Chapter 233: Invasion
The Duke had three rounds left in his magazine and two options.
The group that had just cleared the Cobra soldiers from his position was standing in a loose semicircle at the edge of the firelight, watching him with the patient quality of people who had decided the situation wasn't urgent and were giving him time to arrive at the same conclusion.
He didn't lower the weapon.
"Back up," he said. "All of you."
"We're on your side," the woman with the crossbow said.
"You're strangers with weapons who arrived immediately after an ambush," the Duke said. "That's a presentation that requires more than one sentence to address."
"Fair enough," said the large man to the woman's left, with the specific tone of someone who found the caution reasonable even if the situation was inconvenient.
"Put your weapons down and we'll talk," the Duke said.
"We put our weapons down, your wounded partner over there sees an opening, and someone gets hurt," said a third figure, a man with a targeting monocle over his right eye. "That's not a better outcome for anyone."
The Duke assessed this.
Ripcord had emerged from behind the tree with a weapon, which the Duke noted without shifting his aim. Ripcord's fighting capability was real but the situation was stacked in ways that changed the arithmetic.
"Anna," the Duke said. "The woman who had the case. You know her."
"We know of her," the woman with the crossbow said.
"She's Cobra," the Duke said.
"She's been with them for a while," the crossbow woman confirmed. "Tonight wasn't the first time her work intersected with ours."
The Duke looked at the Cobra soldiers on the ground. Then at the case, which was sitting on the earth between him and the group.
Then at the group.
If they'd wanted the case, they had better options than a conversation. They'd had several of those options in the past fifteen minutes and had used none of them.
He lowered the weapon by ten degrees.
"Who sent you?" he said.
The man with the monocle stepped forward and placed a device in the ground — a narrow cylinder, self-standing, the specific compact profile of something designed to be carried and deployed quickly in field conditions.
"Someone wants to talk to you," the man said.
He pressed the activation point.
The projection materialized from the top of the device — not the polished holographic display of the franchise's more advanced technology, but the functional prototype of it, the image slightly unstable at the edges but clear enough at the center to communicate what it needed to communicate.
A man in a military uniform looked at the Duke through the projection with the specific quality of someone who was used to being the most senior person in a room and carried that habit in how he held himself even when the room was a holographic one.
"Name and unit," the man said.
"You go first," the Duke said.
The man's expression moved toward something that might, eventually, become amusement. "My team just pulled you out of a bad situation. That usually earns a name."
"I wasn't in a position to verify who pulled me out or why," the Duke said. "I'm still not."
"You're careful," the man said.
"I'm alive," the Duke said.
The man behind Ripcord — the sword-fighter in close tactical armor, who had materialized from the aircraft's drop and had been operating with the controlled efficiency of someone for whom this was routine — had a blade at Ripcord's neck. The Duke had clocked this when it happened and had determined it was restraint rather than threat — the specific positioning of someone managing a variable rather than eliminating it.
"Relax," the projection said, reaching behind himself — the imperfect holographic capture briefly showing the desk and the figure standing near it before the image stabilized — and producing a file. "I already know your name, Duke. I'm testing whether you'll give it."
The Duke waited.
"I'm General Hawk," the projection said. "You've heard the name."
"Frontline command," the Duke said. "You moved to a different assignment six months ago."
"A new team," General Hawk confirmed. "Dedicated to a specific threat category." He looked at the Duke steadily through the unstable image. "The people standing in that forest with you are part of that team. They've been running parallel to your operation tonight."
"Who attacked my convoy?" the Duke said.
"Two separate groups," General Hawk said. "We're still characterizing the first one. The second is the organization that sent Anna."
"She was Army," the Duke said.
"She made a different choice," General Hawk said. "Several years ago."
The Duke processed this.
"The case," the Duke said.
"You'll escort it," General Hawk said. "My people will accompany you. We have transport standing by. Better than whatever extraction your command can scramble tonight."
"I'm responsible for that case," the Duke said.
"Then you'll be responsible for it all the way to our facility," General Hawk said. "Where we can assess exactly what happened tonight and what it means." A pause. "Duke. You lost a convoy to something your briefings didn't prepare you for. That deserves a conversation."
The Duke looked at the case.
At the group around him.
At the projection.
He'd been a soldier long enough to know when a situation had moved past the point where standard protocols were the right framework. Tonight had moved past that point approximately twenty minutes after the first helicopter went down.
"The tracking device," he said to the man with the monocle.
"Standard precaution," the monocle man said. "Disable it and your position stays clean until we're mobile."
The Duke nodded.
He didn't lower the weapon entirely while it was done, but he didn't fire either.
The transport was better than the Duke's extraction would have been — the franchise's G.I. Joe aircraft, the specific equipment profile of a team that had been given resources commensurate with a threat category that wasn't being publicized. They moved fast and low, the flight path the kind that didn't show up in standard air traffic records.
The Duke sat with the case between his feet and watched Ripcord trying to have a conversation with the sword-fighter, who appeared to have no interest in conversation.
Outside the viewport, the night moved past in the specific way that nights moved past when you were traveling fast at low altitude — the terrain below compressed to a pattern, the context of where you'd been and where you were going reduced to the narrow present of the aircraft's interior.
"The first group," the Duke said to the crossbow woman, who was sitting across from him. "The armored soldiers with the old weapons. You said you're still characterizing them."
"Yes," she said.
"You have a theory," he said.
She looked at him. "The armor they were wearing was beyond anything in the current classified technology landscape. The weapons were deliberately outdated. The tactical approach was to absorb fire rather than avoid it, which is what you do when you have high confidence in your defense." She paused. "The aircraft that came in before us — the bat-shaped one. That was theirs."
"The aircraft that took apart my convoy," the Duke said.
"Yes," she said.
"And then left before you arrived," he said.
"Approximately four minutes before," she said.
The Duke thought about the specific sequence. The first group had taken his convoy apart with precision and restraint — no deaths, warhead documentation taken rather than the warhead, and then a conversation with him that had ended with a promise of a meeting and the documentation returned. The second group had arrived, run off Anna's Cobra team, and then coordinated his extraction to General Hawk's facility.
"They're separate organizations," he said.
"As far as we can tell," the crossbow woman said. "Their objectives tonight intersected without collision. That could mean coordination or compatible interests."
"The man who talked to me," the Duke said. "After the convoy. He said his name was Jake."
Something moved in the crossbow woman's expression — not recognition exactly, but the specific quality of someone noting that information was landing in a category that was already active.
"Dark Council," she said.
"That's what he said," the Duke confirmed. "You know the name."
"We're aware of it," she said. "The profile doesn't fit any existing organizational model. The operational footprint is — extensive in ways that don't have a coherent explanation in our current intelligence framework."
"He said he wanted access to the nanotechnology research team," the Duke said. "After a meeting with General Hawk."
The crossbow woman absorbed this.
"That's a specific request," she said.
"He was specific about everything," the Duke said. "Which is either very confident or very calculating."
"Possibly both," she said.
The aircraft began its descent.
Two thousand feet above the desert, the Batcraft held position.
Jake watched the G.I. Joe transport's flight path through the Red Queen's tracking system — the signal maintained at exactly the threshold between detectable and not, the stealth systems doing what they'd been designed to do.
"They're heading for the primary facility," the Red Queen said.
"I know," Jake said.
"The Duke gave them the Dark Council's name."
"Expected," Jake said. "He's thorough."
"General Hawk is going to brief his team before the meeting," she said. "The briefing will be based on incomplete information, which means their initial assessment of us will have gaps."
"That's why the meeting happens in person," Jake said. "Gaps close faster in person."
Selene was in the rear section, reviewing the Cobra energy weapon data she'd collected during the engagement. She'd been running the analysis since the engagement ended and was producing results that were making Zola very interested, based on the messages he'd been sending through the base's communications channel.
"The nanotech documentation," the Red Queen said. "Zola has completed the initial review."
"And?" Jake said.
"He describes it as the most significant materials science advance he's seen outside of a high-tier dimensional world." A pause that carried the specific quality of the Red Queen noting something she found interesting. "He also said, and I'm quoting directly, 'tell the boss I want to build things with this immediately.'"
"Tell him the building comes after the analysis," Jake said.
"He anticipated that response," the Red Queen said. "He said the analysis will take forty-eight hours and he intends to start building on hour forty-nine."
Jake looked at the desert below, at the G.I. Joe transport disappearing into the base's approach corridor.
"Tell him that's acceptable," Jake said.
"He'll be very pleased," the Red Queen said.
Matilda appeared from the rear section with her notebook. She'd been quiet for the past hour, which the Red Queen's monitoring suggested was because she'd been writing rather than sleeping.
"The G.I. Joe team," she said. "The franchise establishes them as one of the most capable special operations units in their world."
"Yes," Jake said.
"And you want them as allies," she said.
"In the specific sense I described to Selene," Jake said. "Operational alignment without dependency."
"Which means," Matilda said, "that at some point they're going to need something that we have and we're going to provide it, and the relationship moves from introductory to established."
Jake looked at her.
"When did you start thinking in those terms?" he said.
"I've been around you long enough," she said, with the specific dignity of someone who had absorbed a methodology by proximity and was now applying it.
Princess, who had been asleep on Matilda's shoulder and had apparently not been asleep, opened one eye.
"Cobra is the more immediate concern," the cat said. "Anna. Her access to MARS Industries technology. The accelerator suits specifically."
Jake looked at Princess.
"The suits are the next acquisition target," Jake said.
"I know," Princess said. "I'm confirming that you know."
"I know," Jake said.
Princess closed the eye.
Matilda looked at the cat with the expression of someone who had long since stopped being surprised by Princess and had moved directly to appreciation.
"When do we go to the G.I. Joe base?" Matilda said.
"When General Hawk responds to the meeting request," Jake said.
"And if he doesn't respond?" she said.
"He will," Jake said.
"How do you know?" she said.
"Because the Duke is thorough," Jake said, "and the Duke is going to give him a complete and accurate account of tonight, and Hawk is going to read that account and understand that not knowing more about the Dark Council is a gap he can't leave open."
Matilda considered this.
"The Duke liked you," she said.
"He respected the approach," Jake said. "That's different from liking."
"Sometimes," Matilda said, "it's the same thing."
Jake looked at the desert below — the G.I. Joe base somewhere in it, the franchise's world doing what franchise worlds did, moving through the narrative that had been established for it, and somewhere in that movement a point where the Dark Council's interests and the narrative's direction were going to intersect.
He banked the Batcraft and set course for the Wasteland.
The night continued around them, unhurried and full of things to do.
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