The Dark Edge Chronicles - Clan War

Chapter 31: Wheels within Wheels

Lash slowly let a stunned breath ease out of his nostrils as he watched the spiderweb of lines connecting nodes of information together continue to grow across the holographic image hovering above the war table in the war room.

"Please allow me to introduce you to Lord General Horatio Janner, commander of the Order of the Untarnished Blade," Vulcrum said as he stepped around Lash, his eyes also on the dense lattice of information that was unfolding before their eyes.

"Gash me," Naryan breathed in disbelief before looking over at a stunned Lash. "But I thought you said he was turned into a vegetable when Mordecai tried scanning him."

Vulcrum answered before Lash could speak.

"Oh, the human Mordecai tried to scan, was. But the White Flame officer that confronted Lash just outside Magnar's estate wasn't Janner. That was Major Amadeus Hahlgrim. Hahlgrim was the one turned into a vegetable by his booby-trapped mind being triggered by Mordecai's scan. But not before the contents of his mind were transmitted to something the White Flames refer to as the Soul Well." The spymaster's expression tightened towards something approaching disbelief.

"Apparently it's some kind of backup storage for high ranking officers to store their minds and memories in case of catastrophic failure.

"Shadrak's ghost!" It was Darktower's turn to breath in disbelief.

"Oh, that isn't the half of it, Lord General," Vulcrum said, looking over at the bluff soldier. "You see, Mordecai isn't an ordinary telepath. He's a psylord. So, after seeing Hahlgrim's mind begin to collapse, he did a complete scan with his full power, to get as much as he could before the mind was reduced to gibberish. Which, in a strange twist of events, saw his telepathy travel down the communication stream an implant in Hahlgrim's brain opened when the cascade failure was triggered, to begin the backup. Mordecai then subsequently scanned the entire contents of the Soul Well and dumped them into a data vault for us to conveniently look over." A thin smile touched his lips.

"As soon as we cracked the ridiculous level of encryption that data had, of course."

"Are you saying Janner had a recent backup of his mind in there, for Mordecai to scan?" Kassidy asked, incredulous. Fulcrum nodded.

"Along with every other senior officer within their organization above the rank of Major." He looked back at the image now so filled with information, it was hard to pick out individual nodes. "Thankfully the Well also kept each backup separate, and the backups organized according to rank. We were able to find this one, General Janner's, sitting nicely at the top all by itself."

Vulcrum then reached into the image to take hold of something he recognized before pulling it out and throwing it to the side. Where a second image appeared, this one considerably less cluttered. Yet, it was still so dense with information, they couldn't see through it.

"Janner, as the biggest dog in the pack, had awareness of troop numbers, base locations, asset inventories, etcetera, etcetera." Vulcrum looked at Lash. "We have it all. The entire organization. From soup to nuts, as the humans say."

"Well, that would certainly explain why they wanted it back," Naryan wryly noted, Lash nodding in agreement.

"I would say so," the big vampire added as, with careful gestures, Vulcrum pulled out separate screens detailing exactly what was in Janner's mind, including GPS coordinates for base locations and a listing of current operations. The top of which were dominated by efforts to retrieve the coded information in the data vault. And, much to Lash's satisfaction, their efforts to reinforce the Hand, and the traitor on the council.

Leaning forward, Naryan frowned as she read a screen detailing the overall objective of their alliance with the traitor.

"They're trying to destabilize the vampire nation, world eater style," she grimly noted as she read. "The alliance between them and the traitor; they're using it to bring down Ventru, vampiredom's oldest and most stable clan in the hopes of throwing the rest of Europe into disarray. Then they'll come in ..."