The Fall of the Society

Chapter 13: Infiltration

     The information he had gathered on the day that Rose had assaulted the Suralon Headquarter of the Society was useful but did not contain much new information on secret locations. It did however have a portion of coordinates that lined up with a partial coordinate that he had found previously. Putting the clues together he managed to pinpoint a possible location. He also found an old code that was used by the builders to come and go from the facility. They must have not bothered to change it due to having other means of keeping the builders from remembering anything of importance.
     He found the lack of new information exhilarating. Many in his profession would have found this demoralizing, but not him. It meant that he was on the right path and that his quarry was terrified that he would find them and trying extra hard not to leave a trail. Terrified prey was much more likely to eventually make a mistake, and when they did, he would be there to capitalize. Until the mistake was made, he would continue kicking any metaphorical beehive he might come across that could be connected in any way possible, no matter how small.
     It had taken him a few days, using many of his contacts, but he finally made it to the coordinates that he had found. He found himself in the middle of a mountainous forest, in a plateau that was devoid of trees. There was waist high grass covering the floor of the area and a soft breeze blowing. The Society had gone to great lengths to ensure this facility was hard to find. They had set many traps, none of which posed any real threat to him, there were very few things that could slow him down and they happened to be things that the Society would not normally think to implement. The trek from the remote beach he had landed at took over a day of constant hiking to reach the point he was headed. Other than the contact that secretly let him off at the beach, no one knew anything about his whereabouts.
     Finding this facility was the culmination of several years' work, an investigation he had been working on long before Tripp gave him his biggest clue when he extracted Rose from the Suralon Hall of Heroes. All the Society's publications said that they were very against doing research on how to modify humans and their powers. They forbid the research of modifying powers and trying to force the manifestation of new powers, being very stern with offenders, often dispatching a special operations unit that would use extreme violence and destroy entire research sites that they deemed had gone against their proclamation. This was one of the things that originally caused him to investigate them. The complete destruction of the sites led him to believe that the Society was in fact gathering the data and did not want anyone to know. He believed that they had a much different agenda, one that had them being the sole corporation researching. They alone wanted to control the research done on humans and their abilities, and Rose was the first key. Tripp had opened the first door, and he had let himself into it. He lacked the necessary hard evidence, but he had multiple pieces of separate evidence that pointed toward what he believed they were doing, and he was willing to dig himself into the very deepest depths of hell to find the truth.
     Standing in the trees surrounding the flattened and grassy area, he watched for anything out of the ordinary, any slight clue that would give something away. Dropping from his perch in the large tree he made his way into the clearing, confident that there were no cameras. He walked slowly, taking in how the ground felt soft and slightly spongey under his feet, how the grass felt on his hands, the breeze on his face. A large and bright moon was floating overhead, casting light on everything below it. Halfway across the opening of the southern portion of the plot the ground felt strange under his feet. It was still spongey, but not as spongey and it was the first time he had felt this feeling in the field. Crickets and frogs were sounding all around him, as bats buzzed by his head, chasing after their prey. Continuing his path, he spent the better part of five hours tracing back and forth across the clearing until making his way back to the southern section to the spot he had marked as odd earlier. Kneeling he dug his fingers gently into the soil, searching for anything that did not belong. After a short while he had made his way down about six inches and found a small control panel. He ran his fingers around the outside of the box and found two small indents on either side. Placing his fingers in the grooves, he pulled outward and the front panel came off, exposing a small keypad.
     Thinking back to his research, a number came to mind. Seven, six, two, four. He punched the numbers in, each with a soft chime. Then he sat in silence for around ten minutes until he heard a soft hissing sound from the center of the field. Quietly he made his way over to the place the sound was coming from and two doors with around a foot of topsoil fused to the top of them lifted to allow a lift to come into view. The compartment looked like a standard elevator but did not have any kind of gear on top of it. It had one large door that folded on top of itself toward his left. He stepped into the lift and there were no buttons, leaving him to wonder if the maintenance program he had enacted would take him all the way to the laboratory below, or if he would have to find some way to manually finish the trip. The door slid closed and cast him into complete darkness, lights were not needed for the elevator to run a system check on itself.
     Standing in complete darkness and silence the only thing he could hear was his own heartbeat in his ears as he was lowered silently into the earth. He stood with his arms crossed and his head tilted forward, emptying his mind of things that did not pertain to the mission, ready for whatever awaited him at the bottom. After three stories of silent decent, he heard a slight hum as the motors engaged on the lift and it began its way down even further at a slightly quicker pace. The trip downward into the earth took approximately fifteen minutes, which meant the elevator did not sit all the way at the bottom of the shaft when not in use. If he had to make a quick exit using the elevator he would have to account for this window of time. The unit began to slow as it made its way to the bottom of the shaft, before coming to a complete stop. He pressed himself into the corner behind where the door slid.
     The door slid open silently and a flashlight shined into the space, but the wall and door protected him from the light shining on him. "It appears that it kicked into maintenance mode for some reason. There is no one on board," a man said into a communication device.
     "We will have to make an inquiry about this in the morning, see if someone dropped the ball on letting us know they had this scheduled. If not, I will have to investigate the coding and see if there is a flaw somewhere," a woman's voice responded back over the device. "Keep your eyes open down there, no slacking off, you hear me. It's not just your ass on the line."
     "Don't worry about me, you know I can handle things here. Besides, no one in the world outside of this facility knows where we are," the man replied while putting his sidearm back into its holster. "She worries about everything," he said to himself as he turned and walked back toward his station as the door started to close. Sid slipped silently past the door and followed the footsteps of the man, sliding past him as he turned into his security station.
     The laboratory was completely quiet, which led him to believe that the walls were very well insulated. This would be both a pro and a con. He would not have to worry as much about being quiet, but someone could basically be on top of him before he knew it. Though him being there would be more of a surprise to whoever might find him than it would be for him. The thought of a random researcher stumbling upon him and the scare they would get made a smile spread across his face.
     The corridor was dark and went on for as far as he could see, the security desk had long been out of his view. Thinking back to the partial plans he remembered that there were hardly any rooms listed on the schematics, which meant he would have to be careful not to miss any markings that might suggest a hidden laboratory. Finally, he saw slight markings on his left, faint, almost invisible lines in the wall and a slightly off colored spot just to the right of it. He ran his fingers along the lines, the wall was cold to the touch. Holding his hand over the spot to the right a screen came on, wanting verification of who was trying to enter the room.  He pulled an object from his pocket that was about the size of a credit card, but three times thicker. Pressing all four sides, a screen came on and he pressed in a series of numbers and commands. The device turned blue and he pressed it against the small screen, lines of numbers and letters ran across the display until the panel on the wall turned blue and the door slid open with a light hissing sound as it backed away into the wall.