The Dark Edge Chronicles - Clan War

Taking Contact

Lash made the silent signal to resume their advance. Mordecai was right. He needed to see Romanescu's extraction so he would be aware that the traitor was once again on the loose.

Oddly the revelation did little more than slightly annoy him. Yes, it was nice to have the Qos Viran-turned-slaver under boot in that holding cell after all they had gone through to capture him.

But now he was being brought here, likely to serve as Demaskieros' protection. Which meant Lash had the chance to face him in combat. Where he fully intended on killing the traitorous filth with his bare hands! The only fitting end for Romanescu, and justice and vengeance both would be satisfied.

A glance up at the wall at the expected interval found the Qos Viran glyph there. According to the embedded information it contained, they had successfully traversed the better part of the passage under the hills and were inside the city's perimeter. Where they now had to watch for Hand patrols.

Easing forward, Lash switched his display to pick up both movement and air displacement. If he had learned anything from fighting the Hand over the last few weeks, it was that they always struck from stealth. And that stealth could be defeated by displacement and motion.

He smiled tightly as his display promptly painted a Hand position in front of them, shivers in the air telling of their moving around before abruptly freezing when his team came into view. He then used a hand in the small of his back to tell his team numbers and location out of sight of the guard post.

A quick countdown then he, Tanis, and Truk simultaneously opened fire. Superheated ceramic hissed almost silently through the heavy air and as one the guards faded into sighted as they toppled over, throwing their stealth cloaks into disarray.

"Every junction from here will be guarded," he turned to say in a low voice. "Switch to motion and displacement on your detectors to spot the Hand in stealth, waiting to ambush or moving to let us go by before stabbing us in the back. We are moving forward!"

With that, he turned back to the path and with his Kali up and ready, he moved forward. Stepping over the dead Hand agents, he was content to leave them where they had fallen. They were a message to any patrols moving through the corridors between the perimeter and the Nocturnum that they were now the hunted.

A handful of steps down the passageway beyond the guard post and Lash was looking at the first patrol they would encounter, an entire squad moving carefully under cloak towards them. Again his hand went into the small of his back to give commands out of sight.

This time he matched the patrol squad one for one with his first squad. A quick countdown and his squad was stepping into a firing line to cut the patrol down with a single volley.

Again Lash moved them quickly past the downed Hand agents. Each sported holes in their heads; there was zero risk of them somehow surviving the assault to rise and attack them from behind. Because of that, they rated no further attention.

Moving more quickly now that they had started taking contact, the Wolfpack slid through two more junctions before coming up against their next guard post. Wanting all his assets to get in live fire before the anticipated running gun battle through the Nocturnum that faced them, Lash rotated his second squad to the front and had them eliminate the guards.

It was a pattern they repeated several more times before a change in the marker glyph pulled Lash up short. Holding up a fist to bring his company to a halt, he summoned a holographic map of the Nocturnum over his wrist control. He then fed in their location and nodded in satisfaction to see they were, indeed, now on the fortress's lowest level.

Plucking a tactical drone off his hip, he tapped it against his wrist control panel to activate it. A dance of his fingers over the interface switched its cameras to motion and displacement and activated its small IR projector. Small, but sufficiently bright that he'd be able to get a good visual feed into his HUD. He then set its distance from home to target to give his unit a good buffer space between whatever the drone ran into, and themselves. That done, he tossed it into the space immediately in front of them.