Preface/Author's note.
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This is going to be the longest novella. I'm going to write it, and what you guys will eventually read will be near exactly what I've written.
The date is 3/24/23, I'm sitting at my desk, with a full thermos of coffee, and my beloved in my lap.
In my left hand is her breast, and in my right, a Noodler's Ahab. (What? I'm allowed to base the things I write off of my life, bite me.)
I'm going to sit on this novella for a long while, probably a year or so. I'm not good at writing action, or any type of high stakes story, so bear with me.
For my fellow fountain pen nerds, my Ahab has a Goulet Broad nib, and I'm currently writing with Pilot Blue Black. I have a Lamy Safari with Pelikan 4001 blue in it that I'll use for on the go editing, and my final markup will be done using a Platinum Preppy or a Noodler's Charlie filled with Diamine Oxblood.
Anyways, you're probably screaming at your screen for me to get on with it.
Very quickly: I'm posting this first part, the preamble to the main body of the story on 4/8/24, simply because I wanted to put something here. I'll digitize and finish out the rest of the story as I get to it, but it will take a very long time. I've never written something this in depth before, and with so many characters all doing something together.
So, without further adieu, here is Obsidian.
2294 UNPC Universal Calendar
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Alex "Alpha Three" "Triple A" Anderson
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Rumors, references in Department Of Energy and Continuity Of Government command files pointed to it, and we found it.
Oscar Zero, or simply Oscar, due to it being the only site of the namesake was completely air gapped, meaning no phone lines, no intranet connection like the Kilo, Lima, and Bravo sites. This one had no interaction in the "web" created by the Kilo, Lima, Echo (etc, etc.) sites interfacing with the Titan, Zulu, and Atlas missile sites.
Oscar had one job, and MILCOM or COG (at least the personnel division) didn't have a single thing to do with it. Where do you put your tax documents, all of the dirty dealings, receipts, unredacted physical and digital copies of classified intelligence?
A bunker. A fucking massive one. Over a hundred rooms. Every one of them the size of..... Well. Let's just say that you wouldn't believe me even if I told you, which I'm not allowed to.
I stood in the control room which had a metal grate for a floor. I watched through the armored glass as the tape machines zinged back and forth across a massive grid of cassettes, each of them holding 500 megabytes or so of files. Might not sound like a lot now. Hell, my armor had a thirty two petabyte chip capable of 4tb per second read/write speeds. But this was technology from 1983.
I smiled, thinking about the look on the face of the NASA braniac who put this thing together realizing I can hold many, many orders of magnitude of this contraption's capacity on the pad of my index finger.
The terminal, a plasma screened box that probably weighed forty pounds, and displayed nothing but text pinged next to me. My smile dropped, and my mouth went dry as I watched the list trickle down the screen in 1980's speed.
God damn it. Why can't it just be like every other site? Why did it have to have records? I felt like God was laughing at me in the terrible green font the terminals all used. It was a simple grid list like an excel document. There were toggles at the top of the grid for state, site classification, etc.
I used the arrow keys to tappy-tap over to the Site Classification selection box. Directly under it "Alpha 0" Was displayed. Alpha bunkers were just civilian shelters, there were thousands of them across America, under schools, government offices, etc. No doubt the alpha bracket would go on for pages and pages.
I was after something else. I hit the Enter key twice, making it sort in reverse alphabetical order, and looked to my laptop, checking on it.
It was on the desk next to me, with the active I/O adapter's small computer box's fan humming away. The box did nothing but translate the information provided by one pinout and encryption method to another that the computer could understand. The laptop was small, being a highly modified ThinkPad X220 unit, which as almost unrecognizable, save for the telltale keyboard appearance. The bezels were thicker, with the screen being a whopping 10'' diagonal, the screen itself behind 2mm of plexiglass.
Charles had made the device stronger than a Panasonic Toughbook. Mainly because I'd broken about twenty of the things. I had specific needs, and he was happy to provide. He liked the challenge of creating specific equipment.
There, in plain green text on the screen, it stared me in the face.
"ARIZONA – Zulu – 0 – MASTER CONTROL – USCOG..." stared me in the face. The "dot dot dot" meant the bracket had a drop down menu attached. I hit enter on it and stared blankly at the screen while it loaded in blisteringly fast 1980's speed.
"USCOG, MILCOM, DOE, NSA, CIA, RSA, NHC, DOH, NRC, USCSB." Were listed. Continuity of government I knew well, MILCOM I knew well, Department of energy.... National Security Agency, I had no idea what RSA meant, National Health Committee, Department Of Health, Nuclear Regulatory Committee, and the United States Chemical Safety Board.
And then one more – MER.
The memory hit me like a ton of bricks. No fucking wonder. MER, every time that acronym was used I had no idea what it meant. Then one day at a Lima site I picked up a log with "Consult Master Event Recovery" printed on it, and wondered what site or agency it was referencing.
A "central" site with all of the things you couldn't shove into the Kilo bunkers no matter how hard you tried. Somewhere you could put absolutely everything important, and control all of the Event Recovery systems and sites from a very long way away.
To the right of that "USCOG..." box, there was a longitude and latitude. I memorized the number, applying it to a nursery rhyme like tune, and pulled out my little green notebook, writing down the numbers. I triple checked they were written as they appeared on the terminal.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
I wished I could use my little laptop to surf the information while I waited. The thing moved at warp speed compared to the 1983 model you could quite literally hear think. But it was copying every line of data from the site, and putting it into a RAID array of solid state drives. The information contained on that laptop would have unimaginable value to the coalition.
Heedless, I kept typing away on the extremely high quality keyboard attached to the terminal. The high wattage EMP rated box was a brick shithouse. Every site's computer design was different, down to wiring diagrams. Every port, pinout, and fundamental design was site specific.
I had to traverse three levels to put together everything I needed to connect my little laptop to the terminal and start siphoning off data. The computer didn't care, I tricked it into thinking it was doing a intra site backup, routed to one of the punch card databases on a level just above us, and only about 500 straight meters away. The little laptop just tricked it into thinking it was one of the punch card systems.
The specificity of every one of the site's systems made it a bitch to do anything. Back in the day, if this site were to go live, a terminal operator would be trained for his terminal, and trees, and maybe a little bit of the terminal to their left and right. Same went for the status boards and mainframe controllers. This mean that my stupid ass had to figure everything out as I went.
I started taking notes in a small notebook I'd labeled with the OS version this site used. Everything was different, as always. You had to train yourself to completely forget everything about the previous site and how the OS system was navigated, or you'd want to suck start a 12 gauge after trying to do the most basic of tasks.
I liked the Kilo sites and their affliction for touchscreen based terminals. If you were quick, you could pitter-patter where you needed to go with just the arrow keys, but the fucking thing would stutter constantly and make you go far, far slower than you needed to. The pen provided with 99% of the terminals at Kilo sites was so, so much simpler and faster.
I had made the computer spit out everything it could tell me about Zulu. Just the name and the attached agencies made my skin crawl.
For shits and giggles, I slid down the line of terminals to a vacant one, and powered it on. I wanted to confirm everything I already knew, and follow a hunch.
I followed my steps to the lists of sites, and sorted by the Kilo codename.
Kilo 14, 22, 29, 34, and 61 were listed.
I made it give me all of the information about Kilo-29.
I grinned. All of their sins were clear as a crystal there on the computer screen. Underacted documents were fun like that. Trying to pick up the puzzle pieces that Stillwater motherfucker left behind in the wake of Kilo-61, even before the coalition was a chore.
Back to the Zulu terminal now. Looking back to it, I squeezed my eyes shut and waited for it to finish processing my inquiry. Hesitation like that from even a computer of this age was indicative of a massive tree trying to load. That was..... Well. Both good and bad.
When I opened my eyes, I wanted to scream. Everything about the site was listed, down to site blueprints and inventory sheets.
Time to make a phone call.
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One year later.
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"What kind of site would we be looking at, if you had to guess?" Director Kiesel asked. His short black hair shining in the artificial light, always appearing greasy.
"The largest site I've ever seen." Triple A started. One of the office workers nicknamed "pack animals" stopping by and dropping off a sealed tube.
They can push pencils for the coalition wearing whatever they want, even if that means nothing at all. They're good at their jobs, let them be. - Director Kiesel to an unspecified UNPCID agent.
Triple A nodded downwards slightly, making eye contact through his clear visor with the office worker, who smiled at the gesture of thanks. They waived to Dr.Raine, who was sat at the end of the table, and walked off.
Alex opened the sealed tube, and pulled out the pictures. They were satellite scans of the area, up to date and taken just hours before, indicated by the time/date code.
The shock at the top of the office door hissed as the pack animal stepped through it, and Triple A set the papers out across the meeting table. Kiesel stepped over, looking at each of them as he set them out in the "arc" they were taken in.
Triple A magnified the view of the images with his helmet, and found what he was looking for.
"Here's an egress point." Alex indicated a seemingly untouched and unremarkable spot where a rough rock edge cast a shadow. He knew there was a door there large enough to drive a semi truck through. At least 80 megaton airburst rated judging by the reinforcement. There was most likely only a few feet of crust above the extremely reinforced concrete that was poured in one go to prevent cold joint related weakness.
The Department Of Energy, given a infinite budget could make the world turn the other way around if they wanted. In the early 2020's they built nuclear reactors in much the same way as their 1950's era bunkers. They were built to widthstand quote "extreme weather events." Which is a rather quaint way to say they can hold up against two times the impact of a once in a thousand year seismic event, among other threats.
The terrain around it also looked to be artificial, there were large piles of camouflaged excavation tailings in the surrounding area, but not nearly enough to warrant the size of the site. That meant one of two things. Either they utilized a natural cave system or they trucked the rubble off. The information at Oscar indicated a mix of both.
"I'll take your word for it." Kiesel replied.
"There's another here, here, and here." Alex said, pointing to areas around the large scans. "We're looking at a 'ground level' of about two square miles, most likely larger." He said. "That's square, but the reinforcement and other stuff would make that a bit smaller. I'm just going off of what the excavation logs had listed."
"And they built these things in the fifties?" Kiesel sounded bewildered.
"We went to the moon in sixty-nine." Dr. Raine shrugged.
"Have you contacted Continuity Of Operations Planning?" Triple A asked Dr. Raine.
"They still don't want anything to do with the sites. After we started using Echo fourteen, they pretty much handed us the keys to all of them in triplicate signed documents." Dr.Raine said. "They, and the agencies as a whole did reaffirm that they will pursue a information inquiry after the draw down or reuse process is set into motion." Dr. Raine said.
"Which reminds me." Kiesel looked to her, then Triple A. "Trying to keep what we found at Oscar a secret was a National Relations clusterfuck. I do not want a repeat of that. Everything that happens at this site, including mission statements and drone footage and onboard feeds will be declassified after the operation is concluded."
"Understood." Triple A said. "We'll be on our best behavior." He winked at her.
"Speaking of we." Dr.Raine said, she put an accent on the "we" and made it sound like "yes" in French. "Your companions should be here shortly."
"I don't blame them for being late. This place is a damn maze." Director Kiesel shook his head.
The installation, a state of the art hard site that Triple A hated, known simply as "Oh Three Seven" had a blueprint that looked like a bowl of spaghetti. Tunnels weaving every which way for miles and miles. The site was massive, and it took every lesson Triple A learned in defeating the security of the older US made sites and improved on the designs from the 1980's.
Across the facility, a rag tag group of augments made their way to the logistics area. Eric, who was lead duck, navigated the confusing tunnels and doors with ease. For every one that was armored, there was another that was in civilian clothing.
Sarah smiled at a few personnel who went about as she did. The massive Amazonian Charlie series went braless as usual while wearing a grey longsleeve top, and paired it with a pair of black tapered fit jeans with large, albeit empty pockets. Anton wore a dark colored striped button up heavy cotton shirt with waxed canvas work pants and a black baseball cap. Arguably the "most normal" of them all. Terror was the grey man of the group, white tee shirt and jeans, skate shoes, grey baseball cap. Simplistic and unremarkable, save for the facial scars.
The site had memories to Sarah, some of them hard to process, but the fond of them balanced it out. Well, somewhat.
Jolene "C4" Parker arrived in her armor, but shed it and chose, like Sarah, to go in the buff.
The ghost disappeared before every checkpoint, and was found waiting around a bend in the hallway every time.
Kugler held the group up every time as the security personnel read the signed papers allowing him to carry his "equipment" with him across the facility, rather than locking it up in the armory. His flamethrower and the fuel for it was developed at the site, so why couldn't he carry it around the place?
They arrived in short order, each of them stepping through the door held open by Sarah, and sitting at the table in the expensive roll around office chairs.
"Well," A3 said, flashing the screen on the wall up, and clicking to the first slide of a Microsoft Power Point presentation, "let's get started, shall we?"