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2188.
Director Vacit was messing things up, badly.
Senator Khalid Ahmed of the United Islamic Nations was making veiled threats of impeachment against Vacit - the Corps, he fumed, wielded broader discretionary powers than any other Earth Alliance agency on or off Earth; they were well-funded, staffed and trained, and unsurpassed in organizational efficiency, but despite all the money and personnel and resources, the rogue threat on Earth only seemed to grow day by day.Bombings. Murders. Kidnappings. Corps prison camps were regularly attacked and overrun, their inmates sprung from their cells to rejoin their comrades in the business of terrorism, murder, kidnappings and mayhem. Networks to traffic telepaths only seemed to grow in size and complexity; children suspected of being telepaths were secreted all over the globe, snatched from school and relocated before the Corps could test and register them.Director Vacit still did nothing, because the rogue leader, Fiona Dexter, was secretly his daughter.2189. Early August.Director Vacit had heard a rumor that his daughter was pregnant.
Rogue telepaths bombed the train station in Geneva, killing dozens of normals.
Whether Fiona was directly involved wasn't immediately clear, but rogues had done it, and on Vacit's watch, right in the heart of Geneva.All hell broke loose. Even the senators who had supported the Underground had a change of heart, and the Corps stood only an inch from a Charter violation, meaning at the least, a replacement of leadership, and at worst, a dissolution of the Corps as a whole, and a return to the unfettered violence of 2115.Only swift action by the Corps to dismantle the Underground (internationally) could possibly reverse course.For decades, Director Vacit had been intentionally thwarting effective, systemic action to shut down the Underground, and intentionally underfunding and understaffing Corps prison camps to maximize rogue escapes. Now they had mere weeks to prepare for an international operation to capture the Underground leaders and shut the network down entirely.Vacit's directions were clear: the rogue leadership were to be captured alive. All children, teens and non-combatants were not to be harmed. And where possible, even violent rogues were to be taken into custody alive.2189. Late August.The rogue leadership returned to their base in Tennessee - built into an underground cave system. Thirteen-year-old Jenny Winters (Talia's grandmother), who had been living with the rogues since they "rescued" her from sexual slavery and brought her into their cult, was left in a nearby rogue "safehouse." She went out to steal liquor, and was picked up by the Corps (the Corps knew there was a "safehouse" in the area, and they were generally trying to collect intel on the rogues' operations). Jenny had her diary with her, in her bag, confirming much of what the Corps knew or suspected about the rogue activity. (They also scanned her, and learned more from that.)The Corps learned from the diary that Fiona had just had the baby.The Corps made it look like Jenny had been picked up by mundane cops (again) for shoplifting (again). After all, the Corps' big raid had been planned for only three days later, and they didn't want to tip off the rogues.Planning the raidTo be successful in shutting down the Underground, the Corps had to raid multiple rogue bases and "safehouses" at once, all over the globe. First, communications between rogue bases would have to be cut, and then teams would have to simultaneously raid each of the bases.They had very little time to prepare, once the orders were given - two or three weeks, tops.The Corps had known for years about the base in Tennessee (a cave system converted to a hotel, then turned into a "safehouse" for runaway telepaths and finally into a rogue base), but the Corps had imperfect knowledge (at best) about the inside of the cave system. Jenny Winters hadn't seen most of the rooms, including the command and control center. And the Corps only knew of six entrances/exits to the cave system - there were eight.The caves were located in a remote, hilly region, far from the nearest town. A railroad had once run nearby - back when the caves had served as a hotel - but had long since fallen into disuse and disrepair.The rails could be repaired, but the work would take weeks, at least. Nor could work be done before the raid, without tipping off the rogues.Psi Cops and bloodhounds would have to be flown in by chopper. The top assault teams were selected for the raid itself, while backup teams would provide support from the air, and on the ground outside the base.Responsibility for the raid was given to then-chief of MetaPol, Sandoval Bey, with assistance from Natasha Alexander and junior aides to Director Vacit, but there was only so much that Bey could do with imperfect intelligence and the then-disorganized, unprepared, MetaPol. Most Psi Cops and bloodhounds were accustomed to ordinary police operations, and not trained for something of this complexity. Success of the mission to shut down the Underground (in each simultaneous raid) depended largely on surprise, overwhelming numbers, and convincing as many rogues as possible to give up without a fight.The Corps had choppers, but the pilots had never flown before in a combat operation, and were unfamiliar with flying in hilly or mountainous terrain. The pilots were accustomed to carrying people and supplies, or conducting search and rescue operations in open land. Combat would be entirely different.The raidThe first phase of the raid - the cutting of communications - went smoothly, and all communication between rogue bases went down at once.The raids of most of the rogue bases and "safehouses" went smoothly as well - in every base other than Tennessee (where the leadership was), the rogues saw their communication go down, and found themselves surrounded by armed troops ordering them to surrender and come out peacefully. And for the most part, people did - they raised the white flag, so to speak, and came out with their hands up. (Most probably assumed that theirs was the only base under siege.)Tennessee, however, was different. Fiona Dexter had been raised and trained by Jack O'Hannlon ("Monkey"), the terrorist/cultist mastermind whose modus operandi, in so many words, read, "when shit gets real, blow everything - and everyone - to kingdom come."That presented the Corps with a real problem. They could bomb the base from the air, and keep their personnel safe, but untold numbers of rogues (combatants and non-combatants, including teens and children) would die. No one wanted to do that - family doesn't kill family. That's how rogues operate, not the Corps.And Vacit's orders had been clear - take the leadership alive, at any cost. And the baby. No matter what, the baby is not to be harmed.The Corps personnel had to go into the caves, room by room. They would rescue as many people as possible without a fight, and would use non-lethal engagement tactics whenever possible, but they knew combat was inevitable.In Tennessee, communications went down at night. Assault teams barged into the caves through five of the six known entrances - the sixth team wasn't yet in place when the raid started.The entrances were guarded by rogues with guns - Corps personnel (bloodhounds) shot them first, before they could raise their weapons and fire.Non-combatants - including teens and children - fled from the remaining three exits, out into the thick woods. Corps personnel spotted them from the air. Unarmed, they were easily picked up, during the raid or soon after.The bloodhounds went through the cave system room to room, clearing them, telepathically ordering anyone they saw to lay down their weapons and surrender, and shooting any armed rogues who didn't comply. Psi Cops ran in next, wearing body cams (command needed the body cams to see what was going on). They, too, went room by room.The bloodhounds found the Underground leadership in a large room deep in the cave system, and the rogue leaders opened fire. The Corps responded non-lethally - with telepathic orders to surrender, with verbal commands to surrender, but to no effect. The Corps personnel hesitated to fire on the rogue leadership, and were hit. Some of the Corps personnel, in the chaos of the literally underground engagement, broke orders, and returned fire. In the caves.The rogues then tried to use telepathic projection to make the Corps think the room was suddenly being flooded with a wall of water, but this only stunned them for a moment - one, because there was no water, two, because the Psi Cops (close on the heels of the bloodhounds) were strong enough to block the illusion, and three, because they had body cams, and command could tell them it was an illusion.The Psi Cops gave the order to use non-lethal gas, but the rogues just ran deeper into the cave system. The six assault teams all ran deeper into the cave system, after the rogue leadership.And then the rogues really did what they'd only pretended to do before - Fiona Dexter and her associates, following Monkey's playbook, set off hard-wired explosives in the cave system, destroying the tunnels to the exits, and starting a flood with water from an underground river. The rogue leadership escaped before the explosion, but all the Corps personnel still inside the caves were killed, injured, or trapped.The Dexters and their remaining associates fled out into the woods.With the main assault teams dead or incapacitated, the backup teams panicked and took over. Bloodhounds with bullhorns and gas canisters lowered themselves from ropes, ordering the remaining rogues to surrender, but were fired upon. Many Corps personnel fell, injured or dead. (Some, disoriented or wounded, lost their grip on the ropes when they were fired upon.)Other bloodhounds, seeing (or feeling) their comrades dying, tried to fire at the Dexters from the choppers, but missed, because shooting out of a chopper - at night, no less - is hard. In the chaos of the battle - the noise from the choppers, the telepathic screaming, the fog of the gas, the dark of night - Corps personnel became disoriented.Some Corps personnel probably shot each other by accident.Finally, the Dexters ran out of ammo - but before the Corps could capture them, they pulled the pin on a grenade and blew themselves apart in the Tennessee night.Meanwhile, the Corps didn't know if the Dexters had sent the baby out with the non-combatants, or if he'd died in the underground explosion. Would they have tried to save their son, or would they kill him (like themselves) rather than risk him "falling to the Corps"?Walters, meanwhile, had escaped from the cave system with the first wave (of non-combatants), baby in arms. He left the baby and a teenage girl in a nearby farmhouse, and ran back to try to attack the Corps forces. When he felt the Dexters die, he opened fire on the choppers.The Corps returned fire, partly from panic, and partly because "fuck orders, we're taking this guy down." Over a hundred of the Corps' finest Psi Cops and bloodhounds were dead, injured or trapped - and some of those in the backup teams wanted Walters dead already.Though the Corps personnel had night-vision goggles, they found it nearly impossible to shoot accurately out of a chopper. Walters (former EarthForce special ops) caused one chopper to crash by firing enough rounds to disorient the pilot till he crashed into the mountainside. Another chopper crashed because of pilot error.And then no one could find Walters at all. They flew around in circles wondering where he'd gone. Was he hiding? Dead (and cold)? They'd have to wait for sunrise.By sunrise, he was long gone, but they found the baby in the cellar of an abandoned farmhouse, with a teenage girl.Medics arrived on the scene, to treat the injured. Search and rescue teams poured in, to dig out the survivors from the cave system. Non-combatant rogues were picked up in the woods, including Remy Ligeau, the now-fourteen-year-old autistic boy whom rogues had kidnapped the year before. The rescue from the caves went on for days, but in the end, dozens of Corps personnel had been killed.AftermathThe Corps brought the baby - safely - to Geneva.Then no one could find him.Official reports eventually said he had been unaccounted for in the raid, but internally, there was much hand-wringing about how a rescued baby could just disappear. They knew he'd reached Geneva safely. But then what?More panic. Internal investigations, all of which went nowhere.(Vacit, of course, had changed the baby's name and made it seem as if he was another child entirely... and while this made sense to Vacit, to protect the child from his past, no one else knew what he'd done, and the loss of the baby caused much distress.)Sandoval Bey tried to turn in his badge and resign from MetaPol. The raid had been a disaster. He went to Vacit, took off his MetaPol badge, and said it's a samurai's duty to disembowel himself for failing his family, his clan, and his daimyo.It was metaphorical, Vacit knew, and more than a bit melodramatic - Bey despised suicides, ever since his own wife had committed suicide.Vacit would have none of it."The Corps needs you alive, Mr. Bey," he said, flatly, and refused to accept his resignation. For political reasons, he had to demote Bey to Station Chief of Geneva, but he offered him a role at the Academy, training up-and-coming Psi Cops to be better than ever: men and women who could truly bring honor to the Corps.Bey accepted.