[Thank you to Thedaringhatrick at FanNation for her excellent beta work]Janus Rising
Chapter 4: Instinct“They’re still alive.” A white-haired gentleman stood over a widescreen security monitor imbedded in the table in front of his wing-backed chair. He was only slightly amused at the two figures he had ordered the computer to magnify. They had eluded every trap and security force he had sent their way, but that was to be expected when the leader of the infamous Underground and the senior cleric of the TetraGrammaton were teamed up against him.
“What? You said we were prepared for them!”
“Calm down, Mr. Hall. They haven’t made it to Counsel Chambers yet. There is still plenty of time to work up a panic if they do.” Councilman Michael Devron chuckled sardonically at his colleague’s expense. Being several years his junior, Councilman Peter Hall had grown up entirely within the bounds of wealth, privilege and safety afforded to any “elite” Librian. He had never known the chaos of war as Devron had, a fact which the elderly councilman was rather proud of; he was the only man on the council old enough to have gained that wisdom.
“I am not panicking, Michael; I am simply expressing concerns for your questionable security tactics.” His companion put a nasty spin on the word “questionable” that left no doubt as to his opinions regarding the intelligence of the older man
“Then perhaps you should have spoken up with a better idea before, when there was still time to implement one.” said another voice. It came from the tall woman with keen brown eyes who was presently pacing behind the councilman's chair with her arms folded tight across her chest. The salt and pepper hair she had twisted into a braided bun on the nape of her neck was barely moved by the constant shaking of her head. She wasn’t any happier about the situation than Councilman Hall, but she was smart enough not to voice her misgivings when there was nothing to be done about them.
Behind her, the once tranquil, marble-lined council hall, with its majestic columns and commemorative statues, now stood testament to the very chaos which the council had feared. People were rushing from left to right; under-secretaries fussing over their respective council members, some treating minor injuries, while their betters barked orders at granite-faced clerics. Sweepers patted down the walls, the cushioned chairs, the oval table, while assistants made muddled turn-arounds, hastening to obey a flurry of requests.
All fourteen of the sitting members along with their under secretaries and personal assistants were crowded into the marble-lined hall. The oblong room with an oval table and plush chairs was surrounded by columns and commemorative statues, and now held more than a dozen sweepers and at least ten clerics. A few of the assistants were treating their respective council members for minor injuries incurred in the rush to chambers.
Most of them wore looks of someone who had been defeated, and more than a few thoroughly expected to be dragged into the streets at some point in the near future and executed at the hands of those angry barbarians. The fact that not one of the Council members had taken the dose in their lifetime, or had ever actually met anyone from the Resistance, didn’t affect their opinions of its followers in the least. Every privileged man and woman in that room knew that any Librian who refused the dose was a demented and untrustworthy soul whose only joys were mayhem and murder. Father had said so, and whatever Father said was law and truth.
Devron looked up at the opulent box that rose twenty feet over there heads on the far side of the room. The richly appointed balcony containing a multi-view observational monitor along with its rich black velvet couch, was more recently occupied by the unfortunate DuPont. The late Vice Consul was a fool to think he attended to every contingency, that he was the god that Father was. He wasn’t half the visionary and tactician of the late founder of Librian society, and his lack of vision was what had found him slain in a most humiliating manner. Father’s box always reminded the senior counsel member of the reality of power and government. In every system of leadership - Monarchy, Democracy, or Dictatorship - there was always a king.
“Cleric Davis.” Councilman Devron called a grey clad warrior to his “throne” and pointed to a certain spot on the monitor that now displayed a view of the main hall outside Chambers. He licked his lips and drew a raspy breath in anticipation of the perfection that the next part of his plan represented to his strategic mind. “Place the fifth contingent in the main hall. Have them stand at the ready, guns drawn, in inspection formation.”
Cleric Davis ran to do the rotund old man’s bidding.
“Michael! You can’t mean to follow through with that plan?” Hall nearly yelped in his surprise, though he was probably more worried about the political ramifications of the plan than whether it would work or not.
“Do you wish me to save our lives, or not?”
“Are you sure that will stop them? They’re off the dose. They could just massacre the next generation of Grammaton law enforcement and move on to us.” The woman stopped her pacing to ask.
“No, Pentence.” Devron shook his head at the council woman and smiled at the security feed of Preston and Jurgen’s group sneaking down the corridors. “I know these men in my own little way. They will not kill my little soldiers. That would disgust them. We shall use their new found freedom to feel against them, my good lady.”
She responded to his commentary with a wicked smile which blended into a look of confident superiority.
====
Just outside the main chamber corridor, Preston anxiously thumbed at the black, shiny Berretta in his hand, his palms slick and his heart pounding with more trepidation than a first year monastic student who had missed his morning dose. He had plowed through three dozen men without a thought other than what was required for the task, but now some dark premonition was preying on his conscious mind refusing to be ignored.
The sounds of whispered questions and shuffled feet floated up the hall behind him. He felt Jurgen standing directly behind him, simply waiting, but the other three in the group were hanging back a few feet, apparently discussing Preston’s state of mind.
He turned slightly and caught the looks on the men’s faces, who were in turn scrutinizing his. The bulk of Brennan nearly engulfed that of Frank and Stark, the fraternal twins. The former, a six foot mass of muscle and black curls, seemed as if he would be the jolly sort if he weren’t attacking an impenetrable fortress with a stranger.
The twins eyed John fiercely from behind their comrade, barely moving their lips as they spoke. From the rapid fire of their whispers, he could guess that the two were actually finishing each other’s sentences. Stark’s thin, pointy beard twitched as he pondered the cleric, while his brother’s clean chin set crookedly in thought. Though he knew they were some of Jurgen’s most trusted friends, in the damp of the low lit hallway, Preston took a deep breath and imagined them as evil omens of what awaited the savior of the resistance.
“What’s wrong?”
John looked suddenly into Jurgen’s questioning eyes. In his pursuit of that nagging thought, he had shut his eyes, momentarily closing himself off from the rest of the group. “I don’t know. Just something.” He wrinkled his nose and his eyes squinted as he attempted to find the words to best describe the tingling feeling rising deep within his core.
“Tell me what you’re feeling.”
“It’s...” He tilted his head slightly. “It’s like something growing-” He brushed his gun across his chest gently. “-slowly inside, and my ears burn hotter the closer we get to Council Chambers.”
Jurgen’s eyes grew wide and he froze in place. His steely-gray gaze actively sweeping their surroundings, at once settling on the wall to his left. He sucked in a deep breath before grabbing Preston by the shoulders, and pulling him and their small group into a smaller side hallway. Now shoulder to shoulder with the taller man, he turned around the corner, eyeing the near-ceiling light fixtures that dotted the main hallway approximately every seven feet. Preston followed his companion’s gaze.
Each oval fixture was a simple glass piece framed in a matte gold, brass lip. The soft light, now set at its lowest output, was projected upward against the wall in order to minimize shadows. As he studied the lights that he had seen hundreds of times in his service to the TetraGrammaton, he noticed a slight variation from the fixtures in the other hallways. Between the gold lip and the glass on each light, was a quarter-inch-wide black strip around the circumference of the fixture.
“Optical transmission strips.” The cleric confirmed the Resistance leader’s suspicions.
“Instinct.”
“What?”
“What you were feeling...that’s the height of instinct,” Jurgen whispered back. “Yet another blessing of an unsuppressed human nature and the boon to our particular tyrant’s existence. He was just the first human in history to deny that power to those who could overthrow him. ”
“Instinct.” Preston repeated, logging the word and its corresponding feeling in his mind. He had always been told by his superiors that he had good instincts, but they really had no idea. This new experience was much more intense - and more accurate - than anything he had experienced on the dose. He wondered for a moment if this was the way DuPont had picked him to be the one to infiltrate the Underground. Had Vice Consul chosen Preston based on a
feeling? He shook his head and put the consideration away for another time.
“They know we’re coming,” he continued, stating it as a fact and the others didn’t contest it. All eyes focused on the Senior Cleric while he flexed his jaw in thought. In his years of service, he had successfully attacked many Resistance compounds when the residents had former knowledge of his coming, and it had never presented much more than a slight annoyance, if that were possible on the dose. But these people knew his tactics - knew
him.
“What is it?” Jurgen hissed. While in “cleric mode” John was usually a picture of serenity.
“I don’t know what to do,” the cleric answered, choking on the words. Jurgen watched as all the possibilities washed over Preston’s consciousness, his eyes darting rapidly from side to side.
“That’s never happened to you before has it?”
John shook his head slightly. “No. Every option I think of, I have to immediately dismiss because I’ve used it before, and the people in there-” he nodded in the direction of Council Chambers “-will have anticipated it.”
“Are you sure they’re that good, or are you unsure of yourself?”
For a short moment, he looked almost offended, then he pierced Jurgen‘s gaze with his own. “No. I
know they will have anticipated me, just as I have anticipated them, and they have anticipated my anticipation. They saw me coming before this day even started. They
chose me.”
That was a lot to think about. Just how far did the Council expect this to go? Were they really expecting Preston’s betrayal? Had they seen an all out attack on their way of life at this juncture? Jurgen had a sudden insight.
“Are they expecting the cleric, or the Resistance?” John stifled a yawn as he thought of an answer. The savior of the resistance probably needed a hot meal and a long nap. He was using all of his strength to stay with the task at hand and refrain from thinking of his two young children waiting (most likely anxiously, being off the dose) for Dad to come home, but he was still here, forcing himself to focus on freeing the people he once helped oppress. Jurgen was going to owe him much more than his life when this was all over - if he was still alive. They all were.
“Both - What do you mean?”
“Do they know you’re off the dose?”
John’s interest was peaked again, bringing more life to his eyes. “Probably.” He thought a second more. “Definitely. You knew. And I’m sure they would have counted on it to make their plans work, even if DuPont didn’t tell them all of his machinations, they’re the ones that keep Libria running. They would have to know.”
Jurgen nodded but held off on naming his theory on how they would use that knowledge against the Resistance, not wanting to think about what it meant for them. He looked up into his companions eyes, searching for any sign that he had come to the same conclusion. Behind them, Brennan breathed a soft “They wouldn’t!” The twins shuffled nervously and waited with their leader for Preston to confirm their fears.
In a flurry of movement, John finally saw the situation clearly and became desperate to resolve it. He turned suddenly toward the back of the small dead-end hall way. The doors that lined the walls probably lead to the offices of junior councilmen. Preston’s gazed was not on the walls however, but the ceilings, scanning rapidly in his search for something specific. He found it in a small vent port for the air filtration systems on the left side of the ceiling at the very back of the hall. In one steady motion, with both guns firmly in his hands, the cleric ran to end of the hallway and leapt toward the vent.
At first it seemed as if he would not make it, but then his right foot pressed against the edge of a small table at the back wall, propelling him upward and towards the left. Shoving his left foot against the corresponding wall, Preston then hurtled through the opening, fist first, smashing the grate in just before his shoulder passed the ceiling level.
Frank, Stark and Brennan gasped and swung their guns at the sudden movement, but Jurgen simply followed at a steady pace, and pulled the table from the wall to just below the hole. As he climbed the homemade stepstool, a hand reached out of the ceiling and grasped his upturned arm, pulling him into the ventilation system.
The smell of the dust and sweat filled his nostrils. He looked around to find the same grey uniformity to be found elsewhere in Libria, only not as sterile in this hidden place. It reminded Jurgen of the Librian political system: clean and pleasant on the outside, but teeming with filth and corruption from within.
“So it’s true, then?” He was no more than six inches from Preston’s face, so close he could hear his smooth breathing and feel the air whistling through his lips as his companion exhaled. He hoped his friends below couldn’t hear their quiet conversation.
The other man nodded grimly. “I’m not sure what or who, but they’ll put it in our way. If they’re smart, they’ll surround themselves with something that we can’t bear to destroy in our current. . .conditions.” As his last word faltered, John gave up the conversation to grind his jaw.
“Feeling is not an illness. Father was wrong about that part, but he was right about another. There are symptoms - of feeling, of humanity. One of them is cruelty, and that is what you will witness tonight. It is not your compassion that hinders you, but their lack of it. That is what we fight. Those who would choose to feel only those emotions which enthrall them soon find that the only thing they can feel is the strangling numbness of their own apathy.”
“Is there a way to come back from that?”
A sudden sadness filled the resistance leader. Preston had cut down the TetraGrammaton in one night with a complete lack of feeling as his aid. “Don’t confuse the choice to resist emotional distraction as apathy. There is always a way back from apathy, perhaps even for the Council.”
John didn’t have a chance to respond before he had to move further down the duct to allow another man through the vent. One by one the rest came through only leaving Brennan staring up at the hole in the ceiling with a lifted eyebrow. John eyed the man for a moment before grunting in recognition. Of course the fighter’s mammoth muscles and tall frame weren’t going to allow him through the opening, but John had an idea.
“Continue down the corridor and take your next right. There’s a storage closet immediately on the right. Wait there until you get a signal from us.”
“What’s the signal?”
John grinned for the first time in his life and found it gave him release. “You’ll know it when you hear it.”
====
Down the hall and to the right, the main corridor opened up into a palisade of Parthenon proportions - the curved main corridor that led to Council Chambers. The cream-colored marble columns shined pale grey in the near darkness. In the far distance, were the barely discernable double mahogany doors that led to the back entrance to the Hall of Justice, and a corridor only accessible by a Council member and their aids. That hallway was lined with eighty secret doorways that would open in succession, revealing two sweepers each, one holding a bulletproof shield, the other a Berretta rifle. The unlucky person who managed to bypass all of the guards outside and all the electronic systems would quickly find themselves mowed down only feet from their goal.
During the day, the corridor was usually full of the echoing voices of political arguments and people engaged in friendly chats. Now, in the deafening silence, a very still person could have made out only the occasional whisper of shuffled fabric. Though, at first, in the blackness, nothing would be visible in the pool of dark that was the middle of the hallway, if that person waited a moment for his eyes to adjust, he could make out many small figures. Then, as they adjusted further, he would begin to recognize the stance of a trained cleric. The wide spread legs, the stiff arms at the sides, and the five inch extensions that could only be Grammaton issue pistols.
After awhile, it would become clear that filling up the outer hall of Counsel Chambers was an entire battalion of monastic students - children in training to be the deadly enforcers of Father’s will - lying in wait for whatever threat encroached on the sanctity of the TetraGrammaton. For what Father and his agents ordered sacred, all one hundred of these young ones seemed perfectly willing to give their lives .
;D
