The F.O.X. Project

Chapter 20: Discovery

Trent and Crystal's ship touched down on the Obelisk's roof. No vehicles flew this high up so it was relatively safe.
They ran with the other agents to the roof access, they were going in loud. Ash's orders.
Troops converged on them, the agents all spilt up and swept through like an unstoppable force, zero casualties, zero survivors. And unlike the enemy, they were using nothing but pistols.
Trent and Crystal ran towards one of the ATC towers, Trent went ahead, dealing with threats in front all the way along a small covered bridge to the tower.
The bridge was narrow and made of concrete with dusting iron railings a few hundred meters up in the air in some places. The bridge rattled as they ran across it and up the stairs inside the empty tower.

At the top Crystal set up her sniper and slowly picked off enemy snipers in other areas of the building, praying on the agents below.
'So,' Trent started, 'where shall we start looking?'
'I guess we'll go top down.'
When Crystal had finished firing they climbed down the tower and this time down a bigger set of stairs to a massive open area.
Scientists and workers surrendered to the agents as they searched the building with little opposition. Once inside, DCC wasn't very well protected. It's getting inside that's the problem.

They walked through the space and continued downwards, towards a hangar.
A windowed corridor displayed the scorched wasteland outside, climate change did so much damage that the rainforests migrated slowly north, leaving a barren, rocky desert behind.
An ash storm slowly rolled by in the distance, flashing angry colours of white, blue within the storm-black clouds forming a swirling, sweeping column of superheated air raging across the desert sands.

Floor after floor was cleared by the agents, each floor hundreds of meters squared in floor space, with little opposition with the people working there.
One thing the Nova Corporation is good at is knowing who is the real threat, the agents aren't allowed under any circumstance to shoot anyone without a gun or suspected to have a gun without vitrification. This helps the NC to keep a low kill count. They also use stun cartridges which essentially shut down the victims brain temporarily, so they weren't really killing anyone.

The Obelisk had a lot of ground to cover. A towering maze of corridors, a labyrinth of lounge chairs and lampshades. Blank wallpaper and fogged glass panes seeming to warp into infinite pathways, twisting and turning one way or another, seeming to loop back on themselves. They'd pass a window and feel like they knew where they were before the corridor seemed to break physics and turn a direction that would be impossible, confusing them again.
Workers ran through these corridors in panic as Trent and Crystal searched each and every office, board and break rooms, every time coming out with nothing more than they came in with.

They started sprinting down an abnormally long corridor with an ominous looking door at the end, guarded by two soldiers.
Trent kept forward knee first and kneed the first soldier straight in the gut against the wall, knocking him out and Crystal shot the other soldier with a taser, immobilising him.
They broke down the door and they were in an office, it was clean with red carpets and gold and black theming around the room.
A mahogany office desk lay in the middle with a black office chair turned to one side behind it. A pen was on the desk alongside a pile of papers with a small basic paperweight on top. A scale model of each of the 4 main Obelisk buildings were also in glass cases inside each of the four hexagonal black-marble pillars in each corner of the room.

They looked to the sides of the room and found nothing, but Trent noticed something behind the desk. He walked around the desk to find the body of a man in a black suit with large, square glasses who had a bullet wound in the side of his head. How could that be? No other agents had guns that could do that to a person. That's when he realised who this was.
Freddy Deare was dead...