"It's your call then," he came out of his thoughts. She knows the risk, she's got the experience.
"We'll search," Hayate sounded determined. "But nobody goes alone, we pair off and stay close."
The Buddy System. Yes, yes. Smart Girl.
"Sir, you've got the birds eye-view and the data hub, so you'll be our coordinator," she continued.
Roland nodded, time to do this systematicly.
"Got it," he began. "Priority search is going to be our seven remaining AMF transmitters, we'll refer to them as Projectors. If little Rein's analyssis is accurate-"
Reinforce Zwei instantly puffed up at the 'little' comment, but was ignored.
"-we can narrow our search area to a three kilometer radius of the generator building. The pods are man sized as we already know, so they can be in any building, in any room, which is a lot of places to search. A grid search method would take to long this way, so I suggest we break up into three teams."
Shamal looked over as Roland was reviewing data on his screen.
"Nanoha, Signum, Alpha team, use your callsigns. You've got search magic, so scour the inside of the reactor buildings from head to toe, leave no stone unturned as they say. Fate, Vita... Bravo Team... External grounds search. Check storage sheds, vehicles, open fields, trees... You'll back up Alpha as well in case they meet trouble. Hayate, Crash, Charlie Team. Immediate town search, outside only. Look for signs of forced entry for now. I don't want you doing a room by room search alone until we finish the facility. Check doors and windows, and remember... Anything suspicious enough to look at is suspicious enough to point an attack at."
There was a chorus of affirmatives from the ground party as Roland looked at the data on his console. After a moment, Shamal turned to him.
"I'll start an area search with ClairerWind from the outside and work my way inwards. If there's anything suspicious, we'll be the first to know."
"Okay guys, let's get this Search going!" Hayate seemed to almost cheerfully belt out, despite the ever pressent threat hanging over the area. Nanoha quickly spun, floating off the ground and levitating quickly across the room, dropping several white gloing orbs as she went, signum following her with her hand already gripping Levantine in preperation to slice something up. Fate and Hayate bounded back to the opening the in the ceiling and quickly lept up out of sight, leaving Crash and Vita to catch up before they dispersed.
"Hey," Vita snapped as Crash walked the opposite direction to a room door. "Hayate went that way... go cover her like you're supposed to."
"Can't fly," Crash quipped. "Grav. drive's out from that impact, so I have to take the normal exit first."
"If you hadn't acted like a dofus and powered up immediately, that wouldn't be a problem," she responded.
"You can thank Lt. Colonel Yagami for that one," Crash responded curtly. "If anyone was acting like a dofus, it would be her okay? I didn't exactly ask to be thrown out of the back of a plane, so cut me some slack... I'm no combat expert like you guys are."
Vita turned on a heal and walked over to the test pilot, a non-plussed look once again on her face. As she stopped, Crash suddenly got that crawling sensation down his spine he didn't like. Then she raised one gloved hand and waggled her finger for him to come closer. Crash leaned in.
WHAM!
Graf Eisen didn't hit, so much as the hammer end wedged itself between his helmet and shoulder armor, and then Vita gave a firm yank, dragging crash down to one knee in front of her. The sight of a four foot tall 'little girl' manhandling the six and a half foot tall armor behomouth with ease using what looked like fancy metal polo mallet would have been funny were it not for the look on her face that was a vicious in its silence as Don was in a two our long double S rant.
"Listen, and listen good," she growled in a tone that was obviously off the radio. "This is not a game, this is not a joke, and this is certainly not a vacation. This is a potentially life threatening situation and not your island paradise test facility by the sea. This is a real mission, and as long as you're here, you need to at least take the job seriously whether you like it or not, whether you wanted to come here or not."
She then pointed with her free hand towards the hole and lowered her tone almost impossibly to a hiss..
"Hayate is -VERY-, important to us... You are assigned, by your commander, to act as her escort and she to you. So you will ensure that you guard her to the best of your abilities and beyond, because I don't want ANYTHING to happen to her. And God help me, if you let anything so much as SCRATCH her, both myself and Graf Eisen will ensure that you know what it feels like to be a can of sardines caught in a trash compactor while it's being used in a presentation of Verdi's Anvil Chorus! Are am I making myself clear?"
"Crystal," Crash gulped. The half maniacal look she had was easily seen from this close, and it said she meant every syllable of that threat.
"Good," Vita nodded, lifting Eisen out of its wedge and allowing Crash to stand himself up straight. "Don't you dare fail me."
"Let's go guys!" Hayate's voice sounded through the hole. Vita spun and bounded over to the hole and lept into the air, leaving Crash in the dust. Hayate looked at the girl with just the slightest impatience as she appeared over the rooftop.
"What's taking so long?"
"Crash's gravity drive system is malfunctioning," Vita shrugged as nothing had transpired. "He can't fly without it so he said he'll meet you at the building entrance."
Hayate rolled her eyes and smirked, at least her little stunt hadn't done worse. Spinning in the air, she floated over towards the reactor building entrance where Crash would emerge. Vita turned to Fate, who Nodded and took off to begin their search of the grounds.
Roland could say that it has been his personal experience that most people do not appreciate the scale of One Square Kilometer until they've personally had to search and clear an area. As a former US Army Veteran who spent sometimes weeks doing dull Field Training Excersizes, the concept of searching for a man-sized objecct in such an area was one that immediately made the General blanch. If you could for a moment, imagine the average American football field, roughly a hundred meters though you must remember to carry the extra few inches the yards lose... Now you stack ten of them end to end to have one kilometer distance. Then you take ten more and go perpendicular to your direction of travel, making a giant L shape with them. Once you've done this, and you see your fields extending in two directions from the corner, you look in the middle and imagine everything within this partially outlined square to be your search area. Then you fill this area in with numerous multi-story buildings, and lots of random clutter. Once you've firmly established what that looks like in your mind, you multiply it by nine and that would be an adequet visual representation of the current search area.
In short, it could be best described by the classic saying 'Trying to find needles in a haystack.'
Nanoha was no stranger to the concept of the extremely wide area search Once before, and under similar conditions, she used search magic for two solid hours while in combat onboard the cradle just to find one person. She could still remember the look of total shock on Quattro's face through her targetting window as she prepared to blast the sociopathic cyborg through over half a kilometer of reinforced bulkheads. Even still, it had taken two hours, and that was searching for a single person. This time there were seven objects to locate, and even though there was less volume to search though, she still expected this would end up taking several hours. Nanoha's outlook on the situation, while more optimistic than the General's outlook, was still locked into the grim realization that this was going to be a long and tedious process.
At the same time, Hayate's almost jovial approach to the search stemmed from her time spent doing more office styled duties and data searches. There was just something about the girl that seemed to thrive under harsh conditions. It was perhaps a psycological after effect of spending her childhood days paralized and reduced to a wheel chair patient, and the unique outlook on life it gave her. Or perhaps it was the fact that she knew she could find happiness now matter how grim things looked. Whatever the true reason... Despite the carnage in the core room, and the forboding of the situation, Hayate seemed ready to tackle it with a smirk. To Crash, who'd just gotten what amounted to a Death Threat from Vita, it seemed completely inappropriet as they walked, yes walked, to the main entrance to the facility.
The first ten minutes went as expected for any search... Absolutely nowhere. And Roland calmly marked each area off on the map as they cleared the sections a piece at a time.
It was the Vita and Fate, arbitrarily dubbed 'Bravo' team who reported in first.
"We've got something interesting over here," Fate's voice crackled over the wide-band.
"Define: 'interesting' as it were," Roland responded. "Interesting 'Oh neat', or Interesting 'OH SHIT' ?"
"More like interesting 'what the hell' really," Vita's voice crackled in. "There's been some kind of excavation done just north of the cooling tower of Reactor Building Seven."
"Excavation?" Hayate's voice popped in. "That's rather strange..."
"Strange nothing," Roland grumbled. "Why would they be digging up a place they want to destroy?"
"That's a very good question," Nanoha's voice crackled. "Anything else there?"
"Lots of scrapped drone parts," Vita responded. "Also, it looks like someone caught on to the operation and tried to stop it. It's not pretty over here."
"Another Massecre?" Roland asked. This was looking more sinister as the death toll climbed.
"Not quite," Vita responded. "Looks like they tore up a number of type ones over here... but it looks like they were attacking, and drones had an effective defense. They seem... Modified."
"We'll have to collect one for examination," Hayate crackled. "Any clues as to what they were excavating for?"
"It's like they strip-mined the place," Fate comented. "There appears to be some kind of, room below the foundation of the tower... It looks old."
Roland squinted and turned to Reinforce.
"Can you bring up the historical records for this area?" he asked the pint sized unison. "Blueprints, floor plans, survey crew reports? Anything and everything, even myths and legends if there are any."
"Already searching," Reinforce Zwei responded. "Just so you know, the Navy just sent word that a special investigative unit assigned to hunting Sektor 21 is on the way and should arrive in ten to fifteen minutes."
"Oh really?" Roland asked. "Good, then we won't be alone with this mess."
On the ground, Fate worked her way forward between debris of both the organic and inorganic types, and into the hastily ripped ground. "I'll check inside, watch my back."
"Just be sure you watch your front," Vita nodded, looking around. "I don't really want to dig you out if there's a cave-in trap set up here.
Fate nodded, bringing her protective barrier to a higher level before stepping inside. The opening was narrow, but in just a few steps, she was in a small enclosed room. Roughly rectangular, and covered in dust. The ceiling was low, and the back corner was collapsed. However, looking at the ground, it was obvious there HAD been somethign in here. Several heavy somthings, that had been dragged quickly out of the narrow entrance.
"Not much to report," she stated informatively. "Looks like they found what they were after in here..."
"Now I'm confused as hell," Roland crackled back. "This stinks more of a cover operation than a real attack with every passing moment."
Fate looked around puzzled, and set Bardiche firmly on the ground with a small clang.
[SIR, I AM DETECTING TRACE AMOUNTS OF IONIZED HELIUM IN THE SURROUNDING ENVIRONMENT. ENERGY LEVELS ARE ABOUT FOUR POINT SEVEN ELECTRON VOLTS]
"Radiation?" she quipped. Indeed, she was underground, it was probably accumulated Radon gas.
"What was that?" Roland crackled. "Radiation? You find some Radon in there? Don't beathe the shit. I had an aunt in Iowa who got cancer from it and I never got to meet her."
"Grab a soil sample if you can," Hayate interjected over the commlink.
"What are you thinking Yagami?" Roland asked.
"Like I've been watching too much CSI," she quipped. "Anything can be evidence."
"You watched CSI?" the General seemed surprised.
"I watched it all the time in the hospital when I was little." Hayate admitted. "The Head Nurse seemed to eat it for breakfast."
Fate ignored the rest of the conversation as she walked over to the collapsed section of the room and quickly took a soil sample with bardiche, then turned and left the empty room for the open air outside.
"Got a projector," Nanoha chimed in happily. "Reactor Building Two in the northeast quadrant, they hid it among a bunch of CO2 tanks."
"Awesome," Roland crackled. "See if you can disable it without turning it into scrap metal."
"Rip the antenna off," Crash interrupted. There was brief silent pause in which it could be imagined that everyone was considering the reppercussions of any advice the test pilot might give. After a second, there was a radio amplified sigh. "Transmitters without antennae don't transmit. I've broken enough of them to know that much. Trust me."
There was a loud metallic crack, followed by a ringing snap, and after a few seconds, Rein informed them the AMF had dropped by another one-eighth of the total.
"Two down, Six to go," Hayate crackled.
"Stay Sharp," Roland responded, a little more terse than he had been. "The more we dig up, the more I'm starting to agree with Crash."
"Thank you... I'm glad you see it my way..."
"Shut-up Crash." The tone was one-hundred percent No-Nonsense.
"Shutting up."
"Something's fishy, and I don't mean Lake Celcia," Roland continued after Crash clicked off the line. "This level of strategic diversionary prowess is TOO smart. My skin's starting to crawl. It hasn't done that since the Persian Gulf."
"Care to share your insight with us sir?" Hayate asked.
"Well," the General began. "What appears to be Sektor Twenty-One terrorists, have, out of the blue, and with resources they previously didn't have, attacked the largest target of their 'style' in a move that was in and out without any significant losses to them. They rigged a booby-trap and decoyed it, and then used the whole thing to cover some bizzare excavation of theirs to locate something it seems the building planners didn't know about. I know Terrorists aren't stupid... but this seems more like a Special Forces operation then some random Abdul-N-Da-Boyz stunt."
"Abdu what?" came Nanoha's voice.
"Just ignore my terminology," Roland waved it off. "It's just a way I used to reffer to terrorists."
"What would you suggest in this situation then?" Hayate asked.
"I would suggest exactly what we can't really do," Roland shrugged. "Pull back, get a few hundred pairs of boots on the ground, and put a gunship on station. If they're still here, bring the rain, if not, well, it makes a good excersize."
"My gut tells me they found what they came for and left," Hayate responded. "Whatever was in that excavation was probably the real target, and that worries me."
"Me too," Roland admitted. "They got what they wanted, and the trap was just their parting gift, which makes me wonder what else they've left for us."
There was a click as Crash rejoined the line.
"That's entertaining and all, but tell me... Was this place always a ghost-town out here? Or did they evacuate?"
Roland looked at his monitor puzzled.
"As soon as the AMF went up, there was an immediate evacuation order for everyone in a six kilometer radius for public safety. Why?"
"Oh, I'm just wondering," Crash crackled. "If the place is evacuated, then anyone I see is suspect..."
"Generally, yes." Nanoha's voice popped in.
"Oh good," Crash responded... and then suddenly. "HEY YOU!!!!"