Steel Fire

The commissioner put the film reel into the projector and pushed the button that brought it to life. On the screen, a vision of the large General Assembly chambers appeared. Hundreds of seats stood in an intricately patterned semicircle with a long table in the center. All seats were filled by the members of the Assembly, guardians were seated at the central table. The sound started to play on a separate tape. It was about some dry piece of agrarian legislation. Half of the people present were sitting back in their chairs, barely paying attention to the speaker. Commissioner Olivia Terzi recognized a number of them, though the quality of the recording was low. Especially Samyaza, the grandmaster of the Order of Overwatch, formed a formidable presence at the table. His mask was piercing white even on the black-and-white recording. One of the members of the General Assembly stood up and the recording went silent, just before cracking and chaos erupting on the moving picture. The camera was thrown askew and smoke filled up the frame. Olivia waited in silence for the picture to resolve. When it did, she saw the aftermath of an explosion. Men and women stumbled through the ruins of chairs and tables, tripping over the bodies of their less fortunate colleagues. Some were crying, others seemed to be trying to coordinate some kind of first aid effort. One, wearing a shredded uniform, approached the camera and used her hand to cover the camera.

“Did anybody claim the attack?” Olivia asked as her gaze remained on the blank screen.

“The Federation did of course,” Russel said and turned the projector off. “Like how they claim every setback we suffer.”

“Anybody credible?” She turned on the lights in the room and looked her boss in the eyes. There was a hint of fear in them that intrigued her.

“I take it you’ve followed the recent rise of youth movements?” He stared back into her functional eye.

She nodded.

“It’s not just about music. They’ve been calling for something just like this.” He finally looked away. “We can’t prevent something of this magnitude leaking to the general public. New elections will have to be organized.”

“That many?”

“Too many for us to accept,” he said, bitterly. “Instructions are going out to Enforcement at this moment to break up any gatherings of young people with the intent to play prohibited music. Sanction have been upgraded from level two to three.”

“They should be able to round up the organizers easily. Why did you recall me for this?”

He handed her a picture of a man and a woman, taken from a great distance. The man was two heads taller than the woman, broad-shouldered with a stoic impression. His right hand was either hidden in his sleeve or missing. The woman wore a smile as wide as her face, her hand raised in some symbol of ‘resistance’. Both of them were wearing long coats and goggles around their necks.

“Dead or alive?” she asked.

“Alive if you only manage to catch one. Otherwise it doesn’t matter.”

“What do we already know?”

“Too little, but we’re still getting reports from our agents,” he handed her a folder. “Their followers call them Tyr and the Locust. They claim to have magical powers.”

“Those coats. Are they guardians?”

“There are no records of them.” He hesitated. Olivia fixed him with another of her stares.

“You know more,” she said when he didn’t volunteer the information.

“Everything you need to know is in the folder,” he said, forcing himself to return her gaze.

“You know something that you couldn’t write in here,” she said calmly. Her lips curled up into a predatory smile.

“I never told you this, but I have some indications that these two aren’t from this world, if you know what I mean.”

“Don’t try to tell me fairy tales, Russel.”

“I’m serious, Olivia,” he stepped closer. “I saw a corpse of a Deep One once. It had washed ashore, or had been thrown there some said, and I remember how it felt to look at. It was like a frosty nail being driven into my skull, and when I look at this picture...I feel a nibbling in the same place. This is not an ordinary person.”

“The memetic properties of the Deep Ones have been documented. These are just more terrorists.”

“Prove me wrong, commissioner,” he said and saluted. “You’re dismissed.”

Olivia picked city 77 as the place to start her hunt. She boarded a government train from the Capital with her team, many of whom had been with her since her time in Enforcement, and traveled across the continent in three days. By the time she arrived she had memorized every word in the folder and come up with several working theories. They went to work immediately upon arrival, requisitioning an office and setting up their primary base. The movements of the men and women in her team were mechanical, with very few words needing to be exchanged between them. The structure of the beginning of an investigation was always the shame. She felt their gaze upon her when they thought she wasn’t looking. The responsibility for finding the first loose thread was upon her, so that they could then unravel the rest. Something made Olivia suspect that this would be no ordinary investigation however. Too many things in the information she’d been given didn’t add up. Somebody with her clearance knew that generally meant only one of two things; the Orders were meddling, or something outside of the context of the Republic was. During the train ride, it had become more difficult to dismiss Russel’s worries with each passing kilometer.

Olivia didn’t know the sensation Russel had described, but she knew the opposite sensation. As a young, but accomplished, Enforcement officer, she had been to this part of the Republic carrying a mission of the highest importance. The government that had sent her had long since been retired. Officers like Olivia had worked hard to make sure some of the works remained in the shadow, because she still remembered the people she had escorted. If she closed her eyes, she could still recall their faces perfectly. Their luminescent eyes were still a beacon to her after all these years. The children had been beautiful, but the adults were intoxicating. After that mission, no beauty in this world had compared. When she looked at the photo of the terrorists, she felt a hint of that same luminescence.

“André,” Olivia said, as she unfolded the first maps of the city. Her long-time aid and companion straightened and approached stiffly, ignoring a junior member of the team who had asked him something.

“Yes, commissioner?” he asked. She had never heard him use her name and didn’t mind that.

“Are you a father?” she asked him, her gaze on the map.

He paused for a moment. “I have sired several children, but my current assignment precludes me from raising any.”

“I have not raised any of my children either,” she said, and sighed. “The group we are investigating knows exactly how to manipulate them and use them to disrupt established order. I wouldn’t even know what to give a child as a present.”

He paused again before answering. “I hear they like sweets. Perhaps we should consult a child rearing specialist?”

“Perhaps, but I doubt they have any experience with what this group has been doing. It’s remarkable that we’re very good at making people fall in line, but we can’t fathom what would make them fall out of line in the first place.”

“The superior strategist prevails.”

“You miss my point. How can we develop a strategy if we do not understand the enemy?”

He considered her question carefully. “If we just start raiding houses we wouldn’t even recognize the enemy if we found them. We must find out what they want. Only then can we lay a trap.”

“Yes,” she said, and turned to him. “What do these singers, the adults, want? Why do they spread their music across this region and throw large concerts that devolve into riots?”

“They must want chaos.”

Olivia shook her head. “They could do that by themselves, though perhaps in the scale that they desire.”

The younger officer nodded in understanding. “They want followers. The children are their army.”