The Dark Edge Chronicles - Clan War

Uncovering Truth

It was nearly a half hour later that found the big Qos Viran commander standing arms crossed in van Tallert's armory where she maintained a high tech lab. The lab, suitably equipped to be used to enhance weapons and armor, as would be expected from an arms dealer, also hosted the castle's electronic countermeasures suite, enabling van Tallert's nestari to not only attack an enemy electronically out in the world. But it also gave them the power to hack networks, crack military grade encryption, and penetrate firewalls with the same ease an armor piercing shell punched through a tank.

It was with that power that the nestari Truk had named Narcist was now carefully sorting through the pieces of the smashed phone Lash had found amongst the destroyed weapons and bodies of the attacking Hand agents. As vampires go, Narcist wasn't very tall, maybe 160 centimeters in combat boots, half her head shaved to reveal a nanite tattoo of a chinese dragon etched into her pale scalp and face. Even as Lash's eyes fell onto it, he watched it sinuously move into her hairline and out of sight before appearing on the other side to traverse her face, its dark blue lines momentarily crossing not only skin, but her eye and teeth as well, the nanites working just beneath the surface to be visible across all mediums.

Despite the diminutive size, however, she held herself like a professional soldier, a barely-coiled spring ready to unload on anything considered a threat to her mission, or a barricade to her goals. Northern European from her coloration, she was lean and muscular even in her combat fatigues and armor in a way that said she was more comfortable with knives and guns than she was with the current analyzer she was using to carefully scan the phone's thumbnail-sized hard drive.

And yet Narcist handled the analyzer with more skill than Lash had imagined she would, being a soldier and all, carefully working her way through the phone's debris with the care of an expert.

"As I expected," she began in a voice made hoarse by a scar that angled jaggedly across her throat, marking an assassination attempt that failed. She lowered the analyzer to look first at Truk then over at Lady van Tallert. "The phone's logic board is junk, turned to jigsaw pieces by whatever force destroyed its owner." She looked back down at the hard drive. "The flash memory, on the other hand, is intact."

"Can you access it?" Lady van Tallert asked, her expression parts grim determination and cautious curiosity.

"I already have, my lady," Narcist quickly replied. "It wasn't even encrypted."

Pausing just long enough to let the drive slip into a reading slot, she cycled power through it then summoned a holographic display, which quickly filled with a video image of the late stages of the siege, right before the tanks were about to make their final salvo against the wall protecting the power plant.

"This was the video the user was transmitting when the explosion took them out," the tech-savvy nestari explained as the video continued for a moment before looping in a shimmer of static. "It's pretty much the only thing on the drive, which suggests the phone was being used for the first time and for the sole purpose of shooting that video."

"Does the drive still carry the IP address the phone was transmitting to?" Truk asked, earning himself a quick nod from the intense Narcist.

"I'm already running a trace," she went on to say, bringing up another screen that had an overlay map of Europe. The map quickly filled with a number of lines pinging to several countries at once.

"Whoever was running this connection, they were good," Narcist indicated. "Each node in the stream was bounced at least seven times to muffle sites to confuse any possible real-time trace. The signal was also tuned to double back on itself an equally-confusing number of times. Once I clear out the resonances and parse the muffle sites, I'll know exactly where it ended up."