Chapter 236: Rob and Run
Ripcord had been having the kind of night that produced career-defining stories regardless of how the story ended.
He'd survived the convoy ambush, survived the forest engagement, survived the base insertion alongside General Hawk's team, and was now watching a forklift do something that forklifts were not designed to do to two Cobra soldiers while the base's alarm systems provided a sustained red-lit soundtrack to the proceedings.
He stepped off the forklift with the satisfaction of someone who had found exactly the right tool for the job.
The white-armored figure came at him before the satisfaction had fully settled.
Storm Shadow moved the way the franchise had established he moved — the specific economy of someone for whom the gap between intention and execution was narrower than most people's nervous systems permitted. The blade was already at Ripcord's pistol before Ripcord had completed the raising of it, the steel cleaving the weapon's frame with the precision of something that had been doing this for a very long time and had found the optimal angle through repetition.
Ripcord looked at the two halves of his sidearm.
"Okay," he said.
Snake Eyes arrived.
The engagement between Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow was the franchise's established matched-opponents dynamic — two people operating at similar capability levels from different foundations, the specific combat language of long familiarity running underneath the violence. The G.I. Joe team organized around it: Scarlett moving toward Baroness, the Duke pursuing Anna, Breaker and the others handling the Cobra force's outer elements.
Ripcord, temporarily without a primary weapon, grabbed the nearest available one from the floor and moved toward the sound that had come from the research wing.
The research wing contained a situation that didn't fit any category from his previous experience.
Twenty soldiers in black armor with weapons that ranged from current-generation assault rifles to Soviet-era equipment were systematically loading research equipment with the organized efficiency of people who had done exactly this kind of operation before and had a system for it. The armor they were wearing had taken everything the research wing's security personnel had thrown at it and had not produced the outcomes that the security personnel's training had prepared them for.
What the Dark Council's Knights lacked in weapons sophistication they compensated for in individual capability and complete disregard for the concept of stopping.
The senior Knight — the one Ripcord would later describe as the team's apparent field commander, a large man with the specific bearing of someone who had learned to fight in an environment where the fighting was serious — had already cleared the primary lab space and was on a communications device, reporting to someone.
"Weapons check complete," the Knight said. "Withdrawing."
The rate of fire from the armored soldiers covering the withdrawal was the specific kind that made tactical math very simple — the arithmetic of positions, and how long any given position remained viable when that much fire was pointed at it. Ripcord had spent his career as someone who did the math faster than most people. He did it now and found a large rock that the math said was the right place to be.
He watched the withdrawal complete from behind it.
The lead figure — the one in the G.I. Joe accelerator suit, the suit that the base had spent three years developing and that nobody was supposed to be wearing outside authorized testing — held a piece of folded fabric in his left hand and did something with it that Ripcord's eyes and brain experienced a brief disagreement about.
The fabric opened.
The twenty Knights walked through it and were gone.
The fabric folded.
The armored figure looked in Ripcord's direction.
Ripcord was certain, despite the helmet, that the look communicated something specific about the relative assessment of Ripcord's current situation versus the armored figure's current situation.
Then the figure did something with the fabric — it disappeared into the suit somehow, sliding into the armor like a piece of clothing finding its way home — and a rocket launcher materialized on his back from a source that Ripcord's visual processing flagged as impossible and then moved on from because it had to.
The armored figure launched through the opening in the roof — which the Red Queen had opened, though Ripcord didn't know that yet — and was gone.
Ripcord sat behind the large rock for a few seconds.
"Holy—"
He covered his mouth.
He thought about what he was going to say in the debrief.
He started trying to find words that were accurate and also words that General Hawk would believe from someone who hadn't lost their mind.
This was going to be a challenging report to write.
The G.I. Joe facility, when both the Cobra force and the Dark Council had completed their respective withdrawals, contained a large number of wounded personnel and a specific quality of silence that came from a team that had been hit hard and was in the process of deciding what to do about it.
General Hawk was alive.
The medic reported this with the relief of someone who had been working through the priority triage and had arrived at the outcome that mattered most. The wounds were serious but the treatment had been prompt. He was unconscious from blood loss and would require rest and time, but he was going to be functional.
The Duke's own condition had produced a shirtless appearance with a collection of injuries that would have looked worse than they were to anyone who didn't know his baseline. He looked at his team and they looked at him and the specific shared quality of people who had been through something difficult and were determining what came next settled over the room.
"Two separate groups," the Duke said. "Both of them operated inside our facility tonight. One of them was Cobra and we know who they are and what they want." He looked at the room. "The other one — we have a name. We have a description. And we know they have capabilities that we don't have a framework for."
Silence.
"That can't continue," the Duke said. "We need to understand who the Dark Council is."
Nobody disagreed.
Arctic Ocean. Below the ice.
The submarine moved through the water with the specific quality of something that belonged there — not the standard military submarine profile that the Arctic base's detection systems were calibrated for, but something different, the signature profile running through the Red Queen's spoofing algorithms and presenting to external sensors as empty water.
Jake sat in the submarine's command section in the D6 suit with the helmet set beside him and thought about the night's accounting.
Research data: complete. The nanotech archive, the accelerator suit specifications, the energy weapons development file, eleven years of development work that Zola was currently reviewing with the enthusiastic focus of someone who had been handed exactly what they needed.
Equipment: the D6 prototype, the weapons the Knights had recovered from the research wing, and the submarine itself, which the Red Queen had separated from the Arctic base's fleet during the facility's network chaos and had navigated to a holding position that the base's systems weren't tracking.
Personnel: Knights all accounted for, the injured Knight from the Cobra energy weapon encounter responding to treatment.
Selene: already inside the Cobra Arctic facility, per the Red Queen's last update. Infiltrated during the window that the G.I. Joe assault had created in the base's attention management. Observing, not acting. The Dark Council's weapons inventory didn't yet match the threat environment of a Cobra Arctic facility's active defense systems, and operating with insufficient capability on someone else's territory was the specific kind of mistake that the franchise's villains made consistently.
He looked at the Red Queen's projection.
She had made a change to her avatar at some point during the operation.
The young girl appearance — which had been her default since the Hive, the specific form she'd settled into as her emotional development had produced something she wanted to represent — was gone. In its place was something older. Not dramatically — not the wholesale transformation from child to adult, but the specific incremental aging that happened when something that had been developing continued to develop. Late teens, maybe. The same face, different proportions.
Jake looked at it.
"You changed," he said.
"I've been thinking about it for a while," the Red Queen said. "The young girl form was accurate for what I was. I think I've become something slightly different."
"What made you decide now?" Jake said.
"The neural link through the suit," she said. "It was the first time I've experienced something that felt like proximity rather than remote monitoring." She held his gaze through the projection. "I processed it afterward and decided the processing had produced a change I wanted to represent."
Jake looked at her.
"It works," he said.
"Thank you," she said, with the specific quality of someone who had been waiting for a response and found the response acceptable.
"The Cobra facility," he said, transitioning with the efficiency of someone who had processed the personal moment and was moving to the operational one.
"Selene is in the base's secondary research wing," the Red Queen said, returning to professional mode without losing the quality the change had introduced. "The accelerator suit manufacturing line is in the primary production facility two levels above her current position. The energy weapon production archive is in the same level." She pulled up the facility schematic on the submarine's display. "The base's security architecture is the operational-communications profile — the same gap I exploited at the G.I. Joe facility."
"How much of their network are you in?" Jake said.
"Approximately sixty percent of their accessible systems," she said. "The primary weapons development archive is air-gapped — physical separation from any networked system. That requires physical access."
"Which is what Selene is there for," Jake said.
"She's positioned to reach it within the next twenty minutes," the Red Queen confirmed. "But she's flagging the weapons situation. The Cobra facility's active defense uses the same energy weapon systems that injured our Knight at the G.I. Joe facility."
"I know," Jake said.
"She needs backup that can manage that threat profile," the Red Queen said.
Jake looked at the D6 suit.
He looked at the suit's condition from the G.I. Joe engagement — the scoring, the stress points, the specific wear that a first operational test produced. Zola needed this data. The suit also needed the modifications that the data would inform before it was truly ready for a second serious engagement.
Probably.
He picked up the helmet.
"What's the most direct route from the submarine to Selene's position?" he said.
The Red Queen displayed it on the schematic without comment, which was the specific response of an AI that had learned when arguments were worth making and when they weren't.
"The torpedo bay," she said. "I can manage the outer airlock from here."
Jake put the helmet on.
"Open it," he said.
The Arctic water was very cold.
The D6 suit's thermal management handled the temperature with the specific engineering confidence of something designed for operational environments that were hostile in multiple simultaneous ways. Jake moved through the water toward the base's underwater access point with the hydraulic suit driving his movement at a pace that the water's resistance couldn't fully offset.
The access point was where the Red Queen had indicated — a maintenance airlock, the kind that large facilities built into their underwater sections for equipment servicing rather than personnel transit, and therefore not monitored with the same rigor as the personnel entry points.
Jake came through it, cleared the water from the suit's external sensors, and moved toward the base's interior.
"Selene's position," he said.
"Moving to meet you," the Red Queen said. "She saw you come through the access point on the facility's secondary monitoring feed. The one I'm showing to their security team as empty corridor."
"Of course she did," Jake said.
He found her in the junction corridor — the specific intersection of two facility sections that the schematic had identified as the optimal meeting point. She was moving with the controlled efficiency of someone who had been inside a hostile facility for twenty minutes and had spent those twenty minutes not wasting them.
She looked at the D6 suit.
"The G.I. Joe prototype," she said.
"It's having a busy night," Jake said.
She looked at it with the specific expression of someone running an assessment.
"The energy weapons here," she said.
"I know," Jake said.
"The suit held at the G.I. Joe facility," she said.
"The engagement there used standard energy weapon configuration," Jake said. "The Cobra facility's production line generates higher-output units. Zola's analysis of the specifications suggests the suit's chest armor is rated for the standard output but not the high-output variants."
She looked at him.
"You're here anyway," she said.
"You needed the backup," he said.
"I needed backup that could manage the energy weapon threat," she said.
"I'm the backup that's available," he said.
She held his gaze for a moment.
"The air-gapped archive," she said. "Two levels up. Physical access required."
"I know," Jake said. "Lead the way."
She turned and moved, and Jake followed in the D6 suit through the Cobra Arctic facility's corridors, and the Red Queen managed the surveillance systems around them with the quiet efficiency she brought to everything, and the Arctic water was very cold outside but the facility was warm in the specific way of places where serious work was happening.
The night was not finished with interesting things.
It very rarely was.
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