The closer you get to a tower’s walls, the more its syphoning effect begins to disrupt an individual’s sorcery. Psionically, the inner sanctum is like the eye of a storm, calm and focused, while everything in close proximity to it is like the rushing vortex of a tornado. For the Australian, “Mister White”, it is crucial to estimate at what point in his advance toward the tower his glyph of invisibility will suffer from the tower’s turbulence. And that time has come. Wazdog’s palm strokes his rifle’s hand guard, taking aim. The muscles bend eastward in White’s lower back as his huge hand slowly moves over his shoulder towards the blade. A guard on the tower’s lower platform stops his gossip because he notices a hazy something behind his colleagues. Too late, White’s great sword has sliced the man in half. Wazdog’s bullet pops another soldier’s head. A muffled gun shot slams against the infrastructure’s wall. Out of thin air, a huge muscular figure’s naked arm grabs a soldier’s throat. White does not yell or talk. His scowl seems stuck in soundless hate-filled grimace, half in reality, half beyond time and space. Wide eyes of a berserker exploding out of apparent nothingness oppress the third victim; a scared little recruit who falls back on the floor, not even capable of reacting, let alone aim. The barbarian impales him with his great sword and stomps his head with a heavy metalcoated boot. In a matter of seconds, they murdered all guards at the tower’s lower K-door balcony.
Wazdog crawls back and begins his advance, quietly jogging from shadow to shadow, while his friend hides bodies. It will take Wazdog at least a minute or two to reach the door, if not longer, depending on how security behaves on the upper balcony. Wazdog can physically feel the tower’s invisible aura. Whatever his enemies have been doing inside, the amount of energy implies they are suspiciously busy. White, seeing Wazdog’s pace, enters the building and pulls a map from his belt. They do not speak. A hand signal is enough to point the way forward into the building. Its ancient architecture resembles an ant hill’s tunnels, but decades of human refurbishing and technological recuperation have mixed the sediment of biotechnological artifacts with the improvisations of a less advanced humanoid species. Nekraeytian towers such as this one are humid, cold, and ugly. And White’s map reflects that; Upon it is a sideview of what appears to be an inverted lily’s chopped off stem, bended into the sky by human technology’s metal framework. While its peduncle focuses a psionic connection towards parallel planes of awareness, charged by the carpel’s ovule, the stamen’s filaments reach deep underground like the mycelium of a fungus. But White and Wazdog run up first, to neutralize guards on the balconies. A task they meet with brutality and efficiency. Although one must concede that none of their enemies expected to be flanked from inside their own base.
Downstairs, however, things turned sour for the orthodox. One of the loyalist officers used a particularly nasty glyph against Mister White, called Plaeqkeyq. It warps the victim’s mind into a crushing state of thoughtless convulsion. Wazdog’s aim connected with the warlock’s head in one clean shot, liberating his friend from the enemy’s invocation. But it took several minutes before Wazdog’s large companion got up again. This cost them precious time, because they had no way to contact the friendly units that were already on their way to the tower. If White and Wazdog cannot disable the tower’s communication system before their friends arrive, the loyalists can alert nearby towers and other orthodox forces. In the third room they cleared, one level above the sanctum’s ovule, a bullet pierced Wazdog’s body armor and a strange female warrior slashed several deep cuts into White’s left breast and bicep. But her fifth strike struck the hilt of the bodybuilder’s two-handed sword. White laughed when he saw the shock of surprise in the woman’s eyes, because they both knew it was an abrupt counter that would cost her her life. With one brutal upward swoop, he catapulted her body into the computer mainframes and other furniture. She lay there, groaning dazed nonsense, while Mister White summoned a glyph of healing. “Haqaacqo. Haqaacqo,” the warrior repeated, but the building’s psionic interference made the symbol’s purple glow too diffuse.
Two more guards perished before White and Wazdog sabotaged the building’s communication systems. Meanwhile, orthodox reinforcements on horse-back and by truck assaulted the tower’s B and V doors, taking care of whatever loyalist defenders remained. The sound of machine gun fire and pyromantic sorcery alerts some of the personnel in the building’s lower chambers, but White and Wazdog have barricaded themselves inside the communications room. In less than an hour, the whole tower and the surrounding hills, were taken over by the orthodox. Some say history’s course can be diverted by a single event. All of this was to achieve just that. From now on, these orthodox criminals believed, whatever occultists dreamed about on Earth would have an impact on more than Saturnus alone. Unlike the loyalists in Saturnus, the orthodox will perform small incursions into our daily sublunar lives. What appears a violent struggle in the absurd realm of collated imagination, may pierce the thoughts of an ordinary individual sufficiently to steer his or her imagination off course, towards what can only be described as true freedom—a liberty of choice unhampered by the Hierarchy’s conspiratorial management of human destiny. Via shared hallucination, the psyche of a few men, from Earth’s material realm, through the shared out of body experience of the psychedelic realm, and from there back again towards Earth from inside the immaterial, by grace of augmented psionic intervention from this ancient psychotropic alien infrastructure, humanity’s political history would no longer be subverted by the Hierarchy. And all of this, in the name of humanity, despite the self-censoring decadence that is caused by loyalist humility. Let us be clear, though, although often portrayed by loyalist propaganda as rabid dogs who lack self-control, wild dreamers, and accused of smug moralism, the orthodox are not crazy enough to risk detection by the Kraey. The next step of their plan was as carefully planned as the attack on this tower. Great ambition does not always imply a lack of self-control. Even if one feels inclined to portray the hijacker’s failure as an example of orthodox self-indulgence, it is thanks to Wazdog’s discipline that a far greater calamity was prevented (i.e. alerting Kraey about the presence of humans on Saturnus). Orthodox goals are grand, and their violence on Saturnus obscene, but their interplanetary strategy can be compared to a mosquito biting an elephant. It is an unfortunate byproduct, however, that this particular tower was selected to hijack a Kraey ship, because in its lower levels the orthodox discovered something unrelated. And that discovery had great consequences for Saturnus.
What do these terrorists intend to accomplish? Are they trying to conquer territory? No. Sooner or later, someone will notice the presence of orthodox forces inside the tower. They would be surrounded by loyalist forces and the siege would end in a matter of days. The mission’s ultimate aim is to steal cargo from a space ship. After receiving compliments from their captain (a man called Styrkar Oddason), Wazdog was called upon again. The intention is to hijack, sabotage, and crash a ship from Mars. But before doing so, as much of its cargo as possible must be stolen and brought back to Oddason. Only a very skilled agent like Wazdog possesses both the technological and military aptitudes to perform such a mission. The shipment comes from Mars—the actual planet, not an occult state of mind—where the Kraey inhabit several outposts, including a cloaked cloning facility. If human occultists can steal the ship inside Earth’s psionic containment layer, but before it lands, its precious cargo can be replaced. One man, no more than one individual, using a single tower in Saturnus, will teleport from one reality into the material realm, from one plane of awareness into the next. And this one man, Wazdog, must then [a] kidnap the vehicle’s cargo, [b] fake an internal error and sabotage the ship, [c] escape with the cargo, [d] crash the ship while it lands on Earth. The problem they now faced, in the tower, however, was using Kraeytian technology to target the ship.
“The cargo manifest,” captain Oddason said, “do you have it?”
“We have it yes.”
“Get me the xenobiologist.”
“Yes sir.”
“What line are we looking for? Is that Mars?”
“No, no,” the soldier said. “This dot right here, and these dots, those are human ships.”
“So many?”
“They are cloaked. IDF579, IDF509, IDF20A. This is the moon, right here.”
“Space Jews.”
“Yes.”
“Okay, and so where is Mars?”
“Sir, I have the cargo manifest, sir.”
“Good,” Oddason smiled.
“Sir, we found something in the lower Anther, sir,” another soldier said.
“What is it?”
“It’s a new technology, sir.”
“Steal what you can.”
“The manifest should correspond to this line here, sir,” another soldier said, while Wazdog entered the room, fully healed and prepared.
“This trajectory here, is the ship.”
“Well, Wazdog, this is it,” the captain said. “And here is the manifest.”
Wazdog nodded his head quietly.
“Don’t worry captain,” White laughed.
“Expected ETA, approximately thirty… maybe forty minutes,” the xenobiologist mumbled.
“Alright,” the captain said, “let’s steal that cargo and sink that ship.”