Ravens of Eternity

305 Infiltrating the Illuminated, Pt It was hours later when night fell on the megacity. The streets emptied, and most went back home or to wherever they lived. Some gathered together and partook the various nighttime venues with the help of various vices.

Much like any other megacity in the galaxy.

The Temple grounds were also incredibly quiet and dark. Its massive doors had been shut and locked tight, and the streets were completely silent and bare. There was an occasional cleaning drone here and there, but otherwise not a single person was out.

Up above was a different story altogether. The Accursed Bootlegger swooped towards the Temple with its signals at the absolute minimum. It glided serenely over to the Seminary’s roof as its landing gear folded out, then landed.

Both the Seminary and the Scriptum were essentially circular towers roughly a quarter the width and half the height of the Temple itself. They had a single flying buttress at the north end of each tower, which helped give them that futuro-gothic feel.

Four Ravens in stealth suits came down the ramp and crept towards the building’s communications array and external power banks. When they reached it, Raijin waved her baton at the maintenance hatch in the middle of the machinery, and unlocked it.

Freya opened it up and hopped down into a small maintenance closet. Except for a few supplies on some shelves and a couple of lockers, nothing was inside. Raijin, Azrael, and Lucifer all came right behind.

“I’m detecting a stream of current in that direction,” said Raijin as she pointed her baton in a specific direction, beyond the walls of the maintenance closet they were in.

“It appears to be a terminal,” she continued. “Currently idle.”

.....

“Then let’s go take a look,” said Freya.

She tapped on the door controls and slid it open. Her pupils adjusted as light spilled into the dark closet, then she peered out carefully.

They appeared to be in the middle of a T-intersection, though there was nothing in the hallways themselves. Freya then looked straight up and noted the multiple sensor clusters up on the ceilings, right at every intersection.

Thankfully, their suits kept them nice and hidden. For the most part, anyway.

The four of them crept out quickly, and went down one of the hallways. They reached the door they were headed to, but before they could open it, a patrol drone floated out.

They all immediately hugged the wall as the drone turned in their direction, then remained completely still as it moved down the hallway. Azrael even held her breath as it passed by her.

Thanks to their suits, the drone hardly even noticed them.

Freya relaxed once it got a dozen meters away, then she quickly ushered the others through the open doorway. She ducked through last, then sealed the door behind her.

Raijin had already activated the terminal set into the wall, and hacked into it with a wave of her baton. The screen glitched out momentarily before it completely unlocked for her.

“These terminals are mostly locked to communications,” she said after a few seconds. “However, I have been able to find a simple map of this Seminary.”

She then displayed what she found on the terminal’s screen, but also quickly packaged up the information and sent it out to the others.

“This entire building does appear to be an academy of sorts,” said Raijin. “The first five floors have many large classrooms inside of them.”

The screen showed a ringed hallway that held a number of large rooms alongside each other. There were also a few other, smaller rooms scattered around, along with a couple of grav lift tubes in opposite corners.

“Look at this, though,” said Lucifer. “Up on the floors above.”

Raijin quickly flipped through the data and pulled up the floor plans for the 10th floor. The layout of this one was significantly different. There was still the ringed hallway and grav lift tube openings, but there were multiple smaller hallways in a grid inside that.

And each hallway seemed to have numerous small rooms – smaller even than the maintenance room they dropped down in. They looked small enough to hold exactly one person inside.

“Those look like solitary confinement cells to me,” said Freya. “And from what I’m seeing, all the floors from the 6th all the way up to the top are exactly alike. If the Illuminated are keeping Mathilde’s people, it’s probably here.”

“I’m counting thousands down there,” said Azrael. “If they’re actually prisons, I mean... We need to go find out.”

“There’s an Administrator’s room on the other end of this floor,” Lucifer mused. “I say we start there. It’ll likely have, at the very least, access to the databanks.”

“I agree,” added Raijin.

Freya once again took point as the Ravens exited the room and crept around the hallways again. Even though there were sensors right above them, and drones patrolled now and then, their suits kept them all just out of their sight.

They turned down a very short hallway which terminated into a sealed door. Raijin waved her baton, injected some simple intrusion code, and unsealed it. It opened after another flick of her wrist.

Both Freya and Lucifer leapt into the room swiftly. Inside were three techs at their terminals. They were so busy with their work that they hardly even noticed the door that opened up behind them.

Another two were in the corner, but were armed with pistols and wore light beige armor. The logo of the Illuminated was etched on their chest plates. These two easily noticed the sudden entry, and jumped in surprise at the intrusion.

Before they could draw their weapons, Lucifer dashed straight towards them, leapt up, then performed a devastating scissor kick at one of them. Hir left leg knocked the wind out of him, then hir right leg came in and tossed him straight at his partner.

The two Illuminated were thrown into the wall from the force, and were instantly knocked out by the blow. Their bodies slid down and crumpled on the ground.

At roughly the same time, Freya ran straight towards one of the techs. He had easily noticed the commotion to his right, and quickly opened the emergency controls on his terminal.

Just as he was about to activate the alarm, Freya grabbed him from behind, pulled him out of his seat, then threw him over her shoulder into the ground. All of the air was knocked out of his lungs as he landed with a heavy WHUMPH.

She then struck him on the side of the head with just enough force that he was instantly knocked out.

Azrael shot a second with her stun gun, which caused him to spasm uncontrollably, while the third was taken stunned by one of Raijin’s drones.

As it all happened, Raijin simply walked in gingerly and sat down at the main terminal in the middle and activated it. Then, she waved her baton at it and began to take it over with her engines. It only took them mere seconds to break through its meager security, then handed control over to her.

She scoured through the menus until she found the surveillance controls, then activated the live feeds.

The feeds from the five lowest floors – the ones with the large rooms – showed voluminous classrooms. Each one had lecterns and screens in front of multiple rows of seats and desks. They practically confirmed it was indeed a school.

But then she activated the feeds on the floors above, and the sight of each one sent a chill through the Ravens. It was as they feared – these were prison cells. But it was also a bit more than that.

Every prisoner was strapped into a chair in the very center of the tiny cell. In fact, it looked as though they were restrained tightly in them. On their heads was some kind of apparatus – it looked like a domed helmet that completely covered their face. Liquid wires and nanochips and photon bridges and magno-transistors and radium diodes covered it.

“The enclosures around their heads are circuits,” said Raijin morosely. “I do not know what is happening, but it cannot be good.”

Azrael stared at the screen with her mouth agape. Her heart sank as she saw dozens and hundreds and thousands of people, all in the same situation. There were around a hundred per floor, and there were more than two dozen floors.

She couldn’t stand to see all those people suffering, and found her hand curling into a fist.

“Kali would freak if she was down here,” she said, “And prolly go on a rampage...”

“Why’re they doing this in the first place anyway?” asked Freya. “If they’ve supposedly figured out the best method to govern, what’s with this shit?”

“Influence is power,” Lucifer replied. “Maybe they’re instilling some kind of loyalty deep in these people?”

“Perhaps it is as Mathilde says,” Raijin interjected. “And they are taking what these people know. They are very likely drawing out the contents of their memories.”

“Is that even possible?” asked Azrael.

“You and I would need to take a closer look to find out.”

“Science later, job now,” said Lucifer. “Do they have some kind of registry? Maybe if they kept records, we can see if those de Jardin spies are in here.”

“I will look.”

Raijin quickly located the databanks that the terminal was connected to, then had her engines take that over as well. It was moments later that she began to swim through the data itself.

There, within the databanks, she found too many names. Perhaps tens of billions of them. Perhaps even more. Some of the older ones stretched back for hundreds of years. Some since the founding of the House itself.

Raijin shook her head in disbelief, and refocused her attention on the ones she needed to look for.

“I found them,” she said after some time. “They have been registered using their covert names, rather than their real ones.

“They are, luckily, all on the same floor. In fact, many of the prisoners there were inducted in the same week. Almost as though the whole group was swept up at the same time.”

“Great!” said Freya. “Where are they? Let’s get ’em out and get the fuck outta here.”

“Wait,” Lucifer interjected. “We should break out the entire floor, and free all those people.”

Freya looked at Lucifer with utter shock.

“You wanna save a bunch of people?” she said. “Wow. I’m impressed.”

“It’s a matter of practicality, alright?” ze replied. “If we free the entire floor, they’ll think we targeted all of them. If we pull out just the de Jardin spies, they’ll realize something’s up. And they’ll definitely investigate. The House would get exposed at some point.”

“And here I thought you finally grew a heart.”

“I don’t need one of those. That’s what Azrael’s for.”