Kaitiln thought for a second, pondering over what she could do with this AI. "All right then, where do you want to go today?"

A doctor briefly popped into Angel's room, stuck him with a needle, then left.

Angel's remaining eye twitched furiously.

"The one annoying part about medical nanites is that you can feel them moving."

"Jus' one reason why I don't let 'em use 'em on me..." Wraith remarks.

***

Surprised when she doesn't find Wraith in his room, Scrya then starts looking for him in the hallways, checking with several doctors and nurses and searching a few rooms. Finally, she heads for Angel's room to ask if he's seen Wraith anywhere.

And she ends up finding him.

"Angel...?" she asks, knocking softly on the door before going in. "Have you seen--? Oh, Wraith..."

She enters carefully and shuts the door behind her, being quiet for their sake. Wraith takes one look at her and knows she doesn't feel good. "You don' look so hot... you okay?"

"Uh..." She glances between Angel and Wraith, keeping her hands on the doorknob behind her. Swaying gently in place, she flashes a smile and looks down, laughing softly and saying, "I'll be fine..."

Looking back up and walking over slowly, she then asks them, "What about you two? You gonna be all right?"

(A day or so earlier...)

There was very little noise as he put the hapless agent into a sleeper hold. The knife in Devin's left hand reversed itself, its serrated edge resting against his victim't throat. Oh sure, it might not kill him... but it would be very, very unwise to try and struggle free, nonetheless. His victim's hand reached into his coat for a weapon, so Devin decided to help the poor man by drawing it for him.

It was a nasty little piece of work. Czech Skorpion, rechambered to fire 9mm pistol. The weight suggested Hydra-Shok hollowpoints - minute spectral analysis via his nostrils and augmented brain confirmed it.

Just like old times. No, not like old times...

The forest rustled. Half a dozen trenchcoated men emerged from the bush and surrounded him. All were armed with mirrorshades and ugly black Skorpion machine pistols like the one his victim had had. In thedim moonlight, filtered through the trees, Devin almost didn't need to hear them clicking their safeties off.

Old times would never have had you surrounded by six armed and very hostile men.

"Back off!" Devin shouted. "Or I swear to the God I don't believe in, he's going to die!"

Lightning flashed, and thunder rolled... rolled a natural twenty, it would seem, judging by the cacophony that followed which set everyone flinching. Devin silently reminded himself not to blaspheme any more as he flicked his "commandeered" Skorpion's safety off and sent three rounds downrange, striking the center mass of the agents' leader. He grinned as the rounds replaced the red laser dot of the weapon's laser aiming module with bloody blossoms of their own, then realized that if he had one of those, it would also be highly likely that his opponents had them as well.

Devin ducked behind his victim just as a fusillade of rounds thudded into the man's chest, using the ambulatory corpse as a makeshift tower shield as he rushed the nearest agent, and he was gratified to hear an "oof" as he bowled over his new victim. He rolled aside just as his partner came in with a vicious steel-toed kick that missed taking Devin's ear off by half an inch, and the nano-augmented man stunned the agent with a kidney punch to the rear.

The other four agents had spread out in pairs, seeking cover. But Devin had cover of his own, and the thing was, he was a better shot than they were.

There were three staccato blasts, then a bout of vicious cursing as the Skorpion Devin was carrying suffered a chamber explosion.

"Fucking worthless conversions!"

Devin's right hand was currently useless. He let his human shield take a few more hits, then he activated his augs, and he was in one man's face almost before the latter knew it. You couldn't blame him, though. Lack of practice.

Devin's snake-swift stab to the neck was practiced, though, practiced so much that he was already killing the second man before the corpse of the first hit the ground. A pair of laser aiming dots glided over his arm.

But Devin was no longer there. You had to give the agents credit, though. They were smooth and controlled - scanning the surroundings, actually seeing what was there instead of what they wanted to see. In fact, they were so good that one of them almost reacted in time to Devin dropping from a nearby branch on top of one of them.

The one below the ex-SEAL crumpled like a piece of crushed paper, and Devin yanked hard on the other's weapon hand, hyperextending the elbow and shoulder joints, then he seized and twisted the wrist hard and around, breaking it with a crunch, before squeezing the trigger and killing the man with his own gun. Then, not being one to waste ammunition, he offed the last survivor with the same pistol.

He looked around at the seven corpses. Not bad. But in the old days, this would never have happened. For one, he'd have killed them all before they were even aware of him.

One of the "corpses" groaned. Devin answered with a double-tap of Hydra-Shok. The agent died without further noise.

And he'd have made sure that they were ALL dead...

He tucked a Skorpion into his belt. This was big news. He had to get it back to the guys, and quickly.

******

(Present day...)

Behind Scrya and Wraith, the doorknob turned slowly. Devin let himself in with a grace that would have made your average ninja sound like a brass band.

What he had found was important, but it could wait for his comrades.

"Okay, Devin? That right there was some seriously spooky shit."

Angel leaned back in his bed then said, "Well, to answer your question Scrya, Wraith here'll be up and running within the week. I've stuck here until I can walk, my psych evaluation is done, and my massive internal injuries have healed. And by the way: Devin, I love you man. I owe you. Big time."

OOC: Now expressing temp GM powers to move things along...

As the raven vanished into thin air, Kaitiln took a quick look around. "Let's go," she said to Monk, "We've probably been here too long"

***

Back in Mastermind's fortress, an alarm went off. "What now?" Mastermind asked nobody in particular. One of his hacker/technician programs, named OPTIK-NERVE, answered

"Sir, we've detected intruders in the Cyber-Maui facility. Apparently they hacked into our communications grid. Analysis of the spike used to hack in is consistent of Cyber Force design."

"Do they have the location of our main base?"

"Unknown. They did not manage to trace the messages back here...but there was that business in Los Angeles..."

"Whatever happened in Los Angeles is irrelevant, OPTIK-NERVE," Mastermind said. "How many intruders in the Cyber Maui comms facility?"

"Two sir. There was a dampening field earlier that prevented confimration, but there are two Cyber Force units currently inside the facility...and attempting to leave it."

"Send a team of Assassins to take them down!"

"Affirmative, sir."

***

Heading down the hallway to the gap in the wall that they had entered in, Kaitiln said. "Looks like we're in the clear"

6 First Order assassins appeard around Monk and Kaitiln, various pistols and submachine guns drawn.

"That's what you think," one of them said.

OOC: Once I drag MC back here, the fight shalt be written!

(( I'd say, "Good GOLLY Jesus, 6 in the Cyber World??!" but then I realize they might have the Uber Powers I imagine for CW FO folk (i.e., nothing special between there and RW), so then I say, "Oh... :)" ))

Scrya looks over to Devin as Angel finishes speaking, and cuts in before he can answer Angel. "Your mission go good?"

"It went okay. That's the good news. Here's the bad news..."

He moved closer to them, before retrieving a sheaf of papers from his coat.

"I don't know what they told you guys, but apparently Javelin, the entire weapons system, is not just a single satellite. For one thing, it would be too easy to track and shoot down - antisatellite missiles are particularly good at tracking down objects in geosynchronous orbit, which is what Javelin would have to be able to do if it were to provide effective coverage for the United States. Therefore, it uses refracted emissions and sealed beam..."

He paused.

"Am I using technical language without knowing it again? I apologize. I read too much stuff that's not relevant for a bio major."

"Okay, once more from the top. Javelin's a giant pulse laser cannon, embedded in mountains somewhere even these documents don't say. On command, it fires a beam that is received by "splitter" satellites, codenamed Medusa, which serve to amplify, split and retarget the secondary beams onto incoming threats. It's kind of like a substation in the power grid."

"Once Javelin is activated, subsidiary satellites, codenamed Perseus, will deploy from their disguises as commercial satellites into giant mirrors, which gives the system nearly global coverage. And while the small beams aren't too worrying, the Medusa splitters are very troubling. There's nearly two dozen of them floating in the sky, and each of them can channel the full power of the original Javelin."

"How bad is that?" Angel asked.

"How bad? Let's just say that the beams from the Perseus satellites are judged as being able to pierce nuclear silos and superheat the interior until the missile fuel explodes. And that is a split beam - barely a hundredth of the power of the original. The original... Well, apparently they slaved four fusion reactors to it, and during every firing sequence, they still had to pull power from external sources to keep it up. Within seconds it can eradicate a city from the face of the earth like the vengeful gaze of God Himself."

"Whoa."

"That's not the half of it. Javelin literally cuts the sky open every time it fires. There was a little-known Soviet ABM system called the Sarishagan Tiger - it bombarded the ionosphere with ionizing radiation, until they punched a hole in it. The idea was that you could induce an electrical current in missile fuel tanks and induce them to explode in orbit. However, they terminated that project after it was discovered that the Tiger devastated the ozone layer and let all kinds of cosmic radiation through in the wake of its activations."

Devin stopped and took a drink from his hip flask, flipping through his notes as he did so.

"So they discontinued research, but the Javelin team resurrected it. Javelin's laser is tightly bound in a magnetic field to keep it from degrading in the atmosphere. The ionosphere interferes with this sealing, so they' used a massive radio telescope - capable of the outputs of the Sarishagan Tiger - built around the heart of Javelin, in order to rip a hole through the ionosphere each time they fired. However, the Perseus satellites also contain miniature Tigers to "open" a path to their land-bound targets. Why is this bad? Well, the increased radiation, heat and light let through will completely change the face of the local climate. UV rays will cause skin cancer and kill crops and prevent rains. There's probably a whole slew of other ecological effects this is going to have, which I have no inclination to think about."

"The cure is worse than the disease, it would seem."

"Well, when you're threatened with all your cities becoming massive pyres of thermonuclear radiation, a little skin cancer and localized droughts, don't sound like big sacrifices to make, especially when said disasters occur in the countries of the people who are bent on turning you and yours into piles of glowing ash."

"But still-"

"Look, I'm not going to speculate WHAT they were thinking when they developed Javelin, all right? All I know is that this situation is Very Fucking Bad Shit, and when I use that kind of SEAL technical language with reference to local conditions, ladies and gentlemen, you know that it is indeed exactly what I say it is."

"All right, control systems..."

"The system is very advanced, and they've got it all together and working on automatic, because let's be honest, no human, not even an augmented one, can react effectively to the threats presented to them by a mass nuclear launch. So they slaved it to an AI. I think it was called Panopticon. Panopticon takes orders in one fashion only - via a series of access codes that serve to encrypt/decrypt its commands."

"And these are the codes J2 and Beowulf were carrying in their heads."

"I got it, Devin. About us."

"What are we, Angel?"

"Royally screwed."

"That's why we're going to stop Mastermind instead of trying to turn this thing off," Scrya says bluntly. "Speaking of which... Wolf might have some information that we can use, that he got from one of our contacts... I don't know though, he's the only one who's looked at it so far."

(( This being post 99, maybe this's a good place to stop and wait for BG to get back from her holidays...? ))