//------------------------------// // Chapter 15 // Story: Hegira: Option Gamma // by Guardian_Gryphon //------------------------------// Wrenn and Kephic had returned to the Bureau in the lul just before rush hour, so as to avoid causing a stir. They had spent an enjoyable lunch telling war stories, cracking jokes, and just relaxing with fellow soldiers, regardless of species or allegiance. Then they had run a few circuits of the outer hallways, bipedally and quadrupedally, to help Wrenn further break in the armor. After that, they had taken a few practice shots with the Arbalests. The range was close to that of the rail-snipe, by dint of the fact that the ‘strings’ of the weapon were tri-corded steel cabling. It was a decent exertion for even a Gryphon to cock the weapon, making it unusable for humans, and most unicorns. The crossbow-like device didn’t have the same repeating capacity as a rail-snipe, but then the only ranged weapon in Equestria that could be loaded faster was the compound bow, the preferred weapon of Gryphon Alarians. The compound bow had decidedly less range and piercing power than the arbalest, but it could be loaded and fired much more quickly, folded down smaller, and was lighter. Kephic hadn’t been able to get any replicas of the weapon made, so practice with that would have to wait. As they rode the maglev back to the Bureau, Kephic had explained how a Gryphon could extend the range of any bow by firing it from flight, allowing an arcing path downwards to increase the bolt’s speed, accuracy, and range with a gravitational assist. The more he thought about it, the more the urge to fly began to plague Wrenn. He felt as if he was chained down, as if an oppressive force was closing in on him, and that force was gravity. Moving, even running, didn’t help. Near the end of the train ride, he had experienced a moment he could only compare to a bout of severe claustrophobia, though it had been far worse. A burning frustration under the very real sensation of pressure, from both without and within. He had explained it to Kephic, who nodded sagely and told him in turn that Gryphons, Dragons, and Pegasi needed to fly the same way Humans and Unicorns needed to move every so often from a sedentary position, and Earth Ponies needed to run. It was part of their inherent nature. Their soul, even. Like Dragons, Gryphons were lords of the sky; Its owners, defender, and keepers. There was a special relationship there that even Pegasi sometimes struggled to understand, though aside from Dragons they were best able to empathize. A Pegasus’s magical connection to the sky and clouds was different than a Gryphon’s, but related in at least some way. While Gryphons couldn’t manipulate weather, and could only partly manipulate clouds, they could still walk on them, proving they shared at least some innate magic with Pegasi. The rest of the train ride had consisted of Kephic trying to explain that Gryphons could have innate magic, and that it was in fact part of their natural defense against cast magic of the transformative or manipulative nature. In the end, they both agreed to abandon the line of thinking. Neither knew enough about magic, or Thaumatics, to reason it all out, though it did spark no small amount of curiosity in Wrenn. When they arrived back at the Bureau, Kephic told him to take off and store his armor, then go to the roof. By the time Wrenn arrived, Kephic, Sildinar, and Varan were waiting for him. Varan offered a smile, “I hear our obstacle course session is canceled.” Wrenn nodded; he had guessed why he had been asked to the roof, and the urge to jump was already becoming disturbingly loud in the back of his mind, “Yeah... well... sorry. I couldn’t wait any more to get to the good stuff.” Sildinar glanced over the edge, “Come take a look. Get the feel for the updrafts.” Wrenn came to stand by the edge. He could sense Sildinar moving, and might have managed to dodge, if he had really wanted to. He had been party to enough pranks and stunts to have suspected what the roan Gryphon was going to do. Sildinar, in one graceful, forceful motion, shoved him off the top of the forty story building. The sensation of falling wasn’t new to Wrenn. He had made H.A.L.O jumps before. The particular feel of the wind through his feathers was new, as was the ability to keep his eyes wide open comfortably despite the wind whipping against their bare surfaces. He wasn’t afraid, not in the strictest sense. He figured that Sildinar, Kephic, and Varan could easily arrest his descent, and lift him between them, with strength to spare. He was, however, nervous. He wanted to fly, not fall on his face like an idiot. This was the ultimate test of belonging, from a biological standpoint. Was he *really* a Gryphon? really and truly? He cleared his mind, and forced his wings open. The lift effect jolted him sharply, and something that had been vying to breathe since the moment he woke up on the Conversion table, came bursting out in force. A deep seated part of his nature came out of sleep mode, and into new life, with a vengeance. The force was old, as old as the species, and entwined so strongly with his mind and heart that it must have been a part of Gryphons as long as Gryphons had been alive. And it knew how to fly. The sensation of flight on his own wings, of air passing over and under the feathers, creating lift, was so freeing, so euphoric, that he pitied fighter pilots for the first time in his life. Gravity was nothing more than an ally he could use to attain speed. Air was no longer a substance that was only good for breathing, it was his native medium, and his native realm, just as water was to a fish. The wide open spaces of the sky weren’t something to be dreamed of forlornly anymore. They were *his.* He could feel feedback from every individual feather. It was all compiled and presented as a single instinctive, primal sensation, like his ability to predict the weather, or sense the pattern of the air ahead, but it was a sensation as strong and real as any of the traditional five. He spent a good few minutes just being brash. He rolled, he spun, he dove and climbed. Wrenn was intent on testing his limits. Unlike walking, there seemed to be no disconnect. He had never had wings before, so he had no misconceptions about the limbs to interfere with his new instincts. No matter what he did, he couldn’t disorient himself. He always seemed to know exactly where he was in relation to the earth and the sky, and even, to his surprise, the points of the compass. Wrenn knew, every second, his precise spatial orientation, speed, and where he would be in the next few seconds. On a whim, he pushed his wings as hard as he could, doing his best to clock his speed. According to his guess, based on watching mileposts pass on the road below, he was doing nearly ninety miles an hour, with no assisting tailwind and no diving or loss in altitude. The level of power he could feel in his wing muscles made him all too aware of how fierce a weapon they would make. At first he had thought the idea of a Gryphon beating an enemy with a wing silly, now it seemed terrifying, in the bone rending skull flattening sense. He made a game of playing chicken with his reflection in the nearest mega-skyscraper. Though it took extra work to convert it to a real number, he could judge the distance to the glass and steel surface to within a feather’s breadth, and he had at least some conception of the dynamics of his own motion. At the last possible microsecond, he dipped one wing, pulled into a hard downward spin, and corrected into a dive. The windows of the building streaked past mere inches from his chest, the vortex flattening the feathers and fur. Wrenn beat his wings in slow, strong strokes to further assist gravity. He spent a moment working out his speed based on the height of each floor, and the number of floors he was passing per second. By the time he reached the bottom third of the structure, he was clocking two hundred and sixty seven miles per hour. He wondered what the tolerances on his wings were, as he splayed them outward and tilted them to adjust his downward momentum into outward speed. He managed to level off about twenty feet above the traffic in the street below, and only incur minor temporary soreness in the joints of his wings. A thought occurred to him, and he made the effort to climb back up to several hundred feet. He dove again, but instead of a sharp turn, he made a more gradual transition back to level flight. Sure enough; he was able to retain much of his speed, shedding it to friction very very slowly. For what seemed like hours, he just flew in circles through the city, taking in the feelings, both physical and emotional. Compared to this new experience, the idea of freedom as a word, or legal concept, or inalienable right, seemed tepid and worthless. To Wrenn, it was impossible to think of freedom, in its purest sense, as anything but flight. The wind played across his feathers, conveying myriad things about the world around him. From so high up, he could see the city as an entire living breathing entity. Details as small as words on a text being written on a DaTab, or the picture as a whole, and nearly all at once. Night had fallen, and the thick cloud layers which began several hundred feet above him reflected the amber and silver lights of civilization in their subtle folds and curves. The light bounced back and played across the buildings, bouncing between reflective surfaces over and over, leaving the sidewalks and streets as illumined as if it were broad daylight. Those thoroughfares were filled to bursting with people. Wrenn counted, in vis view range alone, two million seven hundred and thirty thousand, nine hundred and twelve. No wonder it had been known for so long as ‘The City that never Slept.’ He looked left at the sound of a traffic monitoring drone below and to the side, and became fixated with watching his own wing, to the point that he nearly slipped into a bank turn. That got him back into stunt flying, and he pushed his range of motion as far as it would go. He never felt out of control; his body knew precisely how to live in the world of the air, and he and his body were one. Wrenn was aware of the other three Gryphons’ approach long before they reached him. He could see them coming from quite a distance. When they came within earshot, Kephic shouted, “You nearly lost us back there! I gather you’re enjoying yourself?” Wrenn laughed, “Dang Straight!” He dipped into formation with the others, and brought his voice down to a loud speaking tone, which was sufficient to be heard over the rush of air and the din of the megatropolis below, “You shoved me off a building!” He glared at Sildinar, his expression more born of cheerful resentment than actual peevishness. Sildinar inclined his head, “It’s how we teach fledglings to fly, so I decided the same technique would suffice for you. The three of us fly daily in the morning and evening, schedules permitting, so I take it you’ll be joining us now?” Wrenn nodded emphatically. Kephic altered his flight path and jabbed Varan in the ribs with one wing, “I told you he would take to it.” Varan rolled his eyes, “And I never disagreed with you.” The four flew on in silence for nearly an hour, straight out to sea. Wrenn discovered, by watching the others and by listening to his own instincts, that long duration flight was best accomplished by climbing, starting a dive, then gliding with only a stroke of the wings every ten or fifteen minutes to further diffuse the momentum falloff. Wrenn counted twelve ships on the journey, most cargo or passenger, but he one spied a military destroyer like the Indianapolis, lurking just below the surface. Eventually, by unspoken consent, they turned around and headed back to the Bureau. When they arrived back on the roof, it was well past midnight. Wrenn didn’t feel tired in the slightest, but his gut told him he had easily flown forty or fifty miles total that night, counting maneuvers. Obviously Gryphons had extreme endurance when it came to flight. He folded his wings and noted, with mild amusement, that he had finally managed to put a few of his primaries in disarray with his more hectic maneuvers. He would have to give those a good solid preening before bed. The four Gryphons spent a few more hours together, they went downstairs for coffee, and talked mostly of flight; The various mechanics, maneuvers, aerial warfare tactics, flying for show, and long distance flight. By the time he finished preening and rolled into bed, Wrenn was starting to feel a little tired. Regardless of the Caffeine high from the coffee, and the remaining glow of euphoria from his first flight, he managed to drift off to sleep in ten minutes flat. As he stood in Hutch’s office, Wrenn tried to figure out just how the morning had gone from perfect, to abysmal, so quickly. Things had started out with a pre-dawn flight, a nice breakfast, more amusing deadpan humor from Skye, and the promise of some sword training. Then Stanley Carradan had ‘invited’ himself to the table. Wrenn wasn’t sure how the reporter had managed to get into the secure part of the building without a pass, but he intended to wring someone's neck for it once the offending person was ejected from the premises. Carradan, looking like the cat that ate the canary, had announced in the most roundabout and veiled way possible, that he knew about Wrenn’s implants. Wrenn’s first reaction had been amusement. That information couldn’t do him much of any harm now. But Hutch had reacted with considerably more concern, and insisted on finishing the conversation in his office. On the way up, it had dawned on Wrenn that the information was not so much dangerous to him, as to the new program. Nevermind the fact that implantation and Conversion were apples and oranges to each other, people were going to hit the roof if Carradan talked, and that didn’t bode well for a potentially controversial program still in its infancy. Wrenn spoke up, once the sliding doors to the Commander’s office had fully sealed, separating him and Sildinar and Hutch with Carradan from the rest of the world. “I say we drop him off the Freedom Tower and see if he can swim in the monument pools.” Hutch glared, but Sildinar actually seemed to legitimately consider the option before dismissing it, “That will accomplish less than you’d think. We need to know his source, or the information will make its way to someone else.” Carradan scoffed, “As if I’d tell you---” Wrenn interrupted, “Excellent point. I took a survival course in torture techniques once. Let’s play around and see what we can get out of him before he eats his own guts to stop the pain...” Carradan flinched, his whining voice grating on Wrenn’s nerves as it crossed into a higher note progression than usual, “You can’t! You wouldn’t! What about your honor code...” Wrenn splayed one wing around Carradan in what would normally be a protective gesture. Wrenn’s voice was low and measured, the danger only apparent if one listened for the growl bubbling up under the air of control, “Listen weasel. I’ve had it up to my crest with your excremental reporting techniques. Our honor code is perfectly at ease with causing someone like you pain to serve better ends. If you can’t take the talons, you shouldn’t have pissed off the Gryphon.” He leaned in and whispered, his hot breath filling the man’s ear, “I will not let you put an end to this program with your childish tomfoolery. I will haul you off to an empty construction scaffold somewhere high above the prying eyes of the city, and I will bolt you to the superstructure with a rivet gun, and skin you alive to die of exposure.” Wrenn allowed Carradan to back away from him to the other side of the room, the Gryphon’s voice became almost jovial, “That, or you can tell me everything you know, right now, and maybe you’ll just get off with disappearing into a secret Earthgov prison for a few months.” Hutch protested, “I’m not going to be party to that.” Sildinar shrugged, “Then, Mr. Carradan, your options are clear. Speak now, or we turn you over to Wrenn.” Carradan looked to Hutch, his pleading eyes conveying, for once, a strong aura of fear, “You guys don’t get it do you? They’ll kill me! They’ll do worse things to me than you’re suggesting that’s for sure...” Hutch threw up his hands, “I can’t exactly control the Lieutenant. If he wants to put an end to you, I can’t stop him from doing so in whatever way he sees fit. Unless of course you get serious and play ball. Then we can talk about amnesty, and maybe even government protection, all you want.” Carradan gulped and looked back and forth between Wrenn and Hutch, weighing his options. Finally he stammered, “I... uh.... I suppose that’s not much of a.... choice.... But look you’re going to have to find out who my source is yourself! They sent me an encoded e-mail.” He fished in one coat pocket, and yanked out a DaTab which he showed to Hutch, “I’ll give you this, let you do whatever you want to track them down. I won’t breathe a word about Wrenn’s implants either. In exchange you let me get off scott free, you protect me, and you let me become an embedded reporter with them...” He jerked a thumb at Wrenn and Sildinar. Hutch raised an eyebrow, “You want to spent quality time with creatures who are capable of skinning you alive, and dislike you so much that they have threatened to do it?” Carradan threw up his hands, “There’s a logic to it! They can’t hurt me for just mouthing off, so if I cooperate they have to protect me instead, and they are *the* best protection these days.” A thought occurred to Wrenn, “Fine. But I have three conditions. First, you need to understand that I can and will hurt you for mouthing off, so you will need to keep a civil tongue. Second, you agree and understand that if you ever do or say anything to compromise the Bureaus, or the Gryphonization program, I can and will do to you the sorts of things Earthgov trained and paid me to do to terrorist cells. Third you will follow all orders while on the field, no if's, and's, or but's.” Carradan glanced at Hutch, and Sildinar in turn. They both nodded their agreement to Wrenn’s stipulations. The man gulped, “I don’t like taking orders, but you’re gonna force this one me anyways, aren’t you?” Sildinar shook his head, “No. But you are *well* aware of the alternative. And you are the one who asked to travel into active combat zones with us.” “Riiight. You wouldn't really skin me would you?" Wrenn shook his head, "Not for refusing to answer our questions. I'm sure I could scare you enough to make you do that without really harming you. On the other hand, if you take the story public..." He ran one talon against another, making a threat laden rasping sound. Carradan nodded, "So... er... I guess I’ll take the deal. At least I’ll be famous by the end. Maybe there’s a promotion in it for me...” he brightened at the thought, “...maybe I can use this to finally knock my boss out of her big fat leather chair... you guys are the hot news right now.” He looked from Sildinar to Wrenn, “So is there some ceremony to this? Are you guys gonna jinx me or something? Or do I have to sign paperwork?” Sildinar chuckled, “There is no magic involved in the word of honorable individuals, just our very trustworthiness. That should both comfort, and scare you, sufficiently that magic is unnecessary to ensure your compliance.” Carradan looked up and furrowed his brow, “That's it? No contract? No Papers?” Wrenn snickered, “That's it. Except that you probably want to go secure your Ponification slot now. I hear they’re expecting a full week.” Carradan shot to his feet, “My WHAT?!” Hutch tried not to burst out laughing as Sildinar explained, “We leave for Equestria in one week. If you want to follow and continue reporting on us, you can not do so as a human. And I have absolutely no intention of letting you within a mile of becoming one of our kind. So what does that leave you?” Carradan blustered, his face turning red, “This wasn’t part of the deal!” At this point Hutch lost control, and actually started laughing, doubling over and wiping tears from his eyes. Wrenn smirked, “Yes it was. You just didn’t think it through. I guarantee you its still better than taking me up on the alternative.” He paused, “I hope you like haycakes. That, or you can keep to your end of the bargain, stay behind, and find someone else to pester.” “But what about my *job*!?! If I stay, I lose out on the scoop of the decade, a scoop I promised my boss! If I go, I'm not a human anymore, and I don't know how she will react to that either!” Wrenn shrugged, “Again, you should have thought that through before you stuck your nose where it didn’t belong, but I expect that Equestria needs reporters. You’re no less qualified to make breaking news with hooves than hands. Besides, I’m sure you’d still be famous here too. Lots of people want to hear about life as a Gryphon on the other side of the barrier, and you would get to spend quality time with even *more* of us. In our native territory. Choice is yours.” Carradan’s anguished groan was sweet, sweet music to Wrenn’s ears. Hutch was still trying to suppress fits of laughter as he walked with Wrenn and Sildinar to deliver Carradan’s DaTab to the technical department. “You guys are devious. You know that?” Sildinar snorted, “That surprises you? One can be both honorable and cunning at the same time. In truth, staying with us is likely the safest course for Mr. Carradan, if he has the courage to take it. If the people who bequeathed him this information are as dangerous as he claims, then Equestria is a safer place by far than the streets of New York.” Wrenn snickered, “I am going to savor the memory of the look on his face for a long, long time. Do you think he’ll really help us squash the story on my implants? It’s bound to crop up elsewhere and grow.” Sildinar nodded, “He will have to. His word will carry enough weight, and I’m sure Earthgov will take extra measures to ensure nobody believes the story. I do not like being party to a lie such as this, but even I must admit that it is necessary for now.” Hutch grunted, having become more sober, “I wanna know just how somebody got ahold of that information. I thought we plugged our leak.” His final words made it to Skye’s ears as they rounded the corner into the lab. She bounded up to the group, “We did. What did ya bring me today?” Hutch tossed her the DaTab, which she deftly caught in her telekinetic grip. He gestured to it, “Someone sent some very sensitive data to a certain reporter via that device. Think you can trace who sent it, and from where?” Sky snorted, “Um.. helooooo? My special talent is information. Of course I can figure it out. Just give me a few days. Give or take. Depending on how cooperative this little beast is.” She glared at the DaTab as if it were alive, and her intimidating gaze would force it to break down and confess in a stream of rapid zeroes and ones. Wrenn chuckled, “Don’t make it suffer too badly now.” Skye rolled her eyes, “You wound me. I’m a bit more delicate than that.” One of the techs working at the back of the room mumbled something. Hutch didn’t catch it, but Wrenn, Sildinar, and Skye did, “She isn’t exactly delicate with us...” Skye growled and shouted, in a good natured scolding tone, “You! Overpaid underling! Back to soldering!”