The Dark Edge Chronicles - Clan War

A Higher Calling

As Dru busied herself with using the plane's communication gear to contact her farflung connections, Lash and Narcist turned to make their way back to the cargo area.

"How many of our nestari made it onto this plane?" Lash asked.

"Not many," Narcist quickly replied. "Besides you, me, and Truk, just Ballan."

Lash let his face crinkle thoughtfully.

"I'm starting to suspect our efforts to get the breeders to safety are going to get more complicated, not less. And our window to successfully retrieve Amylia is rapidly closing."

He paused while they went down the ladder into the hold.

"I might have a solution," he said. "But we need all of our people in one spot to make it happen." They dropped into a pair of sling seats.

"Let me see your tablet for a moment."

Narcist silently handed it over, her eyes narrowed as she watched what he was doing with great interest. For his part, Lash pulled up the tablet's GPS function, went to settings to discover sources and pulled up a list of satellites the tablet could access via its uplink.

"Thank the Dark Father your patron is a high tech arms dealer," he said with a playful smile over at Narcist. "Giving you tablets with satellite uplink capabilities."

He then swiped through two lists without stopping, triggering a search function. Into the small search field he quickly typed a cryptic line of symbols and hit enter. The screen immediately went blank before refreshing with a whole new interface.

"What is that?" she asked breathlessly, eyes wide as she stared at an interface she hadn't ever seen before.

It had the straight forward efficiency of a military interface, with clean lines, logical links, and easy-to-read data streams. All in a gold, slate, and black that was both new and strangely familiar.

Entering an access code that looked an awful lot like a senior officer's full access code, Lash opened another screen before quickly navigating through several screens that the sharp-eyed Narcist couldn't make out. Then he was pulling up what appeared to be another list of accessible satellites.

Except this list was considerably shorter and the satellites were designated with strange symbolic codes. Selecting one, Lash was again prompted to enter a high level access code.

That called up yet another interface. A selection opened up a map of the planet. Tapping Europe, Lash nodded in satisfaction when the map zoomed in to show a shadow box version liberally festooned with dots of various colors.

"As the Qos Viran has operated over the years, the command staff realized it was more efficient to keep hidden caches of equipment and supplies secreted about the various continents to support nearby operations," he explained as Narcist looked over his shoulder in wonder and awe at the depth of organization and readiness the system she was looking at represented.

"Using my access codes, I tapped into one of our dedicated satellites and ran a scan of available caches in Europe." He looked over at the extremely interested Narcist. "The ones marked in green are deep cover bolt holes with emergency medical supplies and food. As we operate against non-vampire targets for the most part, bolt holes are considered neutral territory."

He then indicated the orange dots.

"These are what we're interested in," he indicated. "Automated supply depots. Munitions, gear, armor, transport, drones, even planes." He tapped one close to Lucerne, Switzerland and they watched an inventory appear in a secondary window.