Chapter 42.3: Poison Gas - The Final Play
Personal System Calendar: Year 00012, Day 1-14, Month VIII: The Imperium
Imperial Calendar: Year 6857, 1st to 14th day of the 8th Month
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Season of Fall
The summer had officially ended without ceremony, which was how most seasons would naturally end, but most people couldn't truly appreciate it as the world had more pressing matters to attend to.
The days had grown cooler by several degrees, the kind of cooling you would only notice first in the mornings when the air against your face has lost the weight of the heat it had carried through in the past four months. The second you would notice would be the leaves in the forest, as they were beginning their annual negotiation with the light, pulling the green back in and letting the other hues have their time. The shade of the trees was still dense but it was a different shade now, it was softer, with more gold in it.
Autumn had finally arrived at Maya Village, and the village was in the middle of something that the season of fall would simply have to accommodate.
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Two Options
The council had been clear on one point from the beginning of the current modified counter-operation planning: containing this quietly was not the objective, even though it was the simpler option in the beginning which they agreed upon. The first option was arresting the ten privately, making the incident disappear into the administrative record, it would accomplish the minimum damage to their current poor relationship with Arwen and the sacrifices made in the process would also be minimal.
That would have been the better option, but they needed to be practical in their approach, what they sorely needed right now is evidence that was undeniable.
And since the enemy was adamant in making an example out of them, they opted for the second option, they needed it to be witnessed by other people. They needed the narrative to be controlled into their own flow, of what had happened inside the village, so that it will travel outward from Maya Village rather than from the Sovereignty of Arwen, and they needed it to arrive at its intended destinations already carrying the weight of verified firsthand account rather than competing claim, though whether others would believe it or not, that really didn't matter what they wanted was the power of words, to influence the thought of the masses. And because words traveled faster than any wildfire, they intended for it to be capitalized, the right words to the right people could stoke the flames of doubt and question the motives behind Arwen sending a hundred assassins to a newly formed village. Was that village truly a threat to Arwen that it needed that many assassins or had the king gone mad? Thus they opted this route because it is the one that is already in motion and before anyone on the Arwenian side had formulated a counter-narrative, they would already have the upper hand in the information sector.
The two options that had been put before the council. Arrest the ten quietly and immediately, which was clean and surrendered every advantage. Or wait, let them act, and ensure that when they acted it was in front of enough witnesses that nothing about the subsequent account could be questioned.
They chose the second. Unanimously. Without extended debate.
This meant patience. The waiting had extended to several days, during which the ten maintained their cover identities and continued sending coded messages outward that continued to produce no response, and the village continued intercepting those messages without replying to them.
The current intelligence picture was comprehensive: the ten assassins positions were known, their daily movements tracked, their increasing unease at the silence readable through both observation and the decoded content Juan Tamad was producing from their communications.
The cold mathematical reality of the already failed operation, which the ten assassins did not have a single clue of, but the village did, and it was this: seventy-five percent of the hundred were already dead or in custody. The fifteen at the hidden camp were under continuous observation. The ten inside were the last active element of an operation that had already catastrophically failed in a militaristic option; it had been comprehensively dismantled before they could even act out what they had come here to do, now both those surviving outside and those still inside had not received any indication that this was already considered as a massive failure.
But the oath that the graduation from Hell's Pits bound them to was working in the village's favor. The ten could not abandon the mission. The mission demanded them to take action, and whether they lived or died, they were considered expendable pieces, who bred and created with such purpose in mind from the very beginning. Eventually the ten inside would act on what they have agreed upon, and the village would be ready for their criminal action when it came.
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Juan Tamad and the Bar Conversation
Nobody knows exactly how Juan Tamad came to be in a position to overhear the conversation at the bar. If you asked him, he would give you an answer that was technically accurate and left you with no additional information about the actual sequence of events. If you asked anyone else who had been in the vicinity, they would tell you they had not even noticed him there, which was the most precise available description of Juan's professional presence in any situation he chose to occupy.
What is known though is that he was present, he heard everything the assassins discussed, and he understood what he heard.
The conversation had happened in the early hours of a morning, at the bar the ten had established as one of their quiet gathering points, conducted in the manner of people having an ordinary exchange. The cover was maintained even in the absence of any obvious observation, which was the correct approach and also the one that Juan had accounted for when he decoded what the ordinary surface conversation was actually carrying.
Dragnov was the one to open the discussion. The fact that Dragnov was the one who raised the question communicated something to the others about the state of the operation without him having to state it directly.
"Has anyone else felt that something is wrong? I cannot identify what it is specifically, but my instincts are telling me very clearly that something is. The lack of response from outside is no longer just a delay. It is becoming something else."
One of the others, a younger assassin, with the restlessness of someone whose training prioritized action over patience, put the operational alternative plainly.
"Sir, should we proceed independently? Technically we could accomplish the mission with what we have here. A few targets could be reached through direct means. Or we use the new technology (poison gas) for broader effect. Their council leadership is accessible enough. The security has gaps we could work through."
Dragnov held that for a moment. It was visible to those around him, which was unusual in someone whose professional construction had been built around the absence of visible deliberation. He was not indecisive in the ordinary sense. He was experiencing the specific hesitation of someone whose instincts and whose oath were pulling in different directions, and whose instincts, for the first time in a long while, were loud enough to be heard over the oath: FEAR. It was the tingling sense that had kept him alive for so long.
"Let us give it two more days," he said finally. "If there is no response from outside by then, we should proceed independently. I do not like what I am feeling about this place. But the mission is the mission and we are going to complete it."
The conversation ended and they dispersed it to other things back to their identity cover. Juan Tamad was also no longer at the bar when the conversation dispersal happened, in the sense that no one saw him leave because no one had even registered him to be present. He was at his next destination before any of the ten had finished settling their drinks.
The Arwenian shadow unit's coding had its own characteristics, modifications from the more widely distributed systems intended to prevent exactly what Juan was now doing. But Juan had spent his formative years in Gremory building this specific skill in an environment where the people using those codes had genuine reasons to keep them from a very attentive young boy, and what had been built in that environment had continued to develop through everything that had happened since.
He decoded it. He brought it to August. August brought it to the council.
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The Festival Plan
"Elders," August said, when the council had received the decoded content and its implications, "I have a proposal that would accelerate the timeline in our favor. This comes directly from the head of our intelligence unit, Juan, whose work has given us this information and this window of opportunity."
He laid it out plainly.
The ten were going to act within two days regardless of external response. They had committed to that internally. The only question was whether they acted on the village's plans or their own. The way to ensure they acted on the village's whims was to give them a target so favorable that any impulse to delay further would be overridden by the operational opportunity in front of them.
A public festival. A celebration of the village's prosperity, which was genuine and required no fabrication to make convincing. With the leadership present and visible on a central podium for all the plaza filled with people to see.
And for the ten operatives planning a gas attack on an open gathering, this was not a complication but the precise conditions their approach was designed for. They would see it, recognize the opportunity, and they would act on it without hesitation.
And the village would gladly be waiting in position when they have finally moved.
The timing, the security placement, the response protocols for the attack types the ten might employ, all of it was worked through in the hours that followed. The festival would begin before midday. The council would be present and visible on the podium. The security infrastructure would be invisible in the specific way that Maya Village had practiced making it invisible, which was comprehensively.
The council approved it with the collective speed of people who had already decided the direction and were now receiving the means of getting there.
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Baron Kirka, Enjoying the Village
Baron Kirka was, by this point in the hidden proceedings, approaching the situation with the equanimity of someone who had been told enough to understand that something serious was being handled and not enough to be included in the handling, and who had made peace with that division because the people doing the handling were visibly competent.
He walked through Maya Village with the attention of a man who had spent some parts of his life on the frontier and believed he understood what frontier settlements looked like, and was discovering with increasing frequency that this one did not match that understanding.
The architecture was the first sustained surprise. Not because of its scale or its elaboration, which were both modest by the standards of the capitals and major cities he had visited, but because of what the architecture communicated about the relationship between the people who built it and the environment they built it in. Other settlements fought the forest, through and through. They cleared, walled, fenced, and managed the encroachment of root and branch as an ongoing threat. While Maya Village was different in its approach and they had made this different foundational decision to benefit not just them but the forest and all that lived in it: they had trees incorporated into structures at load-bearing points, canopy preserved above thoroughfares for shade and drainage, the forest's natural hydrology was used rather than redirected. It was a place that had decided it belonged to the forest rather than the forest belonging to it, and the forest appeared to have accepted this arrangement, this compromise between man and the green.
The people who live in it also made the same impression in human terms. He stopped and talked to whoever was willing, which was most people, because the village's social character had been built by people who had arrived from difficult circumstances and found something worth belonging to, and that combination produced openness rather than the guardedness that established prosperity sometimes generated. He learned that ninety to ninety-five percent of the population had not been born here. They had come from somewhere else, most of them from circumstances that were not good, and had found a place organized around the principle that what you were willing to contribute mattered considerably more than where you had come from or what you had been.
A Grimfang pair on a street corner regarded him with the yellow-eyed patience of animals that had assessed him as not currently requiring attention and had filed him accordingly. One of the Mighty Peregrine Eagles passed overhead close enough to produce a shadow that moved across the market stalls below it, and the stall operator whose goods were temporarily shadowed did not look up from what they were doing because this was a normal occurrence that happens everyday and they had already accepted and calibrated their relationship with it accordingly.
Baron Kirka watched the eagle until it was past, and then watched the stall operator, and thought about what it meant to be in a place where an eagle with a wingspan wider than most rooms was a normal occurrence.
When this was over, he thought he was going to have a serious conversation with the prince. Not about trade corridors and discount percentages. About what was sitting here in this forest and what the kingdom might want to understand about it before circumstances forced them to be driven into a corner just as it had done to the Arwenians, he wanted them to understand that the village was better to be a friend than its enemy..
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Two Days Later…
The two days of waiting had expired on a morning that felt properly autumnal for the first time, a chill in the air that had not been there two weeks prior and a quality of light that was lower and more angled than summer's overhead directness.
The ten gathered their tools with the focused professionalism of people who had been trained by the Pits and decades of operational experience to separate their assessment of a situation from the actions the situation's oath required.
The poisonous gas was the primary instrument, it was rated to be able to kill up to an expert rank individual. They didn't opt out of food poisoning because the option had been eliminated by the heightened security around the village's food storage and preparation, which had been extended without announcement. Direct weapon approaches required sustained close proximity to multiple targets simultaneously, which the current security spacing made difficult to achieve at the necessary scale. But this poisonous gas cloud could cover a lot of ground comprehensively, and they had the elemental capability among the ten to amplify the dispersal beyond the vials' baseline reach.
They had six vials each. It was an odorless, colorless gas, nearly invisible to the naked eye, and its effects were fast-acting. A coordinated throw from multiple positions with elemental amplification applied at the moment of release would ensure that everything in the plaza received the effect before the crowd could organize a response.
The festival's announced program had provided exactly the conditions their approach was designed for. The leadership present and gathered at a central podium. The crowd dense and full of distraction. The established chaos of a public celebration to use as cover for extraction.
This had gone from a mission with support to a suicide mission in all practical terms and most of the ten knew it. They had understood it from approximately the second day of silence from outside. The question the oath did not permit them to ask was whether there was a version of this that ended with them surviving it.
They moved to their positions through the mid-morning crowd with the practiced invisibility of their training. They identified the podium, the exit routes they could potentially take, and the intervals between the security personnel visible on the perimeter. They did the calculated estimations that their training had built into them and found the current parameters were acceptable.
What they did not see, because it was not visible to any observation they were equipped to conduct, was that they had been continuously watched from the moment they left their accommodations. Their positions were being communicated in real time through channels they had no awareness of. The exits they had identified were already occupied by people who had been there before the ten had selected them.
Dragnov stood at his position at the plaza's edge and felt the gut sense resolve from sensation into something with more definition. He looked at the leadership assembled at the podium, the crowd around it, the security personnel visible on the perimeter at their standard spacing, and he ran through the assessment one more time.
And he still felt that something was definitely wrong. But he could not identify what specifically about everything that had happened so far was wrong.
The signal passed between the ten. The operation was now beginning.
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The Vials Go Up
All ten threw simultaneously. The correct approach for a coordinated area attack, executed with the accuracy of people who had drilled this motion to precision across years of preparation. The vials caught the autumn light on their upward arc, briefly visible, briefly in the space between the throwers and the intended targets.
But they never completed the arc.
Because Mistress Mirabeth who had been told to watch overhead, was watching below podium for the better part of the last hour at a height that made her a small shape against the pale autumn sky, positioned with the patience of someone who had been given the most precisely defined task in the operation: watch for the throwing motion, respond before the vials complete their trajectory, apply enough fire to address each one without igniting anything on the ground below, and do not miss.
She did not miss her magical fire bolt that spewed out of her hands. Each vial was caught at the peak of its arc. The fire was targeted and complete and the gas dispersed at altitude in concentrations too low to affect anyone below. The explosions were small and brief. The light they produced was not natural and lasted less than a second each.
One of the hired actors in the crowd had been waiting for exactly that light.
"We are under attack! Take cover!"
The plaza produced the specific kind of reaction and movement that crowds produce when they are told that there is a threat: it was fast, chaotic and people ran in multiple directions, with genuine fear underneath it because the people in the crowd had not been briefed on the underlying counter-operation and the situation they were currently experiencing was frightening on its surface regardless of what was happening beneath it.
A few vials that had not been caught in the initial second landed at the plaza's edge. The gas they contained was flammable. The fire response was faster than the vials were, and they became additional brief lights rather than events on the ground.
Jonathan Ross's voice cut through the crowd noise with the carrying authority of someone who had commanded units in conditions where his voice was required to reach specific people through specific amounts of chaos.
"Guards, arrest those men! Those are the ones who threw the vials!"
Axel Martin had the encircling units moving on the pre-agreed signal before Jonathan's instruction had completed, because the coordination between the security commanders had been established before the festival opened and was only waiting on the signal rather than waiting for the operations commands.
The ten found themselves surrounded with the specific comprehensiveness of a containing force that had been prepared in advance: no visible gaps, no positions that offered practical exit, the armed personnel at intervals that covered every angle and did so without the uncertainty that improvised containment produces. It had already been prepared in advance.
Dragnov looked at the people in front of him and behind him and to either side. He looked at the armed personnel, the positioning, and the fact that the crowd's chaos was already being organized and directed by people who knew exactly where they were and where the exits were and what was in them.
Then he understood what was actually happening, and why his instincts were blaring up on him. It was a loud signal that there was indeed danger lurking just around the corner..
That was what the gut had been telling him for the last several days they were here. But because it was not a specific observable fact about this particular moment. It was a comprehensive conclusion about the entire operation from their entry to the village until right now: they had known. The village had already known them since before the ten had entered into the mouth of the beast, probably even before the unit left the Sovereignty's territory (he thought of), and everything since the moment of entry had been a performance arranged for an audience the ten had not known they were performing for.
The external silence now made sense. Whatever had happened to the outside element of their force was no longer able to help them and any hopes of them being rescued was not coming.
"Brothers and sisters. We must fight on. Whether we are able to escape from here or not we will die either way."
He said it to the other assassins because their oath required them to finish any mission without fail and because he was what the Pits had made him to be and what the Pits had made him did not stop at the first difficult conclusion. But he said it without the conviction that eighty years of saying similar things had usually carried, and the others heard the difference.
Jonathan's voice, steady and carrying no particular emotion about the outcome it was describing.
"Drop your weapons and lay down on the ground! You will not be given a second opportunity!"
Outside the village, on the road through the forest and at the hidden camp where the fifteen had been waiting with no information and no direction for two days, August was giving instructions through the party chat with the economy of someone who had been watching this specific location with the rest of the force since the previous day and was now communicating what each of their element was going to do and when they are going to execute it.
Two locations and both running on a single operation, with both closing ok it simultaneously.
The final play was not complicated to say the least, and it was never intended to be complicated. The only complication they had to go through had been in the waiting game, and the waiting was finally over.