Twelfth in the series. Read after the break…
Insight
By Scott Lowther
Copyright 2019
1993, September: Brass Valley
Chief Security Officer Lang was waiting at the Central Dome loading dock for the latest shipment from the world. This time there would be, as always, food and meds and entertainment items, but what everyone was really looking forward to was the new reactor. This would be Reactor #4 for Brass Valley, bringing total power generation up to over one and a half gigawatts. But Lang was there to receive that rarest of imports: a draftee.
FBI Agent David Carter had gotten lucky… or very unlucky, depending on how he eventually came to deal with it all. Three sizeable nuclear reactors disappearing in just a few years, even reactors built off the books, leave traces. No matter how careful you are, or how long you’ve been at it, sometimes slipups happen.
There’d been too many slipups lately, Lang thought. Two years ago the United States went to war over a slipup, and the Director of the Office of Insight lost his job over it. There’d been major shakeups and still an outsider fell face-first into the Office’s business. And now he was here, and Lang had to deal with him.
So, here he was. And there was Agent Carter, looking every bit as baffled as Lang expected he would be.
Young Agent Carter was being escorted by two bored-looking Insight agents, walking alongside the titanium shipping container for the new reactor vessel. They had flown in on a special C-5, landing on the plains at the feet of the Hidden Mountains, just inside the Shield. The cargo, including the FBI agent, were to be trucked up to the main base, in the foothills on this side of the Hidden Mountains. On the other side of the mountains lay the dead alien city, hidden from sight. This was far easier on everyone both physiologically and psychologically. From the base, nobody could ever accidentally look towards the west and catch a glimpse of the Madness Mountains. And this position provided dozens of square miles of reasonably level ground with accessible bedrock, great for building the small colony. The Soviets might be out of the picture, but the future could still hold some threats awful enough that it would be good to have a shielded, invisible colony large enough and secure enough to keep the species going.
And so smartass FBI agents couldn’t be allowed to just go blowing their cover all willy-nilly.
“Agent Carter, I presume,” Chief Lang said as the Insight agents dropped the dumbfounded looking young man in front of him. Carter had been slapped into a standard parka on board the C-5; it wasn’t quite doing the job. The loading dock was a vast hangar built to accommodate a dozen C-5’s at once, though it’d never been used for that; it kept loading and unloading and maintenance and refueling out of the weather, but not out of the cold.
Carter nodded, held out his hand. Lang didn’t take it.
“Well, let’s get going,” Lang said, nodding to the two agents. They nodded back and turned away, heading back to their plane.
Lang bundled the bewildered and silent young man into the snow cat for the drive up to the colony. Gruffly he gave a brief rundown of the history of the Office of Insight, the reality of the Elder Things, their city and shield, the Deep Ones, the shoggoths, the other threats facing mankind that most people had no clue about. It was a cold spring day as the hydrogen-fueled machine trundled along the shallowly-sloping ice road up the foothills towards the domes of the colony. Agent Carter listened in fascination, as best he could; he desperately wanted to ask questions, but was told to “shut up and listen” whenever he tried to interrupt. It was all fantastic, and the sort of thing that he would not have come close to believing as recently as yesterday. But now, seeing the vast Antarctic infrastructure, the fragmented sky and the sun low on the horizon, broken into dancing shards, he was ready to accept anything.
It was a long slog from the loading dock to the colony. Traffic was heavy, appropriate for a day with new cargo; snow cats and trucks were coming and going. Helicopters were ferrying higher value items and people to the colony, and some directly to the city beyond the mountains. But neither Lang nor Carter were high value at the moment, so they took the slow road. It gave them time for Lang to get all the way through his spiel. It didn’t cover but a tiny fraction of what someone in the Office of Insight would need to know, but it would do to see if Carter could possibly have a future. Some people, dumped into the larger reality, promptly went off their nut. Lang had seen it before. Carter, however, actually seemed intrigued.
“So,” Lang said at last, “if you pan out you may have a role in Insight.”
Carter turned to him. “And if I don’t pan out?”
“Then,” Lang said with a shrug, “they’ll probably get rid of you, one way or another.”
“That sounds like a threat.”
Lang shrugged again. “Take it as you like. You weren’t invited into this; you basically broke in. That shows you’re smart. But you got caught, and that shows you’re dumb. There are folks at the colony who will check you out, see if you could be useful. If you’re not useful but they figure you can be trusted to keep your yap shut, you’ll probably be sent back to the world to live your life. Maybe you’ll be contacted again, maybe not. A whole lot of folks in your position are like that.”
“And if I get sent back and tell my boss? Or go to the press?”
Lang suddenly lurched the snow cat off the side of the road and brought the vehicle to a stop. He turned the engine off and sat motionlessly staring through the windshield. As the windows began to frost over, the only sound was the two men breathing and other vehicles going by. Finally, Lang turned to Carter. “Look, kid,” he said, glaring at him, “this is the biggest secret on the planet, in all of human history. This place might be the salvation of the species, or it might be the last stand before the end. However it goes, it’s a secret that cannot get out, and the Office will make damn sure of that. They employ people whose sole purpose in life is shutting people up.”
Carter glared back, defiantly. “So they’d kill me.”
“Eventually,” Lang replied. “But one thing you might notice if you stick around here, is everyone has a family. You know how in the movies the sinister secret groups are always going after new recruits who are antisocial loners, have nothing left to lose, that sort of thing? That’s not the Office. They prefer to recruit people who do have family, who do have people they care about. People who have something to lose. Mostly that’s so that everyone working for the Office knows just what they’re here to save and preserve. But it’s also so that everyone knows what the price of treachery is.”
Now Carter looked shocked. “They’d kill my family?”
Lang sighed, thinking back to not that long ago. “The last time an Office of Insight staffer betrayed us, it started a damned war. If he had really understood that that would lead to the deaths of his loved ones, maybe he wouldn’t have behaved stupidly, and there’d be less dead folk cluttering up the cemeteries.”
“Is the Office of Insight really that evil?”
Lang laughed. “God no, son. But it is that determined. Don’t be a jackass, and you’ll be fine. Do good work and you’ll retire like any other government employee. Unlike in the movies, there are a lot of former Office of Insight staffers, retired on fat pensions living the good life. Now. You want me to start back up again, and take you on up to the colony for testing, or do you just want out here? If the latter, leave the parka. You’ll freeze to death in just a few minutes, and you’ll be done with all this.”
Carter sulked, but said, “Head on up.”
“Smart kid,” Lang said. There might be a future for him.