Kansas - 2122
----------------------------------------
This mission feels like it’s the whole reason I’m here with ANET at all. I joined up at Winterbase same reason as anyone else: the Archangels took over the world and the massive compound on the edge of Isla Noctis was the only safe place left. Anyone and everyone was welcome, if they could make it to the gates, but if you wanted better quarters and more substantial rations, you had to volunteer. There were plenty of jobs on base that needed doing, and it was easy enough to secure yourself some comforts without putting yourself in much danger, but for some reason I had felt compelled to join the Operations Force.
Shortly after I had arrived at Winterbase, Operation Pax Omni began, and I was called in to act as a mission lead given my relevant expertise in archaeology. Fast forward to the present and we get to my point about this mission: we’re on route to the White family compound in Kansas to secure a lost apocryphal biblical text called the Codex of Holy Geometries. Back when I was working on my thesis (which feels like it was literally a different lifetime, by the way) I had an absolute bitch of a time getting access to a number of original sources I needed because they were in the White collection, which means two things for today: I’m fairly familiar with the different categories in the White collection and have a decent idea what artifacts we’ll find the Codex amongst, and I’m gonna get a hell of a dose of catharsis if we get to kill those greedy bastards along the way.
“Solaris, we’re on final approach,” called the dropship pilot, callsign Eris.
“Alright everyone, prepare to drop!” I called over the comms.
I looked around the interior of the small dropship at my team as we put on our masks and landing packs. It was a small but mighty crew for this endeavor, callsigns Sirius and Arcturus had been on the Vatican strike op with me just a few days ago, and our Ramiel Cult defector informant was joining us herself on this mission, under callsign Pluto, and the team was rounded out by callsign Mars, a tank of an individual with more than 100 successful ANET ops under their belt.
“Entering drop zone,” announced Eris.
“Showtime! Mars, you are go for drop!” I called as I slid open the hatch on the side of the airship.
Mars gave a cheeky grin and saluted before they did a backwards freefall out of the door. I rolled my eyes as I gave the next call.
“Sirius, Arcturus, you’re go for drop!”
Those two high-fived each other and then yanked each other out the door by their hands. The visual effect of that was actually kind of amusing and I had to hold back a small chuckle as I gave the next go:
“Pluto, you are go for drop!”
The middle-aged woman just looked at me with incredible fire in her eyes, nodded confidently, and jumped forwards out the door. I followed after her a second later, and gave Eris her sendoff:
“Eris, take her up. We’ll see you for pickup in 100 minutes.”
I rolled over midair so I could wave at the dropship as Eris pulled up above the clouds to begin holding maneuvers. After she was out of sight, I rolled back to face the ground and the task at hand.
“Mars, adjust your heading by 12 degrees. The entrance to the bunker is under that half-collapsed helipad,” I called out over the comms. The others had to adjust as well by varying degrees, but followed suit on their own.
We touched down on the dilapidated structure in question one after another; I was surprised how confidently Pluto engaged her landing pack and how quickly she was on her feet. As we stood up and oriented ourselves, Mars gave us an important reminder:
“Now we’ve landed, everyone remember not to touch anything living. No vines, no grass, no squirrels, no frogs, no trees, nothing.”
It had been in the mission brief: Barbiel was in control of this region and —based on scout intel from a few months back— he maintained control of his territory by detecting human life via the tiny and specific electrical signals that passed between humans and other lifeforms when they touch, and promptly eliminating said human life via terrifyingly fast bolts of horizontal lightning. It was immediately clear that not touching any plants would be far easier said than done when Arcturus called us over to what seemed to be our way down to the bunker.
“Unfortunately, I appear to have found the way down, folks,” he called, and as we made our way to his end of the elevated platform, we immediately saw what was unfortunate about it: some kind of creeping ivy sort of plant had entirely enveloped the metal staircase down to the concrete-encased doorway that presumably led to our goal.
“Hold it together folks, the rough schematics indicated that door leads to a preliminary subterranean space before the bunker, so there should be another entrance around here somewhere,” I called out.
Everyone split up around the edges of the helipad to search our surroundings without indicating any doubts yet, but I couldn’t shake a sense of dread sneaking in at the corner of my thoughts. As I was acknowledging that feeling though, it was actually me who found our way down. I was prone on the collapsing side of the helipad, hanging my head off the edge to look underneath the steel beam-supported structure itself. Centered underneath it was a bare cement slab with a round metal hatch in it, and the majority of the ground beneath the pad was bare dirt. There wasn’t a clear way down, but it didn’t look like it would be too difficult to scale the support structure for the helipad.
“Over here! I think I found our way in,” I called out to the others.
This proved immediately to have been a mistake, as the combined weight of the team on the unstable end of the pad caused the damaged support beam to buckle further, with my end of the pad lurching downward as a result. The others stopped their approach but the damage was done, I was sliding off the platform headfirst. I managed to grab onto a small crossbeam, causing me to do a front flip instead of sliding right off, but the uncontrolled momentum caused me to slam my back hard into the vertical beam below, knocking the wind out of me and causing me to lose my grip. I fell downwards a few more feet before I caught myself on another crossbeam, causing me to bruise my forearms pretty badly. At least I was safely several feet above the grass still.
“I’m okay!” I called up to the others. “Follow me down one at a time, and be a little more graceful about it.”
As the others did as instructed, I got myself into a better position to start maneuvering through the support beams to the hatch below. Mars was the first to make it down to where I was, and once they had, I started across the route I had laid out in my mind. Mars observed carefully, and once Arcturus had caught up to them, they followed my path as Arcturus looked on. Pluto did the same, following Arcturus, and then Sirius was last to come down. As Sirius got to the beam that we had all started our horizontal maneuvers from, the damaged vertical beam finally gave way. This caused the beams that Arcturus and Pluto were on to lurch suddenly downwards, and the crossbeam Sirius was on gave way completely, and she began plummeting toward the grass at the edge of the pad.
“FUCK! Arcturus, Pluto, dive for it! Sirius, I’m sorry!” I cried out.
I grabbed the hatch and opened it at the same time as Mars caught Pluto who had flung herself toward the cement platform, at the same time as Arcturus hit the dirt and rolled toward us, at the same time as Sirius fell in what felt like slow motion ever closer to the grass. Somehow, the other four of us were all ducking into the hatch as Sirius finally touched down. I looked on in horror and despair as she almost seemed relieved for an instant before Barbiel’s lightning appeared a moment later. The brilliant green bolt of lightning struck through the metal supports of the helipad, creating a blinding web of light to illuminate Sirius as it struck into her heart, causing her to convulse violently as her flesh began smoking, burning from the inside. Somehow through all of that, I could swear I saw her smile weakly as the lightning disappeared just as quickly as it had arrived, before her charred body slumped forward, dead.
“God damn it!” I said as I closed the hatch and turned to the others.
“I know this comes off as callous coming from me right now, but as terrible as this loss is, we have to keep moving,” said Pluto.
She didn’t say an untrue word there. Silently, we pressed on. Under the hatch we had found ourselves in a small concrete corridor, dimly lit by the green light of some dying mercury-vapor lamps. Opposite the ladder we had come down there was a staircase leading up to the main doorway, and to our left the corridor ended in a blank wall. To our right the corridor extended at a gradual downward slant for about 25 feet, ending in a wall into which was set the main bulkhead of the White family bunker. We approached the bulkhead as a group, and I motioned for everyone to hold position a few feet from the massive steel door.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
“Arcturus, begin security override procedure A,” I directed.
Arcturus broke rank and approached the door, taking a small device out of his pocket as he did. He pressed a few buttons on the device in rapid succession before placing it against the bulkhead, where it remained in place by way of electromagnetism. We all waited in silence for a few excruciating seconds before the device emitted a series of three quick high-pitched beeps signifying it had completed its attempt to hack the door, followed by a longer lower beep, signifying that the attempt had failed.
“This bunker’s probably about a century old, if not older, so it’s honestly to be expected that the codebreaker wouldn’t work on it,” Arcturus explained.
I nodded, then said, “Okay. Mars, begin security override protocol B.”
Mars unstrapped two small explosive devices from his side, and placed one on either side of the door.
“Y’all better back up for this,” they said as they initialized the activation sequence.
We all backed up to the start of the incline in the hall, and looked on as the explosives detonated. They were specially designed so that the actual combustion of the explosive elements was nearly silent, though the pieces of the doorframe and massive steel hinges flying apart and hitting the concrete walls and floor still made a cacophony of their own. As the last echoes of metal on cement rang in our eardrums and the smoke cleared, I gave the team a hand signal indicating to move in.
Stepping carefully over the fallen and mangled bulkhead, we found ourselves in what amounted to a doomsday mudroom. The wall opposite the door was lined with cubbies containing hazmat suits, boots, masks, oxygen tanks, automatic weapons, and any other item you’d expect an early twenty-first century prepper to have in their “going out” repository. On either side wall was a door, to our left an aluminum and frosted glass affair reminiscent of a medical setting, and to our right an ornate wooden door with inset stained glass, like one might expect on the front door of a tacky mansion.
“And here I thought we’d have to look for the archive,” remarked Pluto.
“This tracks actually, the archival bunker has been in use since long before the family moved into the doomsday bunker across the hall,” I said, then continued, “speaking of, we should probably be prepared for company at any minute. Mars, you and I will watch the house door, Arcturus, get us into that archive without setting off any alarms.”
Mars and I each readied our guns and took preemptive aim at the stained glass window. Behind us, I could hear Arcturus activate the codebreaker again, and hook it up to the keypad next to the archive door. After another very tense few seconds, there were three short beeps followed by two slightly longer beeps at the same pitch: a successful hack. Without turning around, Mars and I listened and waited for Arcturus and Pluto to move into the archive before we backed in after them, guns still trained on the door across the way. Once we were inside, I kicked the door closed after us, and we finally relaxed slightly. As I finally turned to face the archive, I let out an audible gasp.
The archival bunker consisted of what appeared to possibly be a natural cave, in any case a massive space, with raw and rough stone ceilings and walls on three sides. Only the floor and the wall on the side we had just come through was flat concrete. At the entrance, we were very near the ceiling, and a flight of twenty-odd steps in front of us as well as a ramp down the length of the flat wall led to the floor level of the space. The majority of the space, easily ten thousand square feet or more, was filled with row after row of tall metal shelves, full of all manner of cultural artifact, from ancient scrolls to dynasty vases to important modernist artworks. The majority of the collection, even at a glance to someone without my intimate knowledge of the contents, was comprised of Judeo-Christian artifacts. The sheer volume of the space combined with how close to capacity it seemed is what was striking me. Before I could even tell her to take the reigns, Pluto was already making her way down the stairs and calling out instructions.
“The Keys of Solomon possessed by the White family should be held with the rest of the so-called ‘Apocryphal Scrolls’ collection, a portion of which was sent on a museum tour in the 2020s. Considering that, I’m expecting them to be relatively close to the front here. Solaris, if you could check these first two rows, up to the third set of shelves, I’ll check the next two, and then Mars, check the same shelves in rows five and six, and Arcturus, seven and eight. If you think you’ve found the Keys, call out and Solaris or I will come verify them.”
“Perfect,” I concurred, “Once we have the Keys, and most importantly the Codex, we move out. With any luck, we’ll be out of here without the Whites even knowing we were here.”
With that, we split up to our separate rows and began our search. Each shelving unit was about twelve feet high, two feet deep, and six feet wide, and each row of shelves had a sliding ladder attached, which seemed to all be conveniently left at the end we were searching. I glanced over the bottom two shelves in my first unit (all sculptural or otherwise object-based artifacts) and then grabbed my ladder, centered it, and started combing over the contents of the upper shelves as I slowly climbed the ladder. The third and fourth shelves in this unit housed two or three sets of some kind of biblical encyclopedia, two of which seemed to predate the invention of the printing press. The Codex we were looking for would be part of a set no larger than three volumes, if at all, so I didn’t waste any time checking titles or contents on those shelves. The fifth and sixth shelves in the unit were completely full of antique bibles, many in languages other than english, but all very clearly fairly standard bible contents just by the thickness of them and the look of their spines or covers. The top two shelves were the only two in my first unit that required any amount of depth to my searching, as they were full of a somewhat uncharacteristically hap-hazard assortment of scrolls and tomes. After scanning the tags of a half dozen scrolls and the first few pages of another few books, I realized the reason for the lack of care with these artifacts was that these were among the portion of the White collection that was determined to be fake sometime around the quarter century.
I climbed back down the ladder, slid it over to the middle of the next shelving unit and continued my search. Once again the lowest two shelves were all object artifacts and so I quickly moved on to the upper shelves in that unit. The middle shelf held another large unified set of some kind so I moved quickly past that and onto the fourth shelf, which required a more detailed search as it contained a variety of books and a few scrolls, though after checking the opening pages of about a third of the items on the shelf I realized they were all Islamic texts and therefore the Codex would not likely be amongst them. In this set of shelves, the fifth through eighth shelves were all disarrayed items that seemed also to have been either fake or unverifiable. I made a mental note to recheck these shelves in more detail if we didn’t find the Codex in our first broad sweep, and then climbed down the ladder again and moved to the third and final shelf Pluto had directed me to check in this row. Just as I was mounting the ladder to skip past the miscellaneous artifacts on the bottom shelves, Mars called out from a few rows over.
“Can I get a second set of eyes on this? I’ve got a ‘King Solomon’s Codex of the Geometries of the Divine’ over here, not sure if that’s quite the right title,” they said loudly, but not quite shouting.
“On it! You keep looking, Pluto,” I called out, dismounting my ladder and heading to the end of my aisle.
I looked down the third row as I passed it — empty; and the fourth: Pluto glanced down at me from the top of a ladder on the first set of shelves and gave me a thumbs up before looking back at the leatherbound volume in front of her. Mars almost ran right into me coming out of the sixth row of shelves just as I reached them, and after looking up from the book in their hands and stopping at the last second, they handed it to me to verify.
I opened the ornate and gem-laiden cover to a faceplate that read:
“King Solomon’s Codex of the Geometries of the Divine
a genuine and certified copy of the little-known third counterpart to his holiness’ Greater and Lesser grimoires”
I said, loud enough for Pluto and Arcturus to hear me two rows away either direction, “It’s a ‘certified copy,’” and then skimmed through the pages of the tome quickly with my thumb as I continued, “seems complete, plenty of crisp illustrations. Do we keep looking for an original?”
Pluto called back almost instantly, “we have 44 minutes till pickup, I say hang onto that and keep looking for another ten.”
“Hang onto this,” I said to Mars, handing the Codex back to them, then continued more loudly, “alright, meet back at the archive door in ten minutes.”
As Mars put the tome in their pack and went back to the shelves they had found it on, I quickly returned to the second row of shelves and got back to looking myself. About seven minutes of near-silence later, I had reached the last shelf in the aisle, and as I ran my finger past the spines of another dozen ancient tomes, I knew I had found it.
It was like a static shock between my fingertip and the blank spine of this particular item. As I slid it out from the shelf, I realized it was not actually a bound book but more of a sort of folio, containing hundreds of impossibly thin sheets covered in silverpoint writing. I didn’t dare touch the pages, but at a glance, it just seemed to be simple geometric shapes over and over again throughout.
“Pluto! I think I have something!” I called as I stepped into the middle of the aisle and opened the folio fully for a better overview. As I did this, an ordinary office sticky note fell out and fluttered to the floor. I picked it up, and with Pluto coming down the aisle anyway, I read it aloud:
“The Codex of Holy Geometries - earliest known edition.”
“Let me see,” said Pluto as she drew near. She inspected the folio, then pulled out a knife to leaf through the first few sheets without touching them, before announcing, “this is it. Everybody! Move out!”
She slung a metal case off of her back and snapped it open, placing the Codex in the padded interior before closing it and returning it to her back. We made our way back up to the entrance of the archive, heading into the antechamber one by one. Pluto had taken the rear, and as she exited, an alarm immediately began blaring.
“Fuck, must’ve been a security tag on the thing. Just keep moving!”
We did, drawing our weapons as we went. We were out of the bunker and climbing back up the helipad before we even heard sign of a response to the alarm— back inside the antechamber a door slammed open, some voices were shouting, and then came the distinct sounds of guns being taken from racks. Thankfully, the last of the team made it onto the top of the helipad before anyone emerged from the bunker, and Eris was swooping in for our pickup not a moment too soon. A sort of net ladder was deployed from the dropship door, so we could leap from the damaged pad and climb up into the craft.
I was the last to leap, and as we pulled away and the others were climbing into the ship, I paused a moment to watch as the occupants of the bunker emerged at last to the surface. They fired some dated semi-automatic weapons vaguely in our direction for a moment, until they oafishly stumbled into the grass.
I closed my eyes, but the flash of lightning burned my retinas anyway.
[https://marts.notion.site/image/https%3A%2F%2Fprod-files-secure.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com%2Ff55aaa38-563a-4fb9-b6f7-a8add6e64006%2F4bf97ec3-710b-4a5d-895b-b0cce33a08f7%2Freliquary.png?table=block&id=6106f481-5bc0-42c2-9d31-dea18ba96442&spaceId=f55aaa38-563a-4fb9-b6f7-a8add6e64006&width=2000&userId=&cache=v2]