Samantha Cromwell. Before the blast.
The plan was foolproof. Use the containment field, retrofitted with the contents of the Cache buried under the Quadrangle, to contain the nuclear blast inside the Exclusion Zone. A nuclear blast that, while already on its own strong enough to wipe the whole state off the map bit, with the containment field would guarantee that whatever was coming from the portal would stay on the other end of it forever. Enclosed within the radioactive perimeter, all proof of alien life would be sealed off from the world forever. Another day at the BSA.
She had SpaceOps transport her to the Quadrangle after unlocking the memories buried in his mind, paying extra attention to his behavior. For now the psychological suggestions she put in place seemed to hold, but she knew very well that these were all temporary measures that were doomed to fail sooner rather than later. But she could do no better than this. She also knew that her choice to use a nuclear warhead was going to cause more than a little ruffling of feathers once the news reached some high places in the chain of command, but the emergency was now and she was counting on bureaucracy to be slow as usual so that she would have a window of time.
Her phone rang. It appeared that yes, she did have her window. The launch had been confirmed, and the missile was soaring through the air as she read. Hidden to radar by a particular kind of experimental cloaking technology that made use of several loopholes in the laws of physics exploited and expanded by magic. Only a magic user, and a particularly powerful one at that, should be able to spot the missile before it hit its target, and she was counting on their total absence from American soil thanks to the hard work of her and of her Bureau.
There was also a second missile inbound, staggered just a few moments after the first one, coursed not to detonate above the portal but somewhere beyond it, possibly on the other end of it. It was all in the hopes that the first detonation would be able to clear out any fortifications built by the Pilgrims, of course, but even if that weren’t to be the case it would mean double the dose of explosive ordnance on this side of the portal. Which was not bad either.
And to make sure that the containment field would hold…
“Here it is.” She said, hunched over in the low ceiling of the service tunnel. The Cache was a fairly small box, and it glowed with ultraviolet and deep blue energies. She touched it, and from her digit spread a growing hole in its defenses until it was left completely bare.
The lid came off with a hiss, and the cold mist that spewed out hid the bottom half of her body from view in the dim light. She reached inside and pulled out a small crystal, attached to a mess of wires and circuits of unknown design. They were all but human, looking utterly alien with their sleek chromed features and soft curves, and not even she knew where they came from or who made them. On a second look, and she happened to steal such look while SpaceOps was winding up for teleportation, she realized that yes these circuits were human, but they were unlike anything she had ever seen in her life. They looked like what she would imagine technology to be ten, maybe twenty years in the future if all the promises the people in Silicon Valley made turned out to be true.
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Smooth, compact casings of a material that could be metal as well as stone containing messy wires that glowed with the power of raw energies. Magic being channeled through infinitely thin conduits and focusing crystals. She was an expert on magic, a respectable figure in the field, but she doubted she could make heads or tails of the device if she was given a year, let alone build one. There were things in the universe that were being kept even from the BSA, she suspected especially from the BSA and from her specifically.
A fact she knew very well back when she inherited her position from her father, but it was in instances like this one here that she was reminded of the extent of what she didn’t know. Of how much was being kept from her. It was in times like these that she didn’t really know what to do, only acting on hunches, gut feelings, and her own personal craftiness. Because clearly, people who could build such tech in the unknown forges of the hidden rings, could also deal with the pilgrims quite easily. Yet they chose not to.
The world resolved itself into clouds, pounding rain, savage winds and a cold chill up her spine. She ignored all of it. It would take more than a raging storm fitting of an arctic climate to take her out, and this was without any magical implementation. Beside her, SpaceOps immediately covered himself in layers upon layers of magical protection instead, unable to withstand the cold. His gadgets and devices hummed and hissed, making him a walking furnace of steam and heat.
She walked on. Her mind wondered about things, about what she didn’t know about the world and about magic. About what laid in places like the Reclamation facilities. But she banished those thoughts from her mind as quickly as they came. She had a job to do. Steeling herself, she approached the field emitter for the containment shield. A vertical wall of energies that severed the region of spacetime inside the Exclusion Zone from whatever happened outside of it. Or rather, that kept whatever happened inside of it from leaving.
The missiles were close. She needed to apply the last-minute modifications and leave before they struck.
“I’m done. Take me to the next.”
One down, three to go.
It was at the fourth one that it all went wrong. The epicenter of the problem that would later result in an uncontrolled thermonuclear blast potentially wiping Temalas City off the map. But Samantha didn’t notice it.
Even she, Samantha Cromwell herself, daughter of the legendary L. Cromwell who founded the bureau in his day, whose face was carved in bronze in the great skyscraper of the BSA, from whom she not only inherited her position as the head of the BSA, but also her resilience and grit… even she failed sometimes. And after four jumps, in the rain and cold, her fingers slipped. The crystal did not fit the socket, but the soft beeping alarm and the red LED were both drowned by the storm.
Or perhaps it was not her who failed, but it was the work of someone who can read and influence minds, as well as move things from afar. The work of someone who had already been suspected of having gone rogue, and who was supposedly under the band-aid effect of a last-minute hypnotic suggestion. Someone who had been missing from the Quadrangle for quite some time by now.
Samantha, none the wiser, nodded to SpaceOps, and the two jumped out.