“Shouldn’t you be out sniffing in the woods?”
— Merlin
The Maze
Ana slouches at her computer, watching the debrief video of an undercover mission she and Elres carried out some months ago. A slice of Jackie’s lemon cake lies untouched on the desk. In the video, people in costumes seemingly assembled from thrift stores are clutching expensive-looking swords. A watermelon sits upon a pedestal. A short, stocky man with a two-handed broadsword steps up and swings confidently. The watermelon explodes with a satisfying ‘PLAPF’ and cheers ring out. The watermelon is replaced and a gentleman with a katana steps up. He strikes so swiftly that some onlookers are still waiting for him to begin. The melon appears whole; an oozing equator and the echoes of the man’s Kiai the only indication that something has happened. He bows and exits the stage to respectful applause. A fresh melon is settled into the holder and Elres takes the stage.
Ana leans closer to the screen.
Elres smiles demurely, looking around the assembled throng with doe eyes. Elres takes aim at the melon, and chops it neatly in two. There is a smattering of polite applause. The two halves of melon fall to the floor and promptly burst into flames. The audience erupts, whooping and hollering. Elres waves regally to the crowd and exits the stage.
“Show off,” mutters Ana. She rewinds and watches Elres again. And then a third time. Ana sighs, picks up the cake and slumps back in her chair. She’s just about to take a bite of the delicious, lemony goodness when suddenly she glares at the cake like it’s poison and flings it back down on the desk. She snatches up her sword and stalks out of the room.
Merlin is in the training room, tweaking the sensitivity on his newest laser-based weapon… to the detriment of the training dummies. His contraption resembles a section of deer antler, such as one might find in a pet shop, with a rotating dial on the end. The dial is inscribed with sigils that are probably better not enquired about. He aims the cervine laser pointer at a training dummy and rubs his thumb back and forth. There is a whumping sound and the unfortunate strawman is peppered with charred, smoking holes the size of golf balls. Merlin frowns, scratches his beard, and begins fiddling with the dial just as Ana shoulders her way through the door.
“ANA! WHAT HO,” cries Merlin.
Ana glares back.
“What brings you down here? Shouldn’t you be out sniffing in the woods?”
“Elres has better form that me. Figured I should practice,” Ana grunts.
“You mean you want to knock seven shades of Sunday out of a straw man to make yourself feel better? HA HA. EXCELLENT IDEA.”
Ana says nothing and begins hacking at the straw man.
“Want to know a secret?” says Merlin, in what he probably thinks is a whisper but sounds more like someone trying to help a deaf person understand them by TALKING MORE LOUDLY.
“Not really.”
Merlin continues on regardless. “I’ve been working on something for Robin’s birthday party. They’re special candles. They LOOK like normal candles but when you blow them out, they summon up a cohort of Satyrs to pipe the tune of ‘Happy Birthday.’ HA HA. It will be wonderful. PANDLES, I call them. HA. HAHAHAAAA!”
“Where’d you get the Satyrs?” Ana asks, suspicious.
“I found an incantation in some old book or other. Nobody was using it. I’m rather proud of how I worked the incantation into the wax.”
“Very clever,” Ana replies. “Robin’s favourite colour is blue.”
With that she stalks back over and resumes battering the training dummies.
“Well…” BAM “That’s one party…” WALLOP “I definitely won’t be…” CLOBBER “attending….” THUMP “Ah, that’s better. Where’s that cake?”
He stops, his brow furrowed. “Steve always pretend be Robin on birthday,” he mutters loudly. “Pretend be Robin, do big bad, get Robin in trouble… Perhaps me tell someone, give warning? Me always give warning ’bout Steve. Who listen? Nobody! Always sigh and give Robin dat look. Me look for Steve in now time, but Robin never find. If me no find Steve, maybe Steve no find Robin?” Robin’s brow wrinkles even further with the effort of thinking this through, then relaxes. “Ok, no worry. Everyfing be hunky dory dis year.”
He resumes his carefree peregrination.
On the day of Robin’s birthday party, Elres (not invited — Merlin decided that invitations are way too complicated when it comes to the Fae, even those who are technically human), Phil Nhiles (not invited as on disciplinary for his behaviour with valued partner organisations), and Ana (invited, declined), were supposed to be the only Hunters in the Maze. Apart from them, there were some of the RaAD personnel (aka Maze Monkeys) and Jakes, Commander of Field Recovery, Containment and Sterilisation (sometimes shorted to recovery and Deposition, but most often simply “the Cleaners”). Elres was doing some boring E-learning on manual handling, with first aid at work lined up for afters. Phil was in the lab, helping Egbert with some projects, and Ana was in the gym, working out some of her frustration. Oddly enough, Robin was also in the gym — Ana assumed that he didn’t fancy his own birthday party. Either that or he thought the point of a surprise birthday party was for everyone to bring a surprise, and the biggest surprise of all was for him not to turn up.
They spotted the first pookle behind the dumbbell rack. As soon as it realised it had been spotted, it swallowed a 24kg kettlebell, which was almost 10cm taller than the pookle, then scarpered.
Ana sniffed around after it, and discovered it smelled mostly of magic. Robin declared it was probably Robin’s fault, “Robin being so stupid.”
In the lab, Phil was startled by the appearance of several adorable balls of grey fluff that proceeded to start eating… Everything. Scans suggested some kind of inter-dimensional anomaly, and he had to talk Egbert down from his latest rather-more-than-micro dose to get any sense of what this might mean. In short, these things were intrusions into this reality from somewhere else, the way a scientist’s hands would penetrate a glove box containing something they didn’t want to touch directly. Whatever these things looked like, it was unlikely to be a basketball-sized ball of fluff that made cute noises like a happy guinea pig.
Back in the training room, Elres had found a pookle behind one of the vents, and had tried to tempt it out with a rather dry cheese sandwich she had left over from lunch. Initially tempted, the pookle seemed way more interested in eating the computers and chairs.
The team finally got together in the labs, where Ana discovered the pookles were quite content and friendly unless anyone tried to get between them and their food. Robin said he was going to go down to the Archives and see what he could find out about them. He promptly disappeared without waiting for anyone to go with him. After a while, Ana and Elres decided to follow, leaving Phil to try to get hold of someone who could tell them what to do.
Down in Archives, Robin persuaded Rogers the Archivist to open the Archives, which he had sealed shut to keep the pookles out. Robin assured Rogers that he could put up a magic barrier that the pookles wouldn’t be able to get through. Although Robin is not normally well known for his magic skills, Rogers did not know this, and was therefore merely impressed rather than surprised when Robin stripped off his furs and conjured a barrier as promised.
By the time Elres and Ana turned up, Robin was trying to get Rogers to show him where the files were for the missions to which Robin had been assigned. Ana and Elres couldn’t understand why this was necessary or even useful, but they let him get on with it while Elres called the emergency number on the internal comms. This put her through to Jakes mobile, and Elres left a message because Jakes wasn’t picking up — she was already on her way up to see what Phil had to say.
Eventually, the team reconvened on the top floor, where Jakes had assembled a crew of Cleaners, probably pulling some of them in from being off-duty. She swore everyone to secrecy, explaining that they didn’t have clearance to access the parts of the Maze where they were about to go, but she had emergency authorisation to do it anyway, then handed everyone powerful electromagnets, split them up into pairs, then the assembled crew drove the pookles in to the central shaft where the emergency stairs and the cabling/pipework came up from the power generator and desalination units in the lowest level. They continued to drive them down to the bottom level, passing through the high security levels such as Heavy Containment.
The Covenant, it turned out, had a portal on the lowest level, presumably built by Merlin. Jakes activated it, then they drove the teeming throng of reluctant pookles inside.
Only then did “Robin” reveal his secret — he had been Robin’s sorcerous evil twin Steve all along! In the confusion caused by this revelation, aided by distraction from Steve’s pet Pleistocene Cave Hyena Fenella, he escaped, taking some of the Covenant’s files with him.
C’s office, Camelot
Jakes stands straight and stiff in C’s office at Camelot, the main HQ, arms clasped behind her back, gaze resolutely fixed on a point some distance above C’s head. C flips through paper reports, cross-referencing them with whatever she has displayed on her computer screen. The damage is devastating.
“Correct me if I am wrong, Commander, but I understand you permitted one C4 Hunter, a C5 Hunter here on placement from a partner organisation, an Intern on disciplinary watch, and our resident Neanderthal’s evil twin access to OHQ SG5 and SG6?”
“It does sound pretty bad when you put it like that,” Darling murmurs from her seat in the corner, where she is taking notes.
“Yes, ma’am. It was either that or lose everything not nailed down. And anything less than five metres across that was nailed down.”
“I understand that, Commander, but do you comprehend the potentially severe consequences posed by at least two of those present seeing we have access to that technology?”
“I assumed they had been vetted, ma’am. My priority at that moment was to clear the infestation before we lost anything more vital.”
“Can you reassure me that exposure to Asset 1277α is the only extreme security risk you permitted during the course of the incident?”
Jakes clears her throat. “With all due respect, ma’am, I did not permit the security breach. I contacted a senior officer and cleared the proposal.”
“You spoke to Merlin, Jakes! He was three-quarters of the way down his second bottle of rum, and it wasn’t even very good rum! You should have come direct to me.”
“Again, with all due respect, ma’am, you were incommunicado.”
C pinches her nose between her eyes, forehead furrowing. “Yes. I was.” She returns her attention to her computer screen. “Pookles. I hate the bloody things. I refuse to believe they evolved to look like that without intervention. Nothing that dials cute all the way up to eleven, despite coming from another Realm, can possibly have evolved that way without some sort of interference. Have we ascertained whether anything important is missing other than the Archived documents?”
“We have, ma’am,” Darling says, scanning her tablet. “We lost the subjects being held in Heavy Containment. Arctos Halkias, the Coppersmith. Jennifer Drayton, who Section 7 pulled in from the Proton Beach mission — she’s the one Gawain tried to convince you had found a Pandora Jar and sold it. We also lost Joshua Weber, AKA Doctor Keen.”
At that last name, Jake’s right cheek twitches.
“Don’t worry,” C says grimly. “I cannot imagine the inside of a pookle is better than what you had planned for Weber.”
“I beg to differ,” Jakes replies, the hint of a snarl putting an edge to her voice. “We don’t know what happens to things inside a pookle. I know what would have happened to him here.”
C nods. “It can’t be helped now. Did we lose any artefacts?”
“Artefacts remained sealed, and Merlin’s workshop was protected by Dante,” Darling says.
“I never thought I would be thankful for Dante, but I should know by now never to say never. Can you bring Rogers in, please?”
Darling leaves her tablet on her chair and goes out to her own office. “Can you come in now, please?” she asks, her voice slightly muffled by distance and the deadening quality of the magical wards around C’s office.
Rogers enters, his expression nervous. “Ma’am.”
“Have you discovered exactly what this Steve took with him?”
“All documents relating to the Abersky mission, ma’am, including those retrieved by the cleaner crew. He dropped the map with the ley line calculations on it when he escaped. The intern brought it back. Everything else is gone.”
“Just Abersky?”
“He asked about Wormsley, but he only took Abersky.”
“Did he get the photograph?”
“Whi… Which photograph ma’am?” Rogers’s skin appears ashen.
“You know which photograph!” C snaps.
“Uh… Yes. Yes, ma’am. He got the photograph.” Rogers is so nervous he stutters, but he carries on regardless. “All the archived documents were together ma’am, as per protocol. And he was a Hunter. I’ve seen him around. He put a magical barrier up to keep the furry round things out of the Archives, ma’am.”
“Which wouldn’t have been needed if you’d kept the damn door shut! All of that was so he could get in there and steal some files. We don’t even know what he wants with them.”
“He asked for missions involving Robin and the Fae. I had no reason to refuse. He was… I mean, the person I thought he was participated in those missions, so I didn’t see the harm.”
“No. Robin never thought to tell us that the infamous Steve was his evil identical twin.” C sighs. “Very well. You may go.”
“The barrier was really impressive.”
“I said, you may go.” C’s eyes glint like moonlight on a blade, and her voice is as sharp as a flint shard.
Darling offers Rogers a sympathetic smile as he scuttles out. Jakes has not moved a millimetre.
“Other than Heavy Containment and Asset 1277α, was there exposure to any other high security asset during the incident, Commander?” C asks. “And don’t try to avoid the question this time.”
“No ma’am,” Jakes says. “All other C1 classified assets remain secure.”
“Well. That’s something. We should at least be able to get the Heads of Bran off the premises without having to run a full decontamination cycle.” C taps some papers together and feeds them into a slot on her desk. A hint of burned paper drifts through the room, quickly disappearing under the aromatic cedarwood emanating from the ceramic diffuser on the windowsill and the waxy scent of furniture polish. “Very well. Best get on with sorting out this mess. Go and wake up Merlin for me. I don’t care how bad his head is. And you have my authority to requisition resources from available Hunter squads if you need them, but be parsimonious. The rest of the world doesn’t stop just because we’ve had a problem with pookles.”
