DAVE
The operation began at twenty-three hundred hours.
It was past curfew, so only patrols and commanders were allowed on the streets, and seeing a group of eight soldiers would have drawn immediate attention.
They were dressed in the standard Brotherhood uniforms, so as long as they didn't march as one unified group of eight, most would not recognize them as the enhanced. Their individual features were not all that distinctive, and with over ten thousand warriors on the island, no one remembered what everyone else looked like.
Patrols were usually conducted in twos or threes, so the Eight divided themselves into pairs. Number One and Number Three approached the security command center from the north, while Number Five and Number Seven circled around from the service alley. The rest remained close but out of sight.
The hive mind worked best when they were close to each other. The connection was maintained regardless of physical distance, but it didn't work as smoothly when they were separated, andthe sensation was uncomfortable. Each pair had to process its environment independently while maintaining coherence with the whole, and the cognitive load increased with distance.
They had trained for divided operations, so it was manageable, but they did their best to minimize the effect of separation by keeping the distance between each other short.
The security command center occupied the ground floor of a concrete building that was somewhere between Navuh's mansion and the hotel. There were other buildings in between, but not many.
It was unremarkable from the outside, which was deliberate.
Navuh had designed the island's surveillance infrastructure to be invisible to the casual observer, because the command center was right inside the resort that housed all the important guests they lured to the island with promises of sexual experiences that were hard to get anywhere else.
Those fools flocked to the island, not realizing that they were compromising themselves and that their activity would be recorded and used to extort them for the rest of their lives. Or maybe they realized that, or at least suspected it, but believed that they were too big and important to let any scandal surface. It was also possible that the pull of fulfilling their wildest fantasies was so strong that they threw caution to the wind.
Two guards stood at the entrance, looking bored out of their skulls at this hour. The collective read their surface thoughts easily. One was thinking about a woman in the brothel. The other was thinking about how much longer until his shift ended.
Neither of them saw Number One and Number Three approach.
The thrall was applied simultaneously, both guards receiving the same suggestion at the same instant.Turn around, look at the wall, don't move until instructed to do so, then forget the whole thing.
The guards' eyes glazed over, and they both turned around, facing the wall.
Number One opened the door.
The command center was a long room lined with monitors, each screen displaying feeds from cameras positioned across the island. Twenty operators sat at individual stations, monitoring their assigned sectors. A shift supervisor occupied a raised desk at the far end, his attention split between his own screens and his empty cup of coffee that he was thinking of refilling, while also grabbing something sweet to eat.
Twenty-one immortals.
The collective could thrall all of them simultaneously without breaking stride, and they did, instructing them to ignore the visitors. The rest required more finesse, and they waited until Number Five and Number Seven entered the room and stood beside them.
Number One approached the operator whose station controlled the feeds from Losham's residential sector. His sector included Losham's house, the adjacent residences of high-ranking Brotherhood personnel, and the perimeter road.
Number One stopped beside his station and leaned down.There's a maintenance cycle scheduled for Lord Losham's residential feeds tonight. The exterior cameras on his house need to be taken offline for the next four hours. You will log it as routine maintenance.
The thrall was gentle, like a hand on the shoulder guiding someone in the direction they had already taken. The order had been received this afternoon. The soldier remembered reading it. This was routine. He would log it and move on.
"Right." The operator nodded. "The maintenance cycle. I have it here somewhere." He turned to his keyboard and began typing.
On the monitors, the feeds from Losham's house flickered and went dark, including the one pointed at the exterior balcony camera and the one in the corridor camera. The operator logged the disconnection as scheduled maintenance, noting the estimated restoration time, and returned to his other screens without a second thought.
At the far end of the room, Number Three was handling the supervisor. The thrall was similar in approach but broader in scope. The maintenance cycle was authorized and expected. If anyone asked, he was to confirm it. He would not remember anything unusual about tonight's shift.
The supervisor nodded absently, stood, and headed to the break room with his empty coffee mug.
It had taken all of four minutes to complete this part of the mission. The collective allowed itself a moment of satisfaction that was distributed across all eight bodies.
Number Five and Number Seven fell into step with Number One and Number Three as they exited the building. The entrance guards were still standing with their noses to the wall.
"We need to keep our distance from each other," Number One said to Five and Seven. "Walk ten meters behind us."
When the four of them reached the bend in the road, the collective instructed them to resume their watch, their modified memories smooth and seamless.
