'Perhaps I could try...' The Talon wondered in response to the news 'but to gift him his salvation now would only serve to leech at his willingness to die. After though, if he survives, the promise of deliverance could be powerful.'
"I will see what I can do, later." She told Riley, kindly. "For now though, best put matters of secondary import out of your mind. I need you focused for what is to come."
The Talon raised her arms and touched Riley lightly on the shoulders. To his left, the warm caress of flesh; and to the right, the cold bite of steel. Both seemed to hold a power of their own.
"The Great Revolution is coming, Brother, and the cycle nears it's peak once more. Below the horizon, a new dawn waits, and we will soon lift it onto our shoulders. When we do, the One Truth will be carried across the world in its light, and our song."
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"We are not going far, Warden." Lee replied pointedly "We are simply going downstairs."
Once again the soldier, Lee marched over to the door behind the bar, the one he knew lead where the liquor was kept stored. He strode through quickly, not stopping to further appreciate the merchandise. The room was only very dimly lit, by rows of flickering fluorescent tubes suspended from the ceiling. Not being an area frequently seen from the outside, or of any particular strategic importance, the stores had not been cleaned up as fastidiously as the rest of RACDI-Alpha. and plaster peeled away from the bare concrete walls. All the better not to rouse suspicion.
"I am about to involve you in matters that are of the utmost importance To the security and well-being of every denizen of RACDI-Alpha," he announced, as they walked through the stacked columns of wooden crates, containing the nectar which drew so many to The Gates Of Pandemonium. "from the highest ranking officers in the Warden's, to the lowliest worker, toiling down in the Lower Levels. It may well come to pass that your part in this may be invaluable to millions upon millions of people across the world. I am not certain. What I am certain of, is that if any of what I am about to tell you, or show you, is relayed to another living soul, especially our most recent civilian guests, there may well be no hope for anyone. I am placing an incredible amount of trust in your discretion."
A small safe was embedded into the wall at the back corner of the room, used for storing valuables that were not safe at the bar. Lee did not wait for Abigail to give him the code. The one she knew was not the one he required. The code he punched into the keypad was five digits, as opposed to the usual four, making it impossible for any uninvolved and unsuspecting party to enter the secret pass code by accident. No sooner had his index finger left the fifth key, than the low rumbling scrape of stone against stone was heard to their right. A square block of concrete floor, barely wide enough to permit a grown man's shoulder span, had disappeared just a few feet away from them.
"Follow my lead." He told her "There are iron rungs we can use to climb down the shaft, but light is poor. Tread carefully."
Minutes later, they both touched down at the bottom of the shaft. Stretching out ahead of them was a roughly cut tunnel, still sloping downward and going on far further than Lee's vision would permit him to see. The tunnel was supported by metal beams at hundred yard intervals, and lit by the same electrical lamps that Inmates used to navigate the tunnels of the Lower levels, suspended from the ceiling.
"It is widely believed that The Atrium is the one entrance and exit to The Pit," Lee began, without waiting for an inquiry from his companion. "When RACDI-Alpha began, this was the truth. However, once the operations of the gang syndicates, aided by corrupt Wardens on the surface, became fully-fledged, they were no longer content with relying on supply drops to smuggle in their weapons and bootlegged narcotics. Over the span of decades of slow, careful planning, tunnels were made, hidden in often ignored areas of the surface and stretching all the way down the the Lower-Levels, that were beyond our reach until recently. Unlike this one, I have destroyed all others that I have discovered.
Auxiliary Warden Nyte, I am entrusting my rear guard to you. Should RACDI-Alpha come under attack, an eventuality I am now convinced will come to fruition at some point in the near future, I mean to defend it fiercely. However, I would be remiss not to make certain preparations in the event that I should fail. No matter what, I will not allow all the hard work that I have poured into this place be undone the moment it is wrested from my hands. Should it come to that, you will not be a hostile combatant to enemy forces, unlike the other Wardens, and their is every chance that you may be passed over whatever will be in store for the rest of us. They'll want someone to serve their drinks too, I suppose. You will continue in your duties, doing whatever is asked of you by your new masters, and giving them no reason to suspect you. However, this secret you will guard, with your life if needs be. When necessary, you will use this tunnel to smuggle in, and out, any personnel or equipment that can be used to hamper the efforts of those who hold The Pit. Doubtless if they can take it, they will mean to hold it for as long as they can. However, should they look to be overwhelmed by an open assault, I doubt they would flinch at raising this entire facility to the ground.
It is imperative that this back door is kept open the lives of every living soul down there, at the very least, depends on it. You said it yourself, Warden. Many of The Pit's population are innocent of any crime, and even of the monsters, many of their atrocities are not so monstrous as the things that I have done. You will not do this because I have told you to, you will do it because they need you to."
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The program inside the flash drive that Selina had inserted into Lee's computer had frozen his firewalls, and made a local copy of all his files in a matter of seconds. It was some of the most advanced software used in the digital espionage branch of Venture Horizon's military forces, and highly classified. Even with the Director in such a lather to find any pretext to see Lee gone, it had taken Selina all her diplomatic talents to wrangle a requisition out of him. By rights, even she shouldn't even know that this technology existed, and her clearance was Category 4, for crying out loud!
Still, that was only the easy part. filtering though files that were of no importance, and getting through the layers of encryption that surrounded anything Lee was bothered with protecting, was taking a lot longer, as Selina paced up and down her room, passing her laptop again and again as it worked. It would be incredibly frustrating if she found nothing suspect after all this effort. She didn't harbor any grudge against the Colonel, but finding nothing here wouldn't exactly be proof of his innocence. Photographic memory meant that Lee need not keep a written copy, physical or digital, of any information he had accessed that was beyond his clearance, or any suspect communications he had made.
'Unless he plans on selling Venture Horizon's secrets, or simply releasing them worldwide. For that he would need evidence...'
As if to answer her query, the program signaled its digital chirping sound, to tell her that the decryption was finished. Selina practically raced over to the screen, and what she saw there made her gasp audibly.
'It's a map! A bloody road map; of all of Venture Horizon's classified operations! Military, economic, scientific... what research was conducted, where, when, and by whom... force deployment, intelligence. He's ordered and compiled every single secret this company has!'
There was no manifesto, no mission statement or admission of guilt. Still no concrete answer as to what exactly the Colonel planned to do with this information. However, that question seemed to matter less now. Lee would have had to flout his clearance, breaking trust with the company as well as the law, a thousand times over just for a fraction of this information. Whatever he meant to do with it, Selina was convinced it meant nothing good for Venture Horizon.
Most of the names of the operations listed she recognised. 'Project Condor' was one, 'Project Amber' another. However, there were also many that even she did not. Her cursor passes over one listed as 'Project Phantom', and rested on the single entry, that was buried beneath the deepest level of encryption. It was uncategorised for clearance, and yet she had never even heard of it, suggesting that it was a dead op, and that whoever had been running it had done their utmost to remove all traces of its existence from Venture's archives. Lee appeared to have visited this entry frequently, every day over the last month, to be exact.
It read: 'Project Talon'.
