The Dark Edge Chronicles - Clan War

All is not as it Seems

And with that, the warrior tech went to work. Forced to keep his eyes on the road to make sure they were going where they needed to go, Lash was unable to actually watch what the vampiress was doing. He could only go by the sounds of her fingers dancing across the surface of her tablet. If he were to judge by how rapidly those fingers were going, however, he would've said she was working very hard indeed to set up something to trap a passive signal coming off their supposed mole.

So it wasn't much of a surprise that, after a good fifteen to twenty minutes of furious work, he saw her pause out of the corner of his eye and sit back.

"Got something?" he asked and she nodded.

"Had to pick it out of ambient, but yeah," Narcist added in the way of explanation. "As I said before with the signal trace on the cell phone, whoever is setting up the Hand's covert network is a pro. I mean, it's next level."

"And that's surprising?"

Narcist favored him with one of her patented long looks before nodding.

"At least with vampires," she indicated, looking down at her tablet and tapping the signal that was now being traced across its surface in a low, rhythmic line. "In all my experience as a tech head working for Lady van Tallert, I've seen thousands of different set ups. Some better than others. But none reached beyond a certain level of sophistication because ..."

"Because we didn't need it to," Lash interjected to finish for her. "We're hunters. We pursue. We don't ... build."

Narcist nodded fiercely in agreement.

"Precisely. We have advanced tech but only create what we need at the moment." She shook her head. "The only time I've seen something as sophisticated as this is when I hacked a Brotherhood network looking for battle plans to head off an oncoming assault on our European assets during their latest attack wave against us."

Lash felt his brow lift in unmitigated curiosity. The Brotherhood?

"You think the Hand is working with psionics on this?" he asked. Narcist immediately shook her head.

"None of what I've seen between the two signals would suggest psionics were involved," the tech clarified after seeing Lash's raised brow. "I mean, this is on par with Brotherhood sophistication, but there's a straightforward nature to it that doesn't match the inherent arrogance you see in psionic networks, which have a deliberate complication to them because they want you to know they were designed by superior intellects."

Lash couldn't help the wry chuckle that escaped his lips at that. It was a fitting description of Brotherhood arrogance, to be certain. Even the only psionic he would count as a comrade and friend, the psylord Mordecai had an unconscious smugness to him that told of supreme confidence in his intellect and psionic prowess.

The half-smile that had touched his lips momentarily abruptly vanished. If the two signals and their apparent sophistication couldn't be attributed to psionics and were far beyond what vampires would normally use, then who was creating them? Did they have another faction on the battlefield? Someone that would benefit from Ventru's downfall?

Pushing that thought aside for a moment, Lash focused on the signal that Narcist managed to uncover.

"Okay, so let's locate our mole," he grimly directed. "Is he or she on the truck with us?"

After her fingers danced across the tablet for a moment, Narcist shook her head.

"Whoever it is, they're riding behind Truk," she indicated.