Chương 192: Dead Hours

Four days had passed since the first arbitration session. Alexander stood in the doorway of the balcony, watching Dubai burn against the dark. The city never really slept, but at two in the morning it came close. The Burj Khalifa's light show had ended hours ago, leaving the tower a dark needle against the sky, and the highways far below had thinned to scattered headlights tracing slow arcs through the city grid.

Somewhere out there, away from the coastal glow and the last fringes of development, the Empty Quarter waited. Dark and vast and cold at this hour, nothing but sand and silence for hundreds of miles. He was already dressed for it. Layered thermals under a long-sleeved tactical shirt in muted grey, loose cargo pants in desert khaki, a shemagh around his neck that could be pulled up to cover his face. All of it chosen to look like casual warm clothing to anyone watching through the hotel's glass. Which people were.

The ESA still had eyes on Grimnir's suite, and the holographic projections Droney was maintaining showed Alexander Rooke standing at his bedroom balcony in comfortable clothes, gazing out at the city the way a restless man might at two in the morning. Nothing suspicious about that. And probably not even worth the effort. He couldn't remember the last time he'd felt real cold.

He turned from the balcony and crossed into the suite's main room, reaching out with a flicker of Metallokinesis as he passed through the doorway. His breastplate lifted from the chair where he'd left it, drifting through the air and settling against his chest with the ease of something that had been done a hundred times. The familiar straps tightened as he walked, cinching into place with small, precise pulses of power, the dark metal fitting comfortably to the shape of his torso.

By the time he reached the couch, it was seated and secure. The curtains in the living room were drawn. Had been since midnight. No line of sight from neighboring buildings, no angle for surveillance, though Droney's illusions continued regardless. Could never be too careful. His gauntlet sat on the couch cushion, waiting. He picked it up, turned it over once in his hands, and slid it onto his right arm. The metal had long since lost its original sheen, worn dull from repeated use.

Faint scratches laced the plating where impacts had been taken by armor and kinetic absorption systems, and the joints had developed the kind of smooth, silent action that only came from thousands of repetitions. Then, almost without thinking, he checked his left hand. Both rings were there, sitting on the middle finger of the cybernetic hand where they belonged. His boots were already on.

Overlapping metal plates for mobility, heavier than anything practical for the desert, but he'd worn them through everything else so far. He sat on the arm of the couch and let his mind run back over the week. Jasmine had taken learning about the end of the world pretty well, all things considered. Barely needed three drinks to wash it down.

She'd asked sharp, focused questions for an hour, processed the answers with the same efficiency she brought to contract law, and then taken up residence in the room next door to work. The next morning, she'd walked into the mediation room and picked up exactly where she'd left off, firing on all cylinders as though the apocalypse was just another variable to factor into her negotiation strategy. Every day since had been more of the same.

Jasmine and Brandt fighting for ground across the table, trading concessions large and small, arguing over definitions and jurisdictional language and liability frameworks while Alexander and Maximilian mostly sat in silence. Occasionally one of them would adjust the heading when the lawyers drifted too far into the weeds, but for the most part, the real work belonged to Jasmine and Brandt. Alexander was both deeply impressed by her performance and quietly miserable about having to sit through it.

There'd been no reports from Frank and the rest of the team at the Ascension Oasis. That was supposed to be good news. Frank would have reached out if something had gone wrong at the resort, and radio silence meant the treatment was proceeding without complications. Alexander hoped so, because what Augustus, Annie, Felix, and Talia had uncovered over the past week made the Oasis a far more complicated situation than a luxury medical retreat. They'd been running operations every night since arriving.

Heading out after dark, hitting militia positions across the northern fringe of the Empty Quarter, gathering intelligence, and coming back before dawn to sleep through the day. Each night brought them deeper into the desert, and each night the picture got worse. The serum these militia groups were using had to come from somewhere, and the evidence trail led straight back to the Ascension Oasis. It had AEGIS written all over it.

The operational fingerprints belonged to STEPS, technically, but with that branch of the government's superhuman management triad shuttered and absorbed into AEGIS, the distinction was meaningless. Same people. Same methods. Different letterhead. Tonight was different from the previous raids. Tonight was the main camp. A soft beep pulled him out of his thoughts. Droney hovered nearby, visor light pulsing in a pattern Alexander had long ago learned to read as mild protest.

"I know, buddy." He reached out and rested his hand on the drone's chassis for a moment.

"But I need you here managing the illusion. If the ESA checks in and the suite looks empty, we've got a whole different set of problems." He gave the metal shell a light pat.

"This shouldn't take too long." In the living room, the air began to shimmer. A few minutes later, the portal snapped into place in the center of the living room, a vertical disc of black so absolute it looked like a hole cut into the world. Augustus's portals never showed the other side. Just that flat, featureless dark, offering nothing but trust as a reason to step through. Alexander studied it for a moment.

One of these days, he was going to walk into one of these things on faith and come out somewhere he really didn't want to be. He'd been meaning to build something that could distinguish Augustus's portals from anyone else's, but it kept sliding down the priority list in favor of things that were actively trying to kill him. Cycling Electrokinesis into his Core and throughout his body, he grinned to himself and stepped through. Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

Cold hit him first. The dry, still chill of open desert in the dead hours, at least ten degrees below what Dubai's climate-controlled towers had to offer. Sand shifted under his boots. Wind brushed across his face. Still, not uncomfortable like it should be. His senses erupted outward on instinct, sweeping the landscape in every direction before his eyes had fully adjusted. The camp registered first. A dense cluster of electronics, vehicles, generators, and communications equipment a short distance to the south.

Weapons systems. Fuel cells. The electromagnetic noise of a small military installation trying to stay awake. Hundreds of bioelectrical signatures, most of them dim with sleep but enough still active to suggest a camp that knew something was wrong. And threaded through the rest, nine signatures that burned brighter than the others. Superhumans. Above it all, a single bird wheeled in slow, lazy circles under the stars. Closer in, familiar signals.

Dozens of his own drones were already deployed in a loose perimeter around their position, with the holo units projecting camouflage across the dune. His best attempt at invisibility, bending light around a position to match the surrounding terrain. It wouldn't fool a telepath or a thermal scanner, but against conventional optics it was surprisingly effective. The team's SUV was parked just below the ridge, tucked into the lee of the dune. Annie was seated on the hood, legs swinging.

She hopped off when he appeared.

"Finally," she said, keeping her voice low despite the obvious irritation.

"Can we get to the fun part now?" She was quieter than usual. Which meant that Augustus had impressed upon her exactly how far sound carried across open sand at night. Augustus himself stood a few meters away, a pair of binoculars raised toward the distant glow of the camp. He lowered them just long enough to exchange a nod with Alexander, then returned to his observation. Alexander crossed the sand to stand beside him. Augustus offered the binoculars without looking away from the horizon.

Alexander waved them off and reached into one of his surveillance drones instead, settling into its feed without overriding Talia's control. He could feel her guiding them in real time, smooth and practiced after days of running the network. She'd kept them high and distant, some high overhead, others tucked along the ridges of dunes and the faces of rock formations. Smart. Well outside visual detection range while their lenses did the heavy lifting.

He flipped between feeds, building a composite picture from multiple angles. At the same time, he accepted the invitation to the active group call the team had been running using the System all week. The connection slotted into place in his mind with an ease that was almost irritating. Neural comms had been one thing. This remained something else entirely. Seamless, perfectly clear, zero latency regardless of distance.

He'd been using the System's communication features more and more lately, and he was uncomfortably aware of how natural it had started to feel. But that's how they get you. He subvocalized into the channel.

"Tell me what I'm looking at." Augustus answered first, his voice low and steady beside him, the subvocalization barely a murmur.

"Main operating base. Square layout, roughly two hundred meters on each side. Whoever designed it had training. It's organized into four quadrants with a central command structure." Through the drone feeds, Alexander could see it laid out beneath him like a dim, flickering grid. Rows of tents in desert camouflage, interspersed with prefab structures, the flat-packed kind that could be assembled in minutes and broken down just as fast.

Vehicles were parked between them in deliberate positions, not random but angled to serve as barriers between internal sections. Sandbag emplacements reinforced the gaps. The whole thing was built to be defended from the inside as well as at the perimeter.

"Four watchtowers, one at each corner," Augustus continued.

"Manned, with spotlights on rotation. Machine gun positions along the outer edges, spaced at regular intervals. They've got solar panels scattered throughout for daytime charging and a few generators running overnight for essential systems." Alexander had already found those. Three generators, higher quality than anything a militia should have access to.

"Large tent at the center," Augustus said.

"Command post. We've been watching it for two days. Heavy foot traffic in and out at all hours, but it's been worse since yesterday. They know someone's been hitting their outer positions."

"Activity across the camp has increased seventy percent over the past thirty-six hours," Talia added through the channel, her voice carrying the clipped precision of someone reading from data she'd been compiling for days.

"Guard rotations are shorter and more frequent. Patrol routes have expanded. They've pulled vehicles closer to the perimeter and repositioned two of the machine gun emplacements to cover the northern approach." Alexander swapped to a drone positioned on the camp's eastern ridge and felt his jaw tighten. Two clusters of trailers sat at opposite ends of the camp. Large, caged transport trailers, the kind designed to be hooked to vehicles and moved at short notice. Five in total, separated into two groups.

Two on the eastern side. Three on the western.

"The eastern trailers hold adults," Augustus said, and something in his tone shifted. Flattened. The way the old soldier's voice went when he was describing something he'd already decided to do something about.

"The western ones are for children." Alexander switched to a drone with eyes on the western cluster. Three trailers, barred sides, canvas stretched across the tops for shade that would matter during the day but did nothing against the cold at night. Small shapes huddled together inside. He could make out blankets, or what passed for them. He shifted his focus to the eastern trailers. A guard was posted between them, rifle slung across his back.

As Alexander watched, a hand reached through the bars of the nearest trailer. The guard turned, unslung his weapon, and slammed the butt of it against the bars. The hand withdrew. The guard shouted something and kicked sand toward the cage before turning away. Alexander said nothing. He kept the feed open for a long moment, then flipped back to the wide view. The silence on the channel stretched. Augustus and Talia had been dealing with this for days.

They'd eliminated smaller groups, gathered intelligence, tracked runners, and planned this particular assault for the past day and a half. Because that was the job. Because rushing in without a plan got people killed, including the ones in the trailers. He understood and respected it. And he hated every second of it.

"Superhumans," he said, keeping his tone level.

"Give me the rundown."

"Six confirmed," Talia answered.

"Identified over the past thirty-six hours against our database and observed power usage during training exercises. We estimate four Tier 1s and two Tier 2s."

"Nine," Alexander said. A pause on the channel. He glanced at Augustus out of the corner of his eye.

"I can sense them. Four Tier 2s. Five Tier 1s." Augustus lowered the binoculars.

"Shit." The word was quiet, but it carried weight.

"That's two more Tier 2s than we've picked up this entire time. Where?"

"Three of the Tier 2s are in the command tent, along with one of the Tier 1s. The last Tier 2 looks to be asleep in a tent, north side of the base. The rest of the Tier 1s are spread across the camp."

"They've been keeping them hidden," Augustus said.

"Held in reserve inside the command post where drone surveillance couldn't pick them up." He exhaled through his nose.

"That changes things."