Origins (Book 4 of Alfireán age)

Deeper In

"Vack actually delivered," The Fallen one muttered to himself, raising an eyebrow.

The sounds of broken robot arms clicking and clanking, along with the whirring of destroyed conveyor systems, hummed in the background as he poured over the computer files in the facility. When Vackzilian had hinted at the possibility of finding access to ancient world satellites, The Fallen had been skeptical. In fact, the last thing he'd expected was to gain access to an entire network of geosynchronous surveillance satellites.

A resounding hiss and crackle of electricity echoed across the factory floor and The Fallen One bent backward, glancing out the door. One of the wires he had severed had come loose and was sending sparks all over the floor. Ignoring it, he turned back to the work at hand.

After passing the war machines' storage bay, The Fallen one had discovered a medium-sized factory. Rather than navigating the tangled mess, he had cut straight through and into the control room.

Clicking away on the screen, The Fallen One integrated the new satellites into his existing network. It had been several weeks since his last false lead, and even with these new satellites, he harbored little hope of finding what he was after using this method. People rarely used holy magic in the open nowadays because of the potential consequences. So while these satellites might prove useful, what The Fallen One really needed was access to every nation's citizen registry. Which would be far easier for him to obtain once the world was at war.

With unfettered access to the world's data, The Fallen One could trace every holy user from the past twenty years and, hopefully, find the woman he had spent centuries creating.

The screen before him flickered, showing the newly added satellites. He clicked on their icon, bringing up their data streams, and watched as the satellites scanned over populated areas. Satisfied, The Fallen One returned his attention to the facility's data and scanned through the useless information until he found what Vackzilian was after.

Hidden within the files was an encrypted portion of a blueprint. He extracted it from the computer and drew a scrying in the air.

Vackzilian's image materialized within the hovering water.

"I've retrieved the first part of the blueprint you seek," The Fallen One informed him gruffly, initiating the file transfer. "However, it's encrypted and useless without a cipher, which this facility lacks."

"I am aware of the encryption," Vackzilian responded as he received the file.

"I see," The Fallen One replied, his curiosity slightly piqued. "I'm en route to the next location, but I thought you might be interested to know there's a small army of T88 war machines here. While you likely lack the means to power them, it would be wasteful to abandon them here."

Vackzilian raised an eyebrow. "Interesting," he murmured, stroking his black goatee. "Powering them will soon cease to be an issue," he added, seemingly speaking more to himself than to The Fallen One. "I will send a group of my blood oaths with a teleportation stone to retrieve them."

The Fallen One grunted and swept his hand through the scrying, terminating the communication. "Poor fools," he huffed to himself. His father had deliberately made the teleportation stones heavy to prevent such tomfoolery.

The Fallen One turned and drove one of his swords through the control room's mainframe computer. Then he marched out, leaving a smoking, tangled mess in his wake.

***

Vackzilian finished assigning a team of blood oaths to recover the T88s The Fallen One had unearthed and then returned to reading the rather pragmatic reports from Drakovian.