Captain Andrews blinked, grabbed them, and quickly scanned the pages. The single word “approved” stamped on the bottom glared back at her.
“No way in hell did you get these through so fast,” she breathed out as she shook her head. “No way in hell.”
Masters just shrugged. “You have a lot to learn about the Teams, Andrews. I had Admiral Karson copy us onto the testing division’s supply authorization. We’ll get whatever new gear is being considered for deployment.”
He stood up as she gaped at him, and then brushed past her on his way out of the office. “Don’t worry about it, Captain. Just think of all the time you’ll save by not having to fill out requisition forms.”
The hurled epithet that followed him out the door brought another wide smile to his face. He’d always wanted carte blanche to fuck with the brass, and as long as Karson needed him, there wasn’t a thing anyone short of another admiral could do about it.
They may have dragged his ass back in, but Hawk Masters was going to extract every ounce of value from the situation he could.
After all, he only had just so long before the whole thing fell in on him anyway. One way or the other.
“Well?”
“He’s begun recruiting.”
“Anyone we know?”
The young man shook his head in response to Percy’s question. “Mostly no. We know their names, but they’re drifters. Not expected to last much longer anyway.”
“Interesting,” Percy acknowledged.
“We do know one person on the list, however,” the young man added, frowning slightly. “Alexander Norton.”
Percy stiffened, thinking. “I know that name. I can’t remember where.…”
“He crossed over when he was eight.…”
“Eight.” Percy reached up and grabbed the paper the younger man was holding out to him. “That seems…highly unlikely.”
“Yes, sir.” The young man nodded, agreeing.
Crossing the veil at eight years old was practically a death sentence — there was just no way a child could hope able to defend himself against the things that would take notice of him. Heck, few adults survived the experience. Most were slaughtered within minutes, some within days, and the largest chunk of the rest went insane and killed themselves.
Children took the shift in reality with more equanimity, but physically they were meat for the grinder.
“He was taken in by Emilio,” Percy whispered, reading the paper. “The Black. Is he a practitioner?”
“We believe so, yes.”
Percy thought back to the matriarch’s orders and sighed, shaking his head. “All right, go. Send Robert back.”
The young man nodded, falling back before turning and leaving the room.
It was clear that Masters knew more about the actual situation than anyone had realized; otherwise he wouldn’t have been able to find someone like Alexander, who had survived across the veil since he was eight. No, for Masters to have contacted Norton, he had to know a great deal indeed.
That made him dangerous.
A few moments passed, and then Robert Black walked into the room. He was a nondescript sort of man, the kind you would miss in a crowd. Percy knew that that was one of his main skills, actually, and only that knowledge kept him from severely underestimating the man. Robert was five foot eight, slim, and had the sort of looks that left you trying in vain to remember anything distinctive. He had been working for the Line of the Clans for many years, and barely seemed to have aged in the fifteen that Percy had known him.
“Sir?”
“We have a target.”
Robert nodded. “Who?”
“Navy man, by the name of Masters,” Percy said, handing over the file. “He’s a security risk.”
“Immediate?”
“Unfortunately, yes,” Percy replied. “We’re fairly sure he hasn’t talked yet, but he’s obviously in the know, and the navy is at least aware that he’s holding information they want.”
Robert nodded slowly, reading the file. He raised an eyebrow when he noted the location. “Coronado? You want this done on a base full of navy SEALs?”
“Is that a problem?”
“No.” Robert shook his head, smiling slightly. “It should be…fun.”
Hawk Masters rubbed his eyes, pushing the grainy grit around more than soothing them, tired of looking at sheet after sheet of paper. Even setting up a small squad entailed a mountain and a half of paperwork, despite the fact that they weren’t “official” at this point.
He pursed his lips as he signed off on another form, one that would get him some of the heavier ordnance types for the AA-12 shotguns he’d requisitioned, and then pushed back from the cheap desk as he looked around the base housing where he was now living. He already missed his cement walls and rammed-earth fortifications.
It was going to take time to get used to living on base again, Masters realized. It didn’t help that the sound of the ocean kept him from sleeping at night. He’d had nightmares for years after the Fitz went down, sleeping with a loaded shotgun because it was the only thing that offered him any comfort. Cold comfort, of course, since he knew that a twelve-gauge would provide as much protection against that thing as spitballs.
Honestly, it was a miracle he hadn’t blown his own head off, either accidentally or otherwise, those first couple years after being discharged. It had taken three more to find out just how deep the rabbit hole went, and another couple before he worked his way down to sleeping with a forty-five.
By then he’d figured that if the forty-five wasn’t enough to take out whatever was coming for him, it’d do a cleaner job on his skull than the shotgun. No reason to make it any messier than it had to be for whoever had to clean up.
In the SEALs, Masters had lived by the credo that the only easy day was yesterday. But he couldn’t remember any easy yesterdays, not since crossing the veil. The things he saw when he was out from under its protection, well…they didn’t exactly lend themselves to a decent night’s sleep.
The experience of having his eyes opened to the real world was not something he’d ever forget, any more than he could forget losing most of his team and an entire destroyer to that hellspawned abomination from the depths. He’d since learned that crossing the veil was invariably a traumatic experience, but for most it didn’t involve coming face to tentacle with a god kin.
Hawk slowly cleaned up his desk, putting away the requisition forms and materials he’d gathered as his mind wandered back to the past. There were a couple old sayings about ignorance. First that it was bliss, and second that what you didn’t know couldn’t hurt you.
Truer words were never spoken.
The veil was the only thing that stood between the modern world and the monsters of old, and when he’d learned about it, Masters had wanted to cry. It was like a cosmic joke that the ultimate defense against evil was powered by the ignorance of those it protected, and he felt like he was the punch line.
It flew in the face of everything he’d been brought up and trained to believe, making a mockery of his life up until that point, and utterly destroying him in more ways than one.
To this day, Masters questioned the sanity of those ancient bastards who’d deployed the veil in defense of the planet’s human population. Yet humanity might not have survived the Dark Ages without it. The best research he could muster on the subject was ambivalent at best, and completely contradictory at worst, but it didn’t seem as though humans would have had a chance at winning in an open conflict.
Finally worn out, in both body and mind, Masters flicked off the lights and prepared himself to try and get a few hours of forced sleep before work started again in the morning. It was only a matter of time before something else slipped through one of the growing holes in the veil and he fielded his team for the first time.