Chapter Text
Cor watched the ghost of his breath dissipate in front of him. The temperatures in the Gralean outlands plummet once the sun goes down, but they still hover around freezing even during the warmest days. He put the binoculars up again, wincing at the frozen metal touching bare skin.
He could barely see shit through the swirling snow. What he could see was the outline of rocky cliffs and wind stripped trees. Last night before the storm rolled in, he could make out a portion of the mountain that was just a bit too geometrical to be natural, and if you knew where to look, you could see a faint yellow glow from industrial flood lights reflecting off the snow. The facility was well hidden, the architecture blending almost seamlessly into the face of the mountain. Lucis would never have found the place without their mole.
Who was late.
The communication blackout was as frustrating as it was necessary, and Cor hoped there hadn’t been any problems carrying out the final portion of the mission. The last he had spoken to either the scientist or Avis, Cor had still been on a train outside of Cartanica. The only thing he had to go by was the single ping they sent to his transmitter letting him know tonight would be the night. He just hoped that tiny blip of connection hadn’t been enough to blow the cover on the whole thing. Besithia was a paranoid little shit, which was why this job had been ongoing for the better part of a year.
Cor stomped down the layer of freshly fallen snow to get some feeling back in his feet and brushed what had accumulated in the last half hour off his shoulders. The mountains loomed like phantoms against the dark sky. If there was any change in the facility he wouldn’t be able to see it, but he kept looking anyway. His team had been watching from this vantage point for three days now, noting any changes and waiting.
Waiting wasn’t exactly Cor’s strong point.
“Marshal, incoming!”
He let the binoculars hang against his chest as he turned to watch Eurus scramble part way up the rocky ledge and motion for him to come. Cor slipped on his pack and gathered up his thermos of now lukewarm coffee before carefully picking his way down to meet him.
“Eastbound from the facility. Amata’s trying to get a better reading,” Eurus said as he led the way down a narrow garula path back to the steadily vanishing dirt road. They found Amata kneeling in the rise between the parallel tire rut marks wearing a pair of oversized headphones and studying an illuminated screen. She stood and let the snow fall from her puffy parka, turning to give them a thumbs up. Cor couldn’t help but notice that the snow was already almost to the top of her boots. When the storm started the road had still been packed ice.
Amata lowered the headphones to rest against her shoulders. “One vehicle on its way. Midsize, with no signs of anything following. Chances are good it’s them.”
The three didn’t have to wait long before the hum of an engine could be heard over the wind. Cor motioned for Eurus and Amata to follow up the road a ways and crouch behind a rocky outcropping.
A white cargo van with its headlights off crested the path, throwing snow behind its chain wrapped tires. As it got closer, Cor breathed a sigh of relief when he recognized the sharp faced man sitting in the drivers’ seat.
The three moved out onto the narrow road to let the van come to a stop in front of them, the engine cutting with a series of pings. Avis hopped out of the driver’s side wearing a heavy coat and rubbing gloved hands together. His lab coat hung out underneath.
“About damn time,” Cor said, but saluted and waited for Avis to come in close, thumping him on the back.
“Glad to be heading back. Let’s get this shit packed up and get out.” Avis looked back to the van and motioned to his passenger. Cor couldn’t see much of her, just a pale face peeking out between a scarf and hat. She got out and walked toward them, rubbing her arms through her coat.
“You’re Dr. Halvor I take it,” Cor said as he reached out to shake her hand.
“Glad I can finally put a face to the name. Marshal Leonis right?”
Cor nodded. “We can talk more once we reach the rendezvous point, right now we need to put as much space between us and the empire as we can. How long do you think we have until they start looking?”
Dr. Halvor pursed her lips and looked back to the distant facility. “Two hours give or take. I have, um, had , high enough clearance to check out everything we took without raising alarms, but it’s already in the system that I took key samples and files in the middle of the night. I’m sure someone got that notification. The van itself would have at least notified our transport officer when we left the hanger.”
“You ditched your phone?” Cor asked.
“Left it in my dorm. The van has GPS, so that’s what we need to worry about.”
Amata was already around to the bay doors of the vehicle, while Eurus was taking Avis through the brush to where they hid the snowmobiles they arrived on a few days ago. Dr. Halvor started to turn to the van too, but Cor reached out and grabbed her wrist.
“Need to check something.”
He pulled out a black paddle device from a pocket in his pack and started slowly waving it around her head and torso. Maybe Besithia wasn’t the only one who was a paranoid shit.
Halvor had been the big break Lucis needed for years to get an in with one of the empire’s Magitek facilities. And it was no doubt this whole thing couldn’t have been done without her defecting.
But still. Cor wasn’t going to take anything at face value. He’d be dead in a ditch a long time ago if he were the trusting type. He was eighty percent sure he could trust her.
“Really?” she said, but stood straighter and uncrossed her arms.
“If you could hold your arms out doctor.” Cor moved the device around her whole body with impersonal efficiency.
“I’m risking my ass for this.”
“Don’t take it personally, we can’t be too careful.” No chips. No trackers. She was clean.
Well.
Maybe he was ninety percent sure he could trust her. Satisfied that she didn’t have any detectable bugs, he stuffed the device back in his bag.
The engines of the snowmobiles roared to life and Eurus and Avis appeared through a cluster of pine. The two they rode were connected to empty trailers meant for the payload, and the third that was presumably still sitting idle in the brush held their already packed camping equipment. It would have been convenient to use Regis’ armiger, but using any kind of Lucian magic was too risky this close to an imperial stronghold.
“We got enough space for all this?” Amata called from the back of the van.
Cor whistled at the stacks of boxes filled with files, loose paper, and jumbled electronic bits that he couldn’t even guess what they went to. Toward the back were soft cooler bags that presumably held medical samples.
“We’ll find out,” Cor said as he reached for a box filled with labeled binders.
They all began the task of emptying the cargo hold of the van into the waiting snowmobile trailers. The file boxes went first, as Dr. Halvor explained most of the coolers held fragile glass and delicate tissue samples. The makings of the Magitek army. Halvor insisted on moving these herself.
While Dr. Halvor secured the samples in the first trailer, Cor looked over to see Avis standing with his face turned up into the falling snow.
“You made it,” Cor said.
Avis took a deep breath, closing his eyes. “Not quite. I’m going to kiss the ground when we get to Caem though.” Another deep breath. “But it’s a step.”
Cor snorted. But he got it. When he chose Avis for this mission, he knew it was going to be a long-haul type of deal. Choosing to send a Crownsguard into the pit of the enemy wasn’t a decision made lightly. They knew snippets of what was going on in these mountains for years now, information trickling in too slow from sources too far away. Some of those sources dubious at best. The opportunity to get one of their own inside could possibly turn the tide.
Avis had a background in biology before joining the Crownsguard. With Dr. Halvor’s backing, they were able to get him in as a low-level lab tech a year ago. He couldn’t give much information while keeping his cover, but during occasional trips to a nearby outpost he relayed what he could. Most of it was things they knew in a vague sense, but now they would have eyewitness accounts. Absolute proof in the form of pictures, documents, and samples. Cor didn’t envy the Citadel scientists that would have to sift through this shit.
“We good to go?” Cor hoped to be clear of the road long before someone back at the facility signaled the alarm. Their small extraction crew couldn’t exactly square off against a squad of MTs.
Avis and Dr. Halvor looked at each other, some unspoken communication passing between them.
“One more sample,” Dr. Halvor said, not breaking her gaze from Avis.
Avis seemed to hesitate before trudging through the snow to the front of the van and opening the passenger door. He spent what seemed like too long leaned into the cab, gathering something up. When he stood, he held something wrapped in a heavy coat and surgical blanket close to his chest.
It took Cor a few seconds for his brain to click into place and notice the tuft of yellow hair being stirred by the wind.
“Fuck me, is that one of the MT clones?” Cor stalked closer to where Avis stood.
“Your king wanted samples, didn’t he?” Halvor said from behind him.
Cor ran a hand across his face. “Like, test tubes and cells. Not…” He gestured vaguely at the...child? MT? in Avis’ arms.
“You want to know how Besithia’s creating his army? A living example of what we’re making in there is the best way to demonstrate this.”
“Fuck,” Cor said under his breath. The Citadel was prepared to study tissue samples and Magitek implants, this was not...Regis was going to shit a brick.
It was a preconceived notion by the public that the MTs were nothing but metal automatons.
Crownsguard agents had found out that they were organic, for the most part at least, not long after they started appearing on the field. But there had seemed to be too many of them, too uniform in their movements and skill, to just be an expanded version of their previous army. The bodies cut down in battle revealed strange implants and blood that was too dark. On the occasion that one of their helmets was removed, their eyes were an unnatural red. They also took note that each of their faces were eerily similar.
Whispers began to trickle in then about the empire’s vast production facilities scattered throughout the mountains where they cloned them by the thousands.
“I agreed with Dr. Halvor about taking one,” Avis said, looking between Cor and the doctor, “we’ve never been able to bring one in alive, built in kill switch I guess. They don’t put those in until later. This is our chance.”
Cor pulled back the fabric of the coat to reveal the sleeping face of a boy that looked to be...three? Four? He was never good with kids’ ages. He was unnaturally pale and looked...sticky. There was definitely some sort of residue on his skin and through his blond hair.
Avis pulled the fabric back up to cover his head. “Sedation should last another five hours or so. After that he shouldn’t give us any trouble on the way back. They don’t...respond much. Unless ordered.”
“I guess we’re doing this.” Cor ran his hand over his face again. “Not like we can leave him in the snow.”
How they would have to revise their plans would be decided later. Right now, the most important thing was getting away from that van. Cor himself, Amata, and Eurus drove the snowmobiles, with Avis and Dr. Halvor finding space with the MT in the trailers.
Eurus led the way as their navigational expert, occasionally throwing signals behind him before turns or to warn of branches and debris once they left the road. It was slow going in the dark, especially with the heavy snow, but at least it helped cover their tracks and hopefully made the road impassable for the imperials.
The snow burst and swirled like a million stars in the headlights, and Cor had to bury his face against the bite of the wind. The night felt too dark, and the way to camp too long. They had stollen a fucking MT and were bringing it to Lucis. Cor tried not to think about it. He tried not to think about how far away Insomnia was, and how many ways this mission could still go south. Instead, he concentrated on not crashing into a tree in the dark.
The narrow mountain path they followed took them down toward a valley where they would make camp for a few hours.
Right now, there was only the sting of the snow and the hope that they would see morning.
Cor turned on the last lantern and the tent filled with soft yellow light. The portable heater was already taking the edge off the cold. He felt stinging heat spreading to his cheeks and hands after hours out in the biting wind.
It would have been nice to have a fire and cook some packets of shitty freeze-dried food, but that was out of the question until they were on safer ground. Cor stripped out of his parka, hat, and gloves, piling them by the side of the tent and hoping they were semi dry by morning.
Avis was already pulling his sleeping bag around him, undoubtably bone tired from the days of stress he was likely under. Cor hadn’t noticed until he was in the light of the tent, but there were heavy bags under his eyes, and his skin had a sunken quality.
Dr. Halvor was digging in her duffle. She too had stripped down to a thermal turtleneck and thinner gloves. He could see now that she had blond hair pulled back into a loose ponytail.
She removed a package of something and turned to the sleeping clone. They had brought him in first as soon as their tent was up and made a makeshift bed out of dry coats and extra blankets.
Cor was rubbing the feeling back into his fingers to at least start writing a report of the night’s events while they were fresh. Dr. Halvor opened what turned out to be wet wipes and started cleaning the MT’s face.
She noticed Cor watching and paused. “We keep them in stasis pods when not being tested or trained.” She pulled out another one and began to try to clean his hair. “We had to move fast once we drained the pod.”
He didn’t react at all to the jostling, whatever they drugged him with obviously still under effect. His skin was pink where his face had been rubbed, his hair sticking up in damp tufts.
She moved some of the blankets out of the way and pulled an arm out to clean, starting in between his fingers. Cor noticed the pale skin of his bare arm was dotted with angry red welts, like markings from a needle. She pulled out his other arm and Cor noticed that in addition to the same red welts, his bicep was covered with a makeshift bandage that was stained dark.
Cor opened his mouth to say something the same time that Dr. Halvor asked, “Do you have a med kit?”
“What happened?” Cor said as he leaned closer to get a better look.
“As I said, we were in a hurry.”
Cor crawled over to a pile of bags and dug until he found the familiar red case. He took it over and immediately opened it to sort for something useful. She peeled the cloth away, not even a bandage but a piece of a shirt, and revealed a deep cut leaking almost black blood.
“They all have a tracking implant. It was either remove it there or have it go off once we left the storage area.” She took a bottle of antiseptic and a roll of gauze from Cor’s outstretched hand and set them on the blankets between them. “We need to get this stitched. Do any of your squad know field medicine?”
“Aren’t you the doctor?” Cor kept digging for anything else to use on that cut.
“I’m not a medical doctor, I’m a biologist. I work with the genetic aspect of all this, I usually don’t even interact much with the finished product, so to speak.”
“Okay,” Cor breathed out. More blood was beginning to run down the arm now that it was uncovered. “Okay. Yeah, I can do it. We all have at least the basics. Get some of those towels out and hold it there after I clean it.”
Cor reached out to brace the arm and inspect the damage.
“Don’t let the blood get on your skin, it’ll burn.”
Cor moved his hands back as if shocked. “What is this anyway? We’ve seen this on ones we’ve fought.”
“Starscourge.”
“Daemon blood? Fuck me.” Cor put down the bottle of antiseptic and dug around for a pair of gloves.
“It’s synthesized. It’ll hurt but it’s not contagious.”
Cor paused before pouring a portion of the bottle on the wound. It bubbled and seemed to loosen clots that had been forming. Halvor immediately pressed the cloth against it.
Cor reached for a potion. It would at least stop the bleeding.
“Wait!” Halvor blocked Cor’s hand before he could break the vial. “Healing magic would probably do more harm than good. I doubt it would interact well with the blood.”
“So the old fashioned way then.”
Cor dug deeper for the rarely used suture kit while Dr. Halvor kept pressure on the wound.
“He going to wake up for this?” Cor asked as he sorted through the box.
“Sedative should still be in effect. As long as we take care of this now.”
Cor clicked on a headlamp to see what he was doing, and once the cloth was taken away, he put a liberal amount of numbing agent down just in case.
He worked in silence with Dr. Halvor keeping things steady. The cut was deep, but clean and precise.
“So how does this work? They have demon blood but still look human.”
“It’s…hard to explain. The short of it is they have trace amounts of viral plasmodia integrated in their DNA. Their base blood makeup has a small percentage of this naturally, but they can synthesize injected plasmodia.”
Cor’s eyes ran over the needle marks.
Just focus on the task at hand. Cor sighed and tried to push the nightmare factory on the other side of the mountain out of his thoughts.
It had been years since he had to do this, and the last time was on himself after getting his leg gored by a garula. All the same, when he put the final stitch in, it looked good.
Well. As good as this kind of thing could be.
He patted the rest of the blood away and wrapped it, holding the small arm out to inspect his work.
He didn’t notice it when he had been concentrating on the upper portion of the arm, but now his eyes were drawn to a patch of skin on his wrist.
Ink that stood out against pale skin. Precise lines that looked out of place on a tiny arm.
The barcode marked him as exactly how the empire saw him. Inventory.
Cor’s face must have mirrored his disgust as he lifted the arm closer to look at the mark.
“I know how this must look to you.”
“Yeah? And how is that.” Cor tried to keep the venom from his voice.
“You see a child. And you see what we’re doing here as barbaric. I get it. But at the same time…“
She seemed to gather her thoughts before looking Cor in the eye. “At the same time, we’ve only lost a small number of imperial citizens since the start of the Magitek program.”
Cor studied the tattoo. Surrounding the barcode were two sets of numbers. He sighed and set the arm back down in the blankets.
“What do the numbers mean?”
“Top set is the batch number. Base makeup for all of them is the same, but they’re tweaked slightly depending on what classification of MT they’re made for. Bottom is the individual production code.”
Cor ran his thumb across the inked skin. “And what kind of MT was this one supposed to be?”
Dr. Halvor gingerly lifted the arm to read the number. “Sniper.”
Cor sat back on his heels and ran a hand through his hair. Despite what the doctor said and what Lucis knew about how they were made, the kid just looked…human.
“This is fucked.”
“This is war,” Dr. Halvor said quietly.
He read the same paragraph almost five times before tucking the tablet away in his pack. How was he supposed to write any of this up? Once they got closer to the border, he would have to call Regis. He’d have to get in touch with their team about how to smuggle the kid in too. They couldn’t very well stick him back with the cargo the whole trip.
Speaking of.
He heard the rustling of fabric across the tent, and from the corner of his eye he saw movement in the dark. Cor kept his movements slow, barely turning his head to look at where the sound was coming from.
He didn’t mean to audibly gasp, but, well, what the fuck.
Cor was met with two points of light in the dark. Not glowing, but reflecting the dim light of his bedside lantern.
Their first night out here they saw a pack of sabertusks circling out in the trees beyond their camp, moving through the dark like shadows. The only definitive feature they ever saw of those creatures that night were their eyes reflecting their own fire back at them.
The MTs eyes were the same as those sabertusks’.
He was sitting up, staring straight ahead of him. He looked…dazed. And though he was sitting straight up Cor couldn’t help but notice him sway slightly, obviously still under the effects of the medication.
He must have heard Cor, because he slowly turned his head his way and met his eyes in the dark.
Cor expected maybe fear or confusion, or at least some emotion to cross his face, but the stare he was met with was just…blank.
“Hey kid.”
No reaction. Did he even understand him? Cor thought about waking Halvor or Avis to deal with this, but the MT closed his eyes and swayed again before falling back into his blankets.
The motion seemed to startle him awake again, but he didn’t try to sit up this time.
He was looking at Cor again, visibly trying to keep his strangely lit eyes open.
“Hey.” Cor thought about what Avis said earlier that night, about reacting unless ordered.
“You can go back to sleep alright?”
After a few hesitant seconds, his eyes slipped closed, the tension in his face draining away.
Cor kept watching.
Eventually, when he was certain the MT was asleep, he turned off the light and curled further under his own blankets.