Book 2: Chapter 47: The Raid (1/2)
The large gymnasium loomed in the distance, its tall ceiling and thick concrete walls giving it the air of a slumbering giant. It lay at the center of an elevated parking lot, high above the flood zone, towering over all it surveyed. Cornelius Graham observed it from a block away and twenty feet down, feeling uncomfortably close to a mouse beneath an elephant.
His team waited behind him, most of them gearing up for the upcoming raid. Three more teams, Beta, Charlie, and Delta, convened along similar corners, boxing in their target. The full force of the Austin Police Department was leveled on this single building. Twenty-nine officers—Beta's team leader was still missing, a puzzle they all hoped might be solved with this operation—all highly trained and equipped with cutting edge upgrades. It might be overkill, but the enemy had at least one Natural.
Cornelius would have liked to have had Gregoir on this, but something about the man's power made it literally impossible for him to move quietly. His presence stuck out like a sore thumb; Gregoir couldn't sneak up on a deaf bat. For an operation like this, where surprise was absolutely vital, the big fellow would only be a hindrance. The whole point was that there wouldn't be a fight. This wasn't an engagement with Coldeyes' Crew, two forces battling it out in honorable combat, this was an execution, bloody, efficient, and final. Prisoners were just gravy.
Tracking down the Crew's safehouse had been tremendously irritating. Dunkirk had proven dangerously obstinate, refusing to share so much as a single scrap of information, and practically obstructing the APD's own investigation with whatever obstacles his waning influence could conjure. Cornelius couldn't fathom what was going through the mind of the man, if he had any kind of coherent strategy, or had simply reached the end of his rope and had decided to lash out at anyone and everyone nearby.
It was the retired Agent Valentine, young Freya's paternal grandfather and an old family friend, who had come through for the department. The Bering field office's armory had been raided, the contents of which the APD were not privy too, and Dunkirk refused to speak on. The reason for that quickly became apparent, as the senior Valentine revealed just how badly Dunkirk had fucked up.
Andros Bartholomew was largely immune to physical injury. His ability—Cornelius still weren't sure if he was a Natural or some kind of strange mutate—granted him enviable regeneration and no need for sleep. Traditional 'hard' interrogation techniques were all but useless on him, and the softer touch had proven impossible due to the man's sheer derangement. Cornelius had worried that the terrorist would spill the beans about Newman's involvement in his capture, but apparently Bartholomew had remained entirely silent for the duration of his imprisonment.
So Dunkirk, faced with the choice of sending away his prize to a specialist at Langley, thus losing standing and status, or improvising something devious, went with what came natural to him. He had requested a weapon from the Artificer's arsenal, the government sponsored Genius who had designed a variety of hyper-specialized equipment for black ops teams. The Genius himself was long dead, a victim of his own upgrade like so many of his kind, but his weapons and designs remained.
There weren't many left. Artificer had a deviant mind. He had been a sadist, who'd enjoyed the suffering his creations caused. Much of his stock had been purged in the aftermath of his death, when the details of his inventions had been leaked to the press by a politician looking to make hay. Some remained, nonlethal weaponry that might someday be understood by someone without a Genius upgrade and applied to a more civilized use. Waste not, as the saying goes.
Dunkirk acquired one of these nonlethal devices and had presumably attempted to use it during Bartholomew's interrogation. The thing was essentially a gun that shot pain. Cornelius could only speculate at this point, but he suspected Andros Bartholomew was entirely immune to pain in his vaporous form, and Dunkirk lacked any way to force the man corporeal. The weapon sat, unused and unutilized, in the field office armory, until it was stolen on the day of the gang war.
Artificer's designs could not be replicated. He was hardly unique in that fashion, many a Genius' created miracles that could not be understood by any mind but their own. While some used modern science to create, others, like Artificer, directly forged cosmic energy into their creations. These meta-materials are entirely unique to their creator, emitting a unique energy signature at all times. This was something that could be tracked, but any criminal canny enough to steal such a device would certainly keep it in a shielded room.
Enter Sergeant Kaneda Ito.
Over two decades ago, the surly officer had been called in to the aftermath of a bootleg cosmic generator gone critical. There, he had rescued a young Gregoir Pierre-Louise, who had clung to the older man like a deranged limpet. Ito had been so traumatized by the experience, that, within three months of meeting Gregoir, Ito had put in a request for a prototype energy spectro...something—Cornelius killed people, he didn't science—so that, in Ito's own words, ”...such a thing could never happen to me again.”
The city had been a very different place at the time. Cosmic generators were far more common, and the department had been considering investing in miniature sensors that could be mounted in police cruisers. They were little more than extremely precise Geiger counters, not good for more than a block or two, and were both expensive and fragile. They could pick up a wide range of signatures, but had to be tuned to each specific wavelength.