Chapter 412 - 411: Anomalies
Location:Seven Peaks — Command Center, Formation Hall, Shadow Pavilion Office
Date/Time:TC1854.12.08-12
Three reports in five days.
That was the thing about intelligence — the pieces never arrived together. They arrived separately, from different people, through different channels, for different reasons. The pattern was invisible at the point of collection. It only appeared at the point of convergence, which was wherever the person receiving all the pieces happened to be standing when the last one landed.
Raven was standing in the command center. The last piece had landed four minutes ago. The three reports were on the map table, arranged in the order they’d arrived, and the order didn’t matter because the shape they formed was the same regardless of which piece you started with.
***
Report 1. Silas. TC1854.12.08.
The formation master arrived at 07:00 with the particular urgency of a man who had been awake since 03:00 and had spent those hours rechecking his instruments because the readings they produced were the kind he wanted to be wrong about.
"Signal anomalies in the eastern network," he said. No greeting. Silas didn’t do greetings when he was carrying data that concerned him. Social protocol was a luxury that yielded to operational priority, and his voice carried the flat tension of a man whose operational priority had been reclassified overnight.
He activated the formation display. The network diagram materialized — the familiar architecture of 12 primary nodes, 73 secondary, 216 tertiary, the web of spiritual energy pathways that connected Seven Peaks to its territory and its territory to the monitoring stations that watched the world beyond.
Three nodes pulsed amber instead of green. Nodes 4, 9, and 11 — all in the eastern cluster, the sector that covered the territory between Seven Peaks and the Sanctum zone.