On the night before, the teams began assembling at the armory. They brought their own weapons, excepting the few specialized pieces that had to be unlocked and distributed. Gladii were the standard, or a quama for the heavy-weapons and demolitions specialists. Each saddle carried a spoatha in the right-side sheath, and a sabre on the left. All night the compound echoed with the ringing grind of weapons being honed to battle-touch.
At dawn the next morning they rode out. Nækos Servaya, the Swordsman, led, with Fencing Angel at his side. Close behind followed the elite strike force Aiovus. There were only two things on the mind of each of the three dozen warriors: The safe return of Moonitic and WebMaster Craig, and the destruction of the hive. Anything that happened in the meantime, anything they did to achieve these didn’t matter.
For now, they were dressed as civilians, bright and obvious. The weapons and armor lay concealed under saddles, blankets, etc. on the cart in the rear. To a passer-by, they looked like a serious band of…civilians, anyway. A few chatted quietly through the day, calming nerves and ironing out tactics. Nækos remained silent, brooding on the rescue of his sworn lady, the scribe. Willow had assured him as he left that she was still well, but he knew how quickly that could change, especially if her outgoing messages were discovered. He longed to hurry, to push his mount into a sprint all the way there, but he knew the result this would have on his equine friend, and the importance of the timing. He continued in tense silence until the sun began to set, and they neared the borders of the fencingsucks domain. A few minutes into dusk, and they had reached the edge of a small borderland forest. Entering the cover of the trees, the horses were undressed of their disguises. The men stripped to the basic uniform: long black pants and a high-collared black tunic.
First came the armor, hurriedly unpacked and sent down the line. This was according to personal preference, fighting style, and weapons loadout. Two on each team carried massive, armor-cleaving falchions and broadswords; they were encased in leather, maile, and plate. The demolitions specialists, two on the attack force, carried plate. Most, fitted with gladii and a lightsword, wore a maile shirt and jointed, stiff-leather leg covers. The two or three most elite from each team, including Naekos Servaya and Fencing Angel, wore a light stiff-leather top, covered in fittings for weaponry, and no other armor. These were the ones who used two weapons, and relied on their speed to remain safe. These were the ones who would decide the fight.
Naekos was one of the first ready, well practiced in his routine from nearly twenty years of the same setup. The leather top was contoured to his body, jointed near his waist to allow full movement. The pair of gladii went over his back, the straps of the sheaths doubling as bandoliers on the front. On each of these bandoliers were sheathed a half-dozen throwing knives and a packet of stars. Two fist knives were on each shoulder, broad bladed and molded to his palm and fingers. A katar hung from the center of his stomach, the handle facing the right, on top. An eighteen-inch quama was sheathed upside down along his spine, under the back of his armor. Three daggers sat ready in the sewn-in sheaths of the legs of his thick pants. And, of course, a boot knife in each boot. When the whole force was ready, he cinched every strap and harness tight, then turned to go. Reconsidering, he took two more small knives, laid the sheaths along his forearms, and laced them tight with a crisscross of leather straps. Then, with Fencing Angel again at his side and the force behind them, he started running forward through the trees.
A dozen border guards were spread out in the trees along the border. These were quickly dispatched with a broken neck; the romanticized slit throat would be too noisy.
Naekos and Fencing Angel ran quickly through the trees, bouncing lightly from rock to root with tensed muscles, avoiding all possible sound. Not a weapon clinked as they sat snugly in their sheaths. Behind them flitted the rest of the force, slipping through the forest like ghosts in the darkness, shade on shadows.
At the edge of the trees, the leaders stopped, and around them the force coalesced, like some deadly black mist congealing. Naekos took a small packet off his back and unfastened the ties, revealing them to be the clasps of a dead-black cloak. Fencing Angel mirrored this, and the two were now like formless shadows. Just ahead was the first node of the complex. The force approached.
“Okay, guys, here it is.” Naekos spoke barely in whisper. “When this thing goes, all hell breaks loose. Get ready.” He paused, and the liquid mass of his detachment separated as if parted by Moses himself. A third of them went to Fencing Angel, the rest gathered around him. He pointed to Saberbaby03. “Let’s go see what they’ve got.”
The entrance to the node was unguarded. Saberbaby03 approached the door and briefly examined the lock panel. “Let’s see how good their security is…” She punched “fencingsux” into the panel, and the door opened. A low chuckle murmured through the two teams. “Disgusting. It’s an insult to my skills!”
Inside was a bank of servers and a single terminal. “My territory now.” Naekos accessed the building’s router, dumped its config, rebooted to bypass the passwords, then reloaded the config before the change could be noticed. Then he sent out a sniffer to show him the status of the complex. “Oh, crap, man…that’s why they called it a hive.”
“What?” Saberbaby03.
“Fully meshed network. There are seven main nodes like this one, with twenty-one backbone links connecting each one to each other. One goes down, an alarm goes out without doing much damage. And I can’t bring them down from here.”
Outside, he repeated his conclusions to the teams “Angel team, Craig is over in the central complex. We’ll blow this place, then follow you over there. We’ll have a few minutes, since they’ll just send a tech to investigate at first. After that, who knows.”
“So, we just get Craig?” Fencing Angel sounded disappointed.
“Yes, then you get out, and don’t look back. We’ll probably be right behind you. Craig is priority number one, the most important mission.”
“You say so…”
“Yes, I do. Now. Piy koo. Let’s go.” Naekos nodded to ledgerto, his demolitions expert.
“With pleasure, sir.” Ledgerto pulled the war hammer off her sash, then headed inside and closed the door. A few minutes later the reappeared, grinning maniacally, followed by acrid smoke, eyebrows singed.
“Right then. Let’s get to it.”
They moved straight to the center hub. Angel Team was about to go for Craig when several dozen, almost a hundred Fencingsucks troops poured into the space, armed with a myriad of weaponry, mostly old broadswords.
Instantly the central black mass turned half silver in the moonlight as over twenty weapons appeared. The fight was vicious but short, leaving the Fencingsucks troops dead and three of the commandos wounded, one seriously. Naekos and Fencing Angel were untouched, save for the nicks and blood on their weapons.
“Okay, now it’s real. Get Craig, and get out of here!”
Two more groups of Fencingsucks troops were gathering just in visual range on either side.
“You don’t have enough! You can’t take this place out and still get Moon, let alone escape!”
“Fencing Angel, go…”
“You can’t make it, and you’re running us out of time! C’mon! We’ve hurt them, we’ll finish them later when we have Craig!”
“You’re running us out of time, now GET OUT OF HERE!!” Fencing Angel stood his ground. “Time’s up! Get Craig and get out, we’ll clean up!”
Naekos turned and charged the larger force, ripping straight through, leaving a few dazed Fencingsucks troops behind, wondering which way to run.
Naekos and his team raced to the next node. He nodded to ledgerto, who smashed in the door and tossed a charge inside. They were almost to the next one when the first erupted. They repeated the process, then headed toward a rather large building. That’s when they saw why the last two nodes had been easy.
Just ahead was a huge group, probably around sixty, of Fencingsucks troops. They stood in ordered rows in front of the door to the large building that the team was approaching. Then the door opened.
Two guards man-handled Moonitic through the door, roughly shoving her into the ranks of soldiers. She turned and slapped one, and received a hard punch in the stomach in return. As she doubled over, only for a second, Naekos’ teeth locked together, and his hands started shaking. Then a dozen or so of the guards broke off, dragging Moonitic with them.
Naekos turned to his team, which had seen the same thing, and were primed and ready. “You guys take care of this group,” he indicated the approaching larger force, “I’m going after Moonitic and the other group. When you get through with these guys, blow the building, take another two nodes, and get out. Don’t think about me, I’ll be fine.” The team nodded, grinning at the prospect of taking out the guys who’d given Moonitic trouble.
Naekos turned and set off running towards Moonitic’s group, hearing the sounds of drawn weapons and then battle behind him. He caught up to his objective quickly, but they had already reached another building, and it appeared, taken Moonitic inside. One of the upstairs windows had a light in it, and Naekos looked up just in time to see Moonitic reel from a vicious backhand. His blood turned to ice.
He kept walking towards the entrance, and the dozen or so guards clustered tightly around it, swords out. Naekos pulled out his right-hand gladius, then the katar, his face a mask of hatred and cold determination. He continued moving, the weighted hem of his cloak floating just above the ground behind him.
Reaching the first pair of guards, he blocked and cleared both of their weapons, cut the right one across the face, stabbed the left with the katar, and kept moving. Now he was in the thick of them. He stabbed one with the katar, extended the blades, then left it there in its new sheath and the other gladius, blocking another blade as he did so. He spun, cut, blocked, kicked, slashed, all the time fighting towards the door. The hem of his cloak acted like a net, and he blocked, then grabbed and threw two weapons this way. Then, a few slow seconds later, he was inside before the last of the guards could reach him, and slammed the door behind. Running up the first flight of stairs he came to, he found a guard sitting outside a large door, smoking. Naekos cut off the cigarette, then kicked the surprised guard in the neck, crushing his trachea. After a minute or two, the guard finally died of suffocation, while Naekos was already inside.
He came through the door in a high garde, then quickly sheathed when he saw that Moonitic was the only occupant off the room. He executed a quick back-lunge, then dropped his left knee to the floor so that he was kneeling low on one knee. Spreading the cloak about him with his arms, he lowered his upper body until it rested horizontal on his front thigh. “My lady, Naekos Servaya at your will. I humbly beseech thy generous pardon for my belated arrival.”
“Granted as requested. Please rise, Swordsman.”
He stood up then, and saw her for the first time in weeks. She appeared near tears in happiness, and was grinning broadly. Despite the ragged clothing, rough treatment, and having been forced to fence for endless hours in bad equipment with blind and moronic directors, Naekos could see that she retained every degree of her customary dignity and beauty. He also noticed a strange likeness to his cousin. “M’lady, we must go. Dawn will bring bad times for those of us left here.” He guided her back down to the entrance, then stopped. Removing his cloak, he wrapped it around her, joining the clasps at her left shoulder. He then drew both gladii again, but hesitated, noting how much prettier the cloak was on her shoulders, and how much more beautiful she was wearing a black cloak. He was surprised it was even possible for her to be more beautiful. She raised an eyebrow at him, and he turned and opened the door. No guards were left outside; probably none of them wanted to be around when he returned. He escorted Moonitic quickly along the empty paths, hearing the distant sounds of a fight. Coming to the woods he had entered through, he stopped.
“My lady, continue that way and you will eventually find several horses. Take whichever you wish, and return to Arconia. I will rejoin my forces.”
“Naekos, come with me. You don’t know if your forces are even still there. They may have left earlier.”
“M’lady, I must return to them. If that was their exit which I heard earlier, I will follow.”
“And if that was their defeat you heard earlier, and you come to the place to find them all dead or captured, and then you are, too? Or you come to the place, and the last thing you see before being surrounded and killed is their exiting backs? I cannot allow you to go.”
“My lady, your will is my order, but I beseech thee...”
She got the expression of an impatient mother. “And you would leave your sworn lady to wander the forest in the dark, then, if she even found the horses, to try and return safely home without first being robbed or killed, or worse?”
He couldn’t argue with her. He only hoped that his team had somehow rejoined Fencing Angel’s, that Craig had been rescued and that they could get out and back to Arconia. And if he could meet up with them on the way back, all the better. “Very well. Let us go.”
He took Moonitic’s hand, and entered the forest, guiding her through and towards the waiting horses as a red dawn broke through the trees. It had been a long night.
------------------
Nækos, leader of elite Aiovan Strike Force
"You can run, but you'll only die tired". -Michael Anson
[This message has been edited by Swordsman (edited 05-21-2001).]
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