nodded as she returned her attention to the complicated looking assembly of silvery boxes, rods and smoothly curving half-circles sitting in front of her. Definitely not as sleek as Paladin and the linked units of Mordecai's information system. But it would do them just fine!
"Daedalus, establish an uplink to the probes that Duffy just launched."
"Uplink established, Detective," Daedalus reported in its soft voice. "I'm receiving good telemetry from the probes."
"Good. Begin mapping the city, making note of all psionically active locations."
"Confirmed, Detective. Mapping is commencing, with noted parameters."
Dee nodded once again as she stood, dusting off her pants as she looked over at Duffy with a grin.
"Looks like we're cooking," she indicated before stepping back over to the bed to check on Mordecai. Thankfully the big man had fallen asleep and, from all appearances, it seemed to be a relatively relaxed and restful one as he lay unmoving, his face untouched by pain. They could only hope that when he found consciousness again, he'd be much better.
"Excellent," Duffy said with a smile, turning away from the bag of equipment. "Daedalus should have a completed map in about an hour or so, if I remember Mordecai's instructions correctly."
Dee nodded in acknowledgement.
"Yup, that's what I remember, too. Just enough time to get out and physically reconnoiter our target." She reached into her jacket to give her Shiva sitting in its holster a shake. "According to the map of Toronto I was looking at on the plane, the Sheraton on University and Richmond is only a few blocks from Bay Street. And the BCE Building is at the corner of Bay and Front Street, a handful of blocks south from Richmond and Bay. We could easily walk there in a couple of minutes and have ourselves a look-see."
"A capital idea." Duffy nodded with a smile on his grizzled and jowly face. He pulled his rumpled coat closer about him. "Shall we make like MI-6 and spy the place out, then?"
It was nearly an hour and a half later by the time the two detectives returned to the hotel, the imposing Sheraton a fixture on University as it loomed over the city around it. Riding up in the elevator to their suite, some eleven floors up, they compared notes.
"I didn't realize the place was so damn big!" Dee exclaimed with a shake of her head as the elevator doors opened to spill them out onto their floor.
"Quite impressive," Duffy agreed. "Especially that atrium inside. Did you know that it was built to simulate a whale skeleton? Very grand."
"Very. And with plenty of exits, both by stairs and by elevator. Shouldn't be hard to reach our objective, do what we need to then withdraw in order. As long as the Brotherhood doesn't have the entire place rigged to blow if they get hit."
Duffy frowned as they stepped along the hallway towards their room, the door's card key in his hand.
"A good point. Hopefully the probes will be able to discover that information for us. I would hate to get trapped by something we didn't see coming!" Reaching their door, he swiped the key through the lock slot built onto the door and, as the indicator light went from red to green to indicate that it was now unlocked, he turned the door handle and stepped in.
Only to come up short when he looked in to find himself facing a knot of obviously exhausted and blood-covered vampires. He couldn't stop the trickle of fear and apprehension that went down his spine at the sight of the grim and dark beings as Dee bumped into him from behind, expecting him to step into the room to let her in too.
"Hey, Duffy, what gives?" she muttered in irritation as she looked around the rumpled detective and into the room. And immediately understood as she too caught sight of the tired vampires.
"Ah, never mind," she said almost to herself before speaking up. "Hey, Lash, guys. Welcome to our little headquarters where we plot the next assault against the Brotherhood!" Her smile faded slightly. "Just out of curiosity, how the hell did you guys get in here, anyway? The door was locked."
"Yes, it was," Lash confirmed as he stepped away from his comrades before jerking a thumb towards the window. "But you left the window open. If you want to keep vampires out, you lock everything, not just the door!"
"Uh, good to know," Dee acknowledged with some anxiety, pushing past a reluctant Duffy to step into the room. She was feeling as uneasy about the vampires' sudden arrival as he was but they were allies, damn it. She had to trust them some time! Might as well be now.
"How big of a mess did you make at the airport?"
Lash chuckled as several of his team openly smiled at the question.
"A considerable one," he admitted with satisfaction. "We took out every Brotherhood psionic in the terminal. They'll be picking up the bodies for days!"
"And still you managed to get out before the local law enforcement got there?" Duffy asked in astonishment, finally getting up the nerve to step inside and close the door behind him. Lash nodded as he grinned in Duffy's direction.
"As I said, Duffy, you have to work hard to keep a vampire out. Or in, for that matter. My people are very skilled in finding the way in and out of a supposedly secure location, my team trained even more so." He looked back at his tired, but happy Qos Viran with a nod of silent congratulations and approval. "You humans have yet to build a building that we vampires can't penetrate."
"Ah." Dee smiled thinly. "I'll keep that in mind." Then she was all professional. "In the mean time, we need to focus on our task: the assault on the supposed Brotherhood headquarters in the BCE Building." She jerked a thumb back at Duffy. "We've reconnoitered the target as well as deployed the probes. Why don't your team grab showers while we review what the probes have found? We can also brief you on the information we've reconned up to this point, as well."
Smile fading, as he too became all business, Lash nodded.
"Excellent idea, detective." He turned and issued a quick set of commands in the vampire tongue, which his team scrambled to obey even as he returned his attention to the two humans.
"My team will cycle through the shower then perform a couple of recons themselves, to add more information from other points of view to assist our endeavor."
"Cool." Dee grinned then, speaking a bit louder, she addressed the imaging array that sat waiting on the floor. "Daedalus, download probe data and give us a three dimensional map of Toronto's downtown core, including the target building, with psionic activity indicators mapped over the physical locations."
"Confirmed, Detective," Daedalus' soft voice indicated. "Downloading data now and constructing holographic map on the fly."
In response to Daedalus' voice, the imager flared to create a familiar blue globe of light, its base quickly resolving into a skyline image of the city's downtown core. Dee quickly picked out the twin towers of the BCE Building, the tall CN Tower sitting next to the swollen bulk of the Skydome, the blocky Bank of Montreal building and the clustered skyscrapers of the Toronto Dominion Square. She pulled the names and images from their earlier reconnoiter.
As soon as the buildings resolved, a level of blue light, starting from the globe's top and working its way down in a quick, clean sweep, washed over the buildings, painting several spots with the colors indicating psionic activity. And, with a wave of relief, Dee noted that the activity was mostly concentrated in the top floors of the BCE Building. That confirmed the suspicions they had in Calgary about the Brotherhood having a headquarters there. According to Mordecai's information, such concentration levels of psionic energy could only mean a psionic stronghold. And that logically meant the Brotherhood.
"Well," she noted dryly. "Looks like the Brotherhood has a headquarters here after all! Maybe even the North American headquarters, like Mordecai suspected."
"I would agree with that logic," Lash said with a thoughtful nod. "The Qos Viran have reconnoitered a number of Brotherhood strongholds in Europe and many of them have similar set-ups. All psionics, not just the Brotherhood, always locate places of strength in the high ground, choosing vantage points that enable them to utilize their greater perceptive abilities and far-ranging skills. Tahsis?"
The Qos Viran second in command nodded as he stepped in close from where he had been looking over Lash's shoulder at the holographic map.
"In four separate reconnoiters of Brotherhood targets, we've found that they chose the tops of office buildings, centrally located in an urban setting, as their primary bases of operation," the muscular vampire reported, his voice as smooth and cultured as his commander's. "They construct their base with heavy psionic protection, including an entire floor set aside as a buffer zone to slow any attacking force. However, we also noted that all four targets, London, Paris, Geneva and Brussels, were set up to repel psionic attackers. All things considered, no vampire would be able to penetrate a psionic stronghold anyway, so we can understand why they didn't build to protect against us. But there are a handful of other fringe races that could easily penetrate such a facility, including werewolves."
"The big question is: why haven't they?" Dee mused out loud with a frown as she stared at the map.
"Most likely because psionics have a tendency to keep to their own," Lash pointed out. "Only the Brotherhood, with their program of extermination against my people, have stepped far enough out of the shadows to strike at another fringe race. And, as far as I can tell, they haven't made a significant move against any other race. Considering their numbers and their power, greater than any other fringe race outside of my people, another race would be foolish to attack without some sort of justification. Which, from all our data, the Brotherhood hasn't provided."
"Makes sense," Duffy finally spoke up, pushing his own discomfort aside enough to join the small circle around the map. "They don't want to be fighting a war on several different fronts! Perhaps they took notice of Napoleon's and Hitler's failures in Europe as they attempted to fight a multi-front war. They could just sit back and pick the others off, one by one. United they stand, divided they fall!"
"Starting with the greatest threat!" Lash grimly noted. "My people, the psionics' traditional enemy."
"That would also make sense." Duffy nodded.
"Okay, so we've figured that their defenses are set up to repel a psionic attack." Dee nodded her understanding. "Understandable since they gain most of their power by crushing independents and turning the survivors into slave soldiers. Although, by the sounds of it, it didn't help the Brotherhood in Calgary against Mordecai."
"There's no defense against a man with those sorts of abilities." Lash smiled thinly. "From what the queen told us, none could stand against Mordecai in open combat. Which makes me thankful he never hunted vampires. My people would've been long dead, if he and his comrades had chosen to hunt us instead of protect their precious shield of anonymity!"
"Well, we won't have his lordship's services on this particular operation," Dee observed, the note of sarcasm in her voice bringing smiles all round. She apparently wasn't the only one that had noticed the big man's tendency towards arrogance
"So we'll have to figure out how to get in there by ourselves."
She looked over at Lash's second in command, who was staring at the map thoughtfully.
"You sound like a tactician, Tahsis, one with experience in Brotherhood tactics and strategies. What do you make of the probe data?"
Tahsis looked over at Lash, as if to silently ask if it was all right to speak. At Lash's almost imperceptible nod, he looked back at Dee, his thoughtful expression deepening.
"Well, detective, by the looks of it, the Brotherhood have presented something that we call the core strategy. That is, concentrating the bulk of their forces in a central location, enabling them to tap into a greater resource immediately in the case of an attack. As I said, a sound strategy in the case of a psionic assault, but poorly constructed to hold against a determined mundane force protected against psionic weapons."
Tahsis squatted beside the map, using his finger to point out things that he had noticed in his examination of the probe data.
"Here, it looks like the Brotherhood had failed to account for passages of entry and exit out of the building. According to the probes' data, there are no indications that any psionic traps had been laid anywhere along the path of egress, here, here and here." His finger indicated several corridors and elevator shafts that ran the height of the building. "That means we could both enter and retreat in safety."
Tahsis made a quick gesture, encompassing the entire downtown core.
"And, as I indicated, the Brotherhood is utilizing their core strategy, which also means they're not scattered all over the city core, but are concentrated in one central location. A flaw we have noticed in the past, since scattering assets could provide pockets of resistance to generate reinforcements in the case an initial assault on the primary target got slowed by greater than anticipated resistance by security forces already in place." He paused to look over his shoulder at Lash, Dee and Duffy. "With the right planning, it appears, at first blush, that a surgical strike could conceivably take the Brotherhood headquarters out in one fell stroke!"
Lash, however, was much more pragmatic.
"Core strategy also means they concentrate their soldiers. Which, if these indicators are giving us a look at their actual strength, means they could have quite the security force in place that we'll be forced to face," he noted grimly. "Even if we made it to the objective undetected, we would have to cut our way through that, running the possibility of sustaining heavy casualties, despite our neuron armor and Shiva weaponry. And, unfortunately, it looks like the only way into the Brotherhood offices themselves are through the front door and the fire escape staircase. Both of which have heavy concentrations of psionic energy warding them. And that means a trained and capable mover/ burner force. I'm not sure we have the resources or the manpower to initiate a frontal assault."
"A frontal assault?" Dee sighed softly. Lash was right: there seemed to be only one way in. And that was through the heavy defenses that the probes indicated were obviously in place. How were they going to compensate for that? Surely the Brotherhood would see them coming from a kilometre away and burn them down before they could even knock on the front door.
Suddenly Dee sat back, eyes narrowing in consideration as an idea pushed itself insistently into her mind. Maybe they didn't have to knock at all! Maybe they could just stroll in, untouched!
"Actually," she began, her tone thoughtful. "I think there might be a way that we can get in, without needing to shoot our way through!"