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Date of Expiration, Chapter 2/?
Title: Date of Expiration
Fandom/Pairing: Leverage/Global Frequency fusion, with eventual Eliot Spencer/Alec Hardison.
Rating: R (eventually)
A/N: Here's wikipedia's rundown Warren Ellis's Global Frequency. While knowledge of the story is helpful, and I heartily recommend the graphic novels, it isn't absolutely necessary.
Summary: The Global Frequency existed to save humanity from itself, and there was always another crisis coming. It was job security of a sort, if you managed to survive the bioenhanced supersoldiers, alien neuroprogramming, physicists who should know better, and the bureaucracy.
Previous chapters: AO3 // DW // LJ
Tues., March 11, 2014 11:15 CDT (GMT-5)
Eliot zipped his jacket and put his work gloves on before leaving his apartment. The synthskin Dr. Laroque kept trying to push on him was flimsy, too easily torn, and though the texture was nearly identical to that of real flesh, the way it stretched over the framework of his left arm and hand looked anything but human. Minneapolis had long winters, though, and he'd probably be able to hide it underneath bulky gloves for another few weeks. He could slip onto the street, blend in easily with the foot traffic as he hiked down the block to his car.
Maintaining the illusion of normality only went as far as his commute down 35W. It wasn't any use pretending when he arrived at the warehouse for his shift. Even with the gloves, knowledge of his enhancements were no secret, and hadn't ever been. They'd probably been known even before the case worker had given him a name instead of a number.
The entire country had watched it on TV, but they hadn't seen everything. The cameras hadn't been there to capture the fear spreading out through his brothers and sisters when they first realized it wasn't a drill. The footage of the week-long siege of the Kansas compound had mostly been taken from helicopters patrolling from above; they'd missed the blood, and the arguments breaking out as two dozen teenagers, their parents gone, tried to strategize against the full force of the United States military.
Those strategies had mostly been in vain. Despite their training and their enhancements, they'd been outnumbered, and hadn't had half the resources of the other side. They hadn't even had their parents, any more, to give them orders.
His brothers, Alpha and Gamma, had died on the third day of the siege. His sister Beta had fallen on the sixth, making him, Delta, the oldest of his siblings, though he'd been too focused on Lambda, seizing on the floor as her malfunctioning enhancements tried in vain to shock her heart back into rhythm, to immediately notice.
He'd wanted to come up with a plan, wanted to raise his eyes to his last nine siblings and convince them that it would be okay, that they'd survive. All he'd been able to think of was the numbers, running madly through his head and refusing to improve.
Win to loss rate is 3.33 to one. Current count confirms enemy forces outnumber allies seven to one. Current light readings 19220 lux. Secondary weapons cache cut off behind the line of M1042s and M1037s to the west; retrieval not an option. Air support is inbound. Probability of strike within next ten minutes is 97.8%. Probability of strike within next five is 82.4%.
There just hadn't been any time to do anything.
He'd winced, expecting the painful red flash in his head that never came, but their parents had been dead for a week. Nobody had been monitoring for OD- operational directive- failures for days, and there was no one left to outrank him.
"We've got to surrender," he'd finally said, the words like gravel in his throat, and glanced up from Lambda's convulsions. Epsilon and Digamma had exchanged a wary, puzzled look between them, which turned to surprise when they realized their OD monitors, too, were offline. Neither of them had spoken, but Digamma had managed a shaky nod, crouching on the floor to try and do something for Lambda.
She'd had even less medical training than he'd had, and there hadn't been enough room for both of them. He'd turned back to the youngers, finding them crouched at the end of the hallway, their lowered heads more habit than necessity so far away from any windows. While some of them had been fitted for basic external armaments, they were all a year or more away from receiving their first neural upgrades. They'd still needed explanation, sometimes, to understand their orders, or what it meant to disobey them.
Beta had always been better at this sort of thing, more patient. But she'd fallen hours ago.
He'd crouched down, deliberately blocking Lambda from view, and tried to explain the concept of surrender, but his words, if they were heard at all, hadn't seemed to matter. The siege had been going on for days, and while the noise was of minimal importance to anyone with cochlear implants, the foam earplugs One had distributed that first night only did so much. The kids were tired, terrified to the point of numbness.
Their tears had run out days ago, but though they'd been silent, they hadn't heard a word he'd said, hadn't even been looking at him.
It had taken him a moment to realize that the bottom of the silence had dropped out. Lambda had stopped seizing, there on the floor of the hallway, when his back was turned.
The television cameras hadn't caught that part. And it hadn't made it into his file, either. What had filled it instead was the detritus of hundreds of hours of psychological and medical evaluations, all the paperwork necessary to prove that he, at age seventeen, could operate as a functional member of human society.
By age eighteen, he'd mostly failed at that. The few months he spent in a public high school had been about as successful as the group homes had been, and both had been written off euphemistically as little more than a series of mutual misunderstandings.
Eventually, at her wit's end, his case worker had advised him that with his training, a career in the military might be worthwhile. She'd carefully omitted any mention of the metal patchwork that comprised his arm and hands, the sensor arrays installed where his optic discs should've apparently been, and the miles of thinner-than hair wire twining along his nerves.
The Army, it turned out, was not at all turned off by the prospects of his bioelectrical enhancements. After a few weeks, he'd forgotten that he'd ever feared otherwise. He'd been routed out of basic training after the first day, deployed inside enemy territory by the end of the first month.
He'd gone from a rank to a name and back again, when he'd enlisted. It wasn't Delta, this time, the number was much longer and bore little resemblance to the soldiers who were his new brothers and sisters, but it fit in a way that Eliot Spencer, the name he'd chosen for himself, never had.
Tues., March 11, 2014 20:03 CDT (GMT-5)
"See you tomorrow, Spencer," Gatiss nodded vaguely in his direction as he passed, his gaze never quite reaching past Eliot's shoulder.
"Boss," Eliot nodded back, though Gatiss was already heading up into the offices with his ever-present clipboard clutched under one scrawny arm. He punched the clock and headed out into the paring lot, and was digging for his keys when his phone vibrated. Not the cell in his coat pocket, though. It was the other one, the one he kept in his jeans.
"This is 324," he answered, his mind nearly landing on the thought that as far as the identification numbers he'd managed to collect went, at least this one was easy to remember.
"324, this is Aleph. You're on the Global Frequency."
The GF phone only ever rang when they needed to send him in to some disaster or another, but he found himself, not for the first time, grinning as he answered. He'd never really examined the reaction too closely. If there was some latent monstrosity in him that the therapists had missed, or the endless stream of case workers had missed some mechanical trigger that just sat waiting for a command code to be entered, he didn't want to know.
Maybe, he told himself, he just liked being able to use what he was to do something good.
Or maybe he just liked the sound of Aleph's voice on the line. Eliot had never met him, only ever caught a few glimpses of him on over his phone's screen once, when he'd used the video function to show the state of the dead bodies he'd found in the subway car last spring.
Eliot hadn't gotten a good look at him even then; just enough to see that he'd been a little younger than Eliot would've thought, and a lot better looking. The insanely bright tee-shirt stretching over broad shoulders had been a surprise; for some reason, after hearing his voice on the line on two or three ops, he'd been expecting to see an underwhelming scrawny guy in a polo shirt, like the ones who came to fix the warehouse's computers when they were down. Or maybe, given the GF's reputation, a wild-eyed slovenly lunatic in paramilitary drag.
But in that one instant, where they'd briefly glanced at each other over the phone, Aleph hadn't looked at him warily at all. He'd just smiled grimly, said "circumstances aside, it's nice to sort of meet you," and asked him to turn the camera on the bodies so that the Korean scientist Aleph had conferenced in could examine the amount of blood that had poured from their ears.
It wasn't the first time he'd had to show someone a pile of corpses. But it was the first time anyone had said it was nice to meet him, sort of or otherwise. Even Miranda hadn't been able to stop her eyes from darting curiously at his metal hand.
"Aleph, hey." He buried the grin, though there nobody was here to see it, and forced himself to switch gears. "What's the situation?"
"Stay where you are. Miranda's two minutes out, she'll brief you on the way to the helicopter. Hope you like Texas." Aleph started speaking Spanish, then, to quickly for Eliot to follow; he was obviously on the line with someone else. Probably a few dozen someones, given the way these things went down. Diplomats or scientists or card-counters or engineers, the usual mishmash of experts the GF had at their fingertips.
"Okay, 324," Aleph's voice was louder now, "Be on the lookout for a black SUV, and move quick. This is gonna be fast and ugly."
"Of course it is," Eliot grumbled, flexing his hand just to feel the metal shifting against his tendons, pretending that it felt like muscles being stretched for action. "Anything else you can tell me before she gets here?"
"Miranda wants to be the one to brief you," Aleph repeated, regret toning his words. "But...you're not going in solo. Ah, 587's already at the landing pad."
587. Parker.
The GF had probably found another Big Wheel house, then. Wonderful.
"Fuck." Headlights swung around the corner up the block, finding him a second later. He stepped off the curb to wait for the SUV to pull up.
"Yeah. Good luck. I'm on your Frequency."
"Yeah," Eliot said. "Thanks," but Aleph had already cut the connection. Glancing in through the windshield, he could see that the front seat was empty so he opened the door and climbed inside. Miranda was at the wheel, talking sharply into her bluetooth.
"I've got an agent here, general. I'll contact you after I've briefed him. Stay near your phone." Pulling away from the curb again, she finally glanced in Eliot's direction.
"Hello again," she said, a razor sharp smile slashing across her face for only a second.
"We've got to stop meeting like this."
"That's what they all say. I trust Aleph's already given you the big picture?"
"Parker's riding shotgun," Eliot said. "I'm guessing Big Wheel?"
"We found another... house, yes." She'd meant to say compound, probably would have if she'd been talking to anyone else. "Five children. Only two are old enough for enhancement installation, we think, but it's unlikely they've progressed very far with it. Last week, a sixth child, the oldest, was found by border patrol, a few miles west of Laredo. She'd run away, and it took social services two days to get her to talk. We've got the location and the layout, and what we need is a clean extraction."
Eliot frowned. Clean extractions weren't usually what he was called in on.
"Parker's taking point on getting the kids out. You're taking care of their handlers and providing cover. Whatever that may entail. And I would appreciate it greatly if the children don't see anything. Aerial's are in the glove compartment."
We don't need another Kansas on our hands. She didn't say the words, but the message was clear.
Eliot nodded, reaching into the glove compartment for the file folder, flipping immediately to the map. "What're we gonna find when we get there?"
"The power's been cut to the property already, though we suspect they've got their own generators somewhere inside. By the time you land- I'm jumping off at Fort Hood- the sky will be 7.5 and 7.8 on the Bortle scale, so at least you should have a fair amount of cover. The house is sitting on a distressingly flat plain-"
Eliot flipped through the printouts. "How many windows and doors?"
"Two doors, four windows, plans are in the folder, but that's not the issue. The house is sitting on top of a half-finished fallout shelter. When the cold war ended, construction was halted and the bunker filled in, but that was a long time ago. There's every reason to believe that the tunnels have been reopened."
"Does Parker have the plans yet?"
"Excuse me?" Miranda's glance was a warning. Agents were never to use names in the field, and Eliot knew better.
"587. She seen this?"
"She's got the originals. And if you're very lucky, she might have some ideas already. If not, you've got a half hour flight to figure it out."
Chapter 3
Fandom/Pairing: Leverage/Global Frequency fusion, with eventual Eliot Spencer/Alec Hardison.
Rating: R (eventually)
A/N: Here's wikipedia's rundown Warren Ellis's Global Frequency. While knowledge of the story is helpful, and I heartily recommend the graphic novels, it isn't absolutely necessary.
Summary: The Global Frequency existed to save humanity from itself, and there was always another crisis coming. It was job security of a sort, if you managed to survive the bioenhanced supersoldiers, alien neuroprogramming, physicists who should know better, and the bureaucracy.
Previous chapters: AO3 // DW // LJ
Tues., March 11, 2014 11:15 CDT (GMT-5)
Eliot zipped his jacket and put his work gloves on before leaving his apartment. The synthskin Dr. Laroque kept trying to push on him was flimsy, too easily torn, and though the texture was nearly identical to that of real flesh, the way it stretched over the framework of his left arm and hand looked anything but human. Minneapolis had long winters, though, and he'd probably be able to hide it underneath bulky gloves for another few weeks. He could slip onto the street, blend in easily with the foot traffic as he hiked down the block to his car.
Maintaining the illusion of normality only went as far as his commute down 35W. It wasn't any use pretending when he arrived at the warehouse for his shift. Even with the gloves, knowledge of his enhancements were no secret, and hadn't ever been. They'd probably been known even before the case worker had given him a name instead of a number.
The entire country had watched it on TV, but they hadn't seen everything. The cameras hadn't been there to capture the fear spreading out through his brothers and sisters when they first realized it wasn't a drill. The footage of the week-long siege of the Kansas compound had mostly been taken from helicopters patrolling from above; they'd missed the blood, and the arguments breaking out as two dozen teenagers, their parents gone, tried to strategize against the full force of the United States military.
Those strategies had mostly been in vain. Despite their training and their enhancements, they'd been outnumbered, and hadn't had half the resources of the other side. They hadn't even had their parents, any more, to give them orders.
His brothers, Alpha and Gamma, had died on the third day of the siege. His sister Beta had fallen on the sixth, making him, Delta, the oldest of his siblings, though he'd been too focused on Lambda, seizing on the floor as her malfunctioning enhancements tried in vain to shock her heart back into rhythm, to immediately notice.
He'd wanted to come up with a plan, wanted to raise his eyes to his last nine siblings and convince them that it would be okay, that they'd survive. All he'd been able to think of was the numbers, running madly through his head and refusing to improve.
Win to loss rate is 3.33 to one. Current count confirms enemy forces outnumber allies seven to one. Current light readings 19220 lux. Secondary weapons cache cut off behind the line of M1042s and M1037s to the west; retrieval not an option. Air support is inbound. Probability of strike within next ten minutes is 97.8%. Probability of strike within next five is 82.4%.
There just hadn't been any time to do anything.
He'd winced, expecting the painful red flash in his head that never came, but their parents had been dead for a week. Nobody had been monitoring for OD- operational directive- failures for days, and there was no one left to outrank him.
"We've got to surrender," he'd finally said, the words like gravel in his throat, and glanced up from Lambda's convulsions. Epsilon and Digamma had exchanged a wary, puzzled look between them, which turned to surprise when they realized their OD monitors, too, were offline. Neither of them had spoken, but Digamma had managed a shaky nod, crouching on the floor to try and do something for Lambda.
She'd had even less medical training than he'd had, and there hadn't been enough room for both of them. He'd turned back to the youngers, finding them crouched at the end of the hallway, their lowered heads more habit than necessity so far away from any windows. While some of them had been fitted for basic external armaments, they were all a year or more away from receiving their first neural upgrades. They'd still needed explanation, sometimes, to understand their orders, or what it meant to disobey them.
Beta had always been better at this sort of thing, more patient. But she'd fallen hours ago.
He'd crouched down, deliberately blocking Lambda from view, and tried to explain the concept of surrender, but his words, if they were heard at all, hadn't seemed to matter. The siege had been going on for days, and while the noise was of minimal importance to anyone with cochlear implants, the foam earplugs One had distributed that first night only did so much. The kids were tired, terrified to the point of numbness.
Their tears had run out days ago, but though they'd been silent, they hadn't heard a word he'd said, hadn't even been looking at him.
It had taken him a moment to realize that the bottom of the silence had dropped out. Lambda had stopped seizing, there on the floor of the hallway, when his back was turned.
The television cameras hadn't caught that part. And it hadn't made it into his file, either. What had filled it instead was the detritus of hundreds of hours of psychological and medical evaluations, all the paperwork necessary to prove that he, at age seventeen, could operate as a functional member of human society.
By age eighteen, he'd mostly failed at that. The few months he spent in a public high school had been about as successful as the group homes had been, and both had been written off euphemistically as little more than a series of mutual misunderstandings.
Eventually, at her wit's end, his case worker had advised him that with his training, a career in the military might be worthwhile. She'd carefully omitted any mention of the metal patchwork that comprised his arm and hands, the sensor arrays installed where his optic discs should've apparently been, and the miles of thinner-than hair wire twining along his nerves.
The Army, it turned out, was not at all turned off by the prospects of his bioelectrical enhancements. After a few weeks, he'd forgotten that he'd ever feared otherwise. He'd been routed out of basic training after the first day, deployed inside enemy territory by the end of the first month.
He'd gone from a rank to a name and back again, when he'd enlisted. It wasn't Delta, this time, the number was much longer and bore little resemblance to the soldiers who were his new brothers and sisters, but it fit in a way that Eliot Spencer, the name he'd chosen for himself, never had.
Tues., March 11, 2014 20:03 CDT (GMT-5)
"See you tomorrow, Spencer," Gatiss nodded vaguely in his direction as he passed, his gaze never quite reaching past Eliot's shoulder.
"Boss," Eliot nodded back, though Gatiss was already heading up into the offices with his ever-present clipboard clutched under one scrawny arm. He punched the clock and headed out into the paring lot, and was digging for his keys when his phone vibrated. Not the cell in his coat pocket, though. It was the other one, the one he kept in his jeans.
"This is 324," he answered, his mind nearly landing on the thought that as far as the identification numbers he'd managed to collect went, at least this one was easy to remember.
"324, this is Aleph. You're on the Global Frequency."
The GF phone only ever rang when they needed to send him in to some disaster or another, but he found himself, not for the first time, grinning as he answered. He'd never really examined the reaction too closely. If there was some latent monstrosity in him that the therapists had missed, or the endless stream of case workers had missed some mechanical trigger that just sat waiting for a command code to be entered, he didn't want to know.
Maybe, he told himself, he just liked being able to use what he was to do something good.
Or maybe he just liked the sound of Aleph's voice on the line. Eliot had never met him, only ever caught a few glimpses of him on over his phone's screen once, when he'd used the video function to show the state of the dead bodies he'd found in the subway car last spring.
Eliot hadn't gotten a good look at him even then; just enough to see that he'd been a little younger than Eliot would've thought, and a lot better looking. The insanely bright tee-shirt stretching over broad shoulders had been a surprise; for some reason, after hearing his voice on the line on two or three ops, he'd been expecting to see an underwhelming scrawny guy in a polo shirt, like the ones who came to fix the warehouse's computers when they were down. Or maybe, given the GF's reputation, a wild-eyed slovenly lunatic in paramilitary drag.
But in that one instant, where they'd briefly glanced at each other over the phone, Aleph hadn't looked at him warily at all. He'd just smiled grimly, said "circumstances aside, it's nice to sort of meet you," and asked him to turn the camera on the bodies so that the Korean scientist Aleph had conferenced in could examine the amount of blood that had poured from their ears.
It wasn't the first time he'd had to show someone a pile of corpses. But it was the first time anyone had said it was nice to meet him, sort of or otherwise. Even Miranda hadn't been able to stop her eyes from darting curiously at his metal hand.
"Aleph, hey." He buried the grin, though there nobody was here to see it, and forced himself to switch gears. "What's the situation?"
"Stay where you are. Miranda's two minutes out, she'll brief you on the way to the helicopter. Hope you like Texas." Aleph started speaking Spanish, then, to quickly for Eliot to follow; he was obviously on the line with someone else. Probably a few dozen someones, given the way these things went down. Diplomats or scientists or card-counters or engineers, the usual mishmash of experts the GF had at their fingertips.
"Okay, 324," Aleph's voice was louder now, "Be on the lookout for a black SUV, and move quick. This is gonna be fast and ugly."
"Of course it is," Eliot grumbled, flexing his hand just to feel the metal shifting against his tendons, pretending that it felt like muscles being stretched for action. "Anything else you can tell me before she gets here?"
"Miranda wants to be the one to brief you," Aleph repeated, regret toning his words. "But...you're not going in solo. Ah, 587's already at the landing pad."
587. Parker.
The GF had probably found another Big Wheel house, then. Wonderful.
"Fuck." Headlights swung around the corner up the block, finding him a second later. He stepped off the curb to wait for the SUV to pull up.
"Yeah. Good luck. I'm on your Frequency."
"Yeah," Eliot said. "Thanks," but Aleph had already cut the connection. Glancing in through the windshield, he could see that the front seat was empty so he opened the door and climbed inside. Miranda was at the wheel, talking sharply into her bluetooth.
"I've got an agent here, general. I'll contact you after I've briefed him. Stay near your phone." Pulling away from the curb again, she finally glanced in Eliot's direction.
"Hello again," she said, a razor sharp smile slashing across her face for only a second.
"We've got to stop meeting like this."
"That's what they all say. I trust Aleph's already given you the big picture?"
"Parker's riding shotgun," Eliot said. "I'm guessing Big Wheel?"
"We found another... house, yes." She'd meant to say compound, probably would have if she'd been talking to anyone else. "Five children. Only two are old enough for enhancement installation, we think, but it's unlikely they've progressed very far with it. Last week, a sixth child, the oldest, was found by border patrol, a few miles west of Laredo. She'd run away, and it took social services two days to get her to talk. We've got the location and the layout, and what we need is a clean extraction."
Eliot frowned. Clean extractions weren't usually what he was called in on.
"Parker's taking point on getting the kids out. You're taking care of their handlers and providing cover. Whatever that may entail. And I would appreciate it greatly if the children don't see anything. Aerial's are in the glove compartment."
We don't need another Kansas on our hands. She didn't say the words, but the message was clear.
Eliot nodded, reaching into the glove compartment for the file folder, flipping immediately to the map. "What're we gonna find when we get there?"
"The power's been cut to the property already, though we suspect they've got their own generators somewhere inside. By the time you land- I'm jumping off at Fort Hood- the sky will be 7.5 and 7.8 on the Bortle scale, so at least you should have a fair amount of cover. The house is sitting on a distressingly flat plain-"
Eliot flipped through the printouts. "How many windows and doors?"
"Two doors, four windows, plans are in the folder, but that's not the issue. The house is sitting on top of a half-finished fallout shelter. When the cold war ended, construction was halted and the bunker filled in, but that was a long time ago. There's every reason to believe that the tunnels have been reopened."
"Does Parker have the plans yet?"
"Excuse me?" Miranda's glance was a warning. Agents were never to use names in the field, and Eliot knew better.
"587. She seen this?"
"She's got the originals. And if you're very lucky, she might have some ideas already. If not, you've got a half hour flight to figure it out."
Chapter 3