"The barracks. You need sleep."
And she did. It was a long night, and though she was awoken in the morning by Three's incessant calling for recruits to hurry out of the mess, it was a productive sleep. She joined the group exiting the barracks, and fell in line, heading down through the corridors to the main training room.
The main training room was a long but narrow cavern supported by pillars every ten feet or so, the smooth-cut stone reflecting the light from the roof lamps to illuminate the entire space. There were a mix of training implements- mats, a collection of obstacles at the far end of the cavern, a door leading to an area simply marked 'Town', a small firing range, and various martial arts gear, as well as two casting dummies jammed into a corner. Three lined the recruits up before shouting "Attention!"
Once everyone was still- about half a second, she relaxed and began to pace as she spoke. "Hello all. Today, we have ourselves a new recruit. She is to be called Mern. A number will be assigned if and when she joins the ranks of the Agents. Training will continue as usual, though I will be absent for the first section so that I can figure out just where she stands in regard to you. Go to your stations," she said before walking over to Mern and leading her to an unoccupied mat.
"So, tell me what you can and can't do," Three said, looking Mern in the eye.
Mern paused to think. It took her a minute, but she did come up with an answer. "I can shoot fairly well, fight decently, evade very well, and have been trained in the basics of diplomacy and infiltration," she answered.
Three nodded. "Is that all?"
"All that matters. I am not magically gifted, for the record."
"Fair enough. I think we can get you started. Talk to the trainers over in the back and tell them to get you up to speed 'As fast as possible'."
It was a very tough workout.
It was, however, worth it, and Mern could tell after the first minute that she did, in fact, require the training. Thus began many weeks of grueling work, practice, drills, and regulated hours. She at least got to see her brother, though, and that was more than enough on its own to keep her going.
It was three months before they were done.
That was the basic training, yes, but that was also enough for them to be field-ready. They met Three separately the last day of their training, to talk one last time in the context of training with their instructor. Her brother's talk was fairly brief, and as she was next in line, which happened to be the last spot in line, she was next.
She walked into the room and closed the door behind her, taking a seat as offered. Three looked her over, nodded to herself, and sat up straight before speaking. "Well, Mern, you're done. Training is finished. You have good marks. We're ready to send you into the field. But let me ask you one question: are you ready?"
"Yes," she replied automatically.
"Let me rephrase the question. Are you psychologically and emotionally prepared to accept the fact that we can and will send you and your brother and separate missions, often in danger of life and limb?"
She paused, thinking it over. After a while, she nodded slowly, replying, "Yes. It's hard, knowing that I'm basically going to war, but I am ready."
"Okay then," three said, leaning forward, "Go do it. Prove us right, that you can do this. Because we think you can, and so does your brother. So, are you ready?"
"Yes."
With that, she left the room, turning to say "Thank you," before closing the door and turning to face her brother. "I'm ready," she said, looking him in the eye.
"I'm glad to hear that," he replied, wrapping an arm around her and walking her to the mess hall.
Chapter 3
The first assignment came a week later. Mostly without warning, the buzzer had rung in her room and a voice had requested her presence in the briefing room. Eager, she carefully put aside the pistol she was cleaning after range work earlier that day, and walked straight out the room to meet her assignment.
Her brother wasn't there, but there were three others, leading to a total of four on the mission. She took a seat in one of the carved chairs and waited, looking over the others as she waited. There was Four, a shorter girl who had a very cold disposition, and had seen far more fighting than most recruits, despite lacking any visible scars, Seven, a tall boy of decent musculature who was probably the best talker out of all of them, and Six, an twenty-something man who had joined with this class, having been promoted out of some other intelligence organization.
And then there was her. Mern Therin, number Nine in the class, last to arrive and last to pass the tests. Trained at first by her parents and then by Three, drillmaster extraordinaire. And more than ready to do something.
It wasn't One doing the briefing, but Five, the first of the men other than Seven that she had met. Wandering into the room, he set down a small packet of papers, plugged a flash drive into the projector in the front of the room. Turning it on, he leaned back in a chair as the wall lit up with an array of colors before blacking out and returning with the first slide of a presentation.
"Welcome all, to your first mission. I am Five-A. I will be your mission controller for this operation, so play nice please. I would like for all of you to return intact. Now, as for the mission, we're talking simple reconnaissance here. Something on the fringes of the Thern border, just inside where we suspect they might be building a missile base or something equally threatening. So, we want you to go look."
He hit the button for the next slide and started handing out the papers from the packet. "So, baseline rules. These papers don't leave this room. If you have any questions on-mission, ask me. I can and will be communicating with you during the mission." Pointing at the large map on-screen, he continued. "You'll leave here tomorrow at 2300 hours, and should arrive close to the location by 2600 hours. The stealth carrier will drop you in quiet, so that should solve any issues had with crossing the border, unless of course you're forced to do that to escape, which I do not recommend. Mainly because it means you've been caught, but also because it puts you in a very nasty position. The reason we're sending people in instead of a satellite, though, before you ask, is because there are trucks heading there and back, but we can't actually see where they arrive or what they're doing there. The trucks themselves are also shielded, so if you can get an idea for what they're carrying, that would be nice.
The main goal, though, is to actually get a look at what the facility is intended to be. No disabling it, no eliminating the personnel there, even if you could. We don't want them knowing we know. As for sending data back and forth, we'll have you in direct-beam radio contact so long as you don't enter the covered zone. From there on out, you'll want to film what you're up to with the cameras built into your uniforms. Getting inside the facility is not needed. We don't want to risk you guys on a mission like that first time out. Are we clear on what
we want and don't want you to do?"
Everybody nodded, reading over the packets as they stood and left the room, packets left safely behind on the tables. Five stopped Mern on the way out, a hand on her shoulder. "Just one thing, Mern. Be careful out there. Don't go too far in, and try to keep the others from doing the same. Because if you can keep yourself from going overboard out there, I think we can trust the others to do the same. The first mission is the most dangerous. People overreach themselves, try to do too much. Try not to let that happen, okay?"
"Okay," she replied, thinking of her brother. "I'll keep it in mind."
He gave her a serious look. "Thank you."
They spent the rest of the day gearing up for the mission, checking and double-checking their stealth gear and their plan for scouting the area. They actually spent more time than normal on the task, but as it was their first mission, it only made sense. Five was more than happy with their preparations, though and they left the next evening without delay.
The flight itself was uneventful, the crew taking one of the small stealth jets out to the task, encountering no rough weather but plenty of cloud cover. As a matter of fact, the flight was so uneventful that they started to get worried.
Nothing was up, though, and as the flight crossed into Thern airspace, no target lock warnings sounded, no explosions ripped through the air, nothing. Just a clean, smooth descent into enemy territory. The ship descended fully only once they were in an area with few sentries and cameras and the jammers were working properly. It would be unreasonable for the ship itself to land and stir up a cloud, but they distance was small enough that they could quickrope down, and so they did, landing and going prone on the grass, covering the area.
They didn't have their weapons out- there was no need to, as the silenced pistols were of no real use at the range they would likely be seeing enemies at, and they didn't plan on dealing with them anyway, but that was beside the point. Making sure their camouflage was arranged correctly, they began the long, slow crawl towards the target site.
It was an unfortunate consequence of the security measures suspected to be in place that faster movement was impossible, but the fact that they could get close without detection while not using jamming gear was a relief, as it wasn't prone to the problems caused by checks where the security system would randomly look into cameras to detect interference. The scatter suits and the infrared shielding did their job plenty well enough, and while the camera tower mounts were intimidating, they also seemed to pose no problem, if the lack of any interference was anything to go by.
It was two hours before they made it to their destination, around 0200 in the morning. The facility itself was a nondescript complex of grey brick buildings, surrounded by a slight distortion that made up the anti-viewing field. Turning off their communicators, the team waited just outside the border of the field and waited, the road just to their left. Four pairs of anti-reflective binoculars came out, and the scheduled delivery came and hour later around 0300, having left them some time to look over the base and inch closer.
The delivery consisted of four large semis trailing a cloud of dust behind them, the dull metal trailers windowless and reinforced. While it was impossible to see what was inside from that angle, the group simply waited as the trucks approached the docking bays. It seemed that to unload, the trucks couldn't be pulled inside for whatever reason, and while they were under an awning, the fence and security systems didn't stop the binoculars from seeing.
They couldn't see much, but it was more than enough. Long, tubular objects with fins spaced across the surface, the anti-radar paint barely visible through the protective wrapping. Missiles. And big ones, too- almost as long as the trailers themselves.
And then things started to make sense. Taking a comprehensive image of the area and the base, the group slowly retreated in the same fashion they entered, crawling through the grass and taking panoramas every so often, in an attempt to document the area from the ground. Making their way to the extract point, a half-mile from the original point, they waited.
And waited.
At the two-hour mark, they were starting to get very worried, when they received a message on the tightbeam- bad weather was causing delays. The ship arrived but an hour later, and they mounted up without a problem. The ride home was smooth enough, considering the storms raging outside, and they arrived home without a problem.
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Topic: ___/The Writer's Apprenticeship\___ (Read 314046 times)