The Alignment: Ingress

CHAPTER 8

That night Hank moved stealthily through the eerily quiet jungle. Something must have spooked the animals. Maybe they had sensed alpha predators and had taken off. Suddenly he felt “the tingle” and came to an abrupt stop. The portal was close. He hoped his guardian was too. If it was a guardian.

Operating more on instinct than knowledge, Hank pulled out his Ingress scanner. That’s how he was told to refer to it, despite the fact that it looked just like a Nexus 4 smartphone. The Ingress app popped up on the screen. The app was the same one that every Ingress player downloaded from the Google Play store. But this one was modified with a few extra Lynton-Wolfe “custom buffs” that Hank wasn’t enthusiastic about trying out given what had happened at Niantic. Things hadn’t gone so well with the power cube during Lynton-Wolfe’s test at CERN.

He hoped he had enough XM to get everything done. He hadn’t harvested XM since he was at CERN. His battery was good though.

The app opened. He heard ADA’s recorded voice and realized that she was going to know exactly where he was, because the portal was going to show up on the Ingress dashboard.

For that matter, the whole world was going to know about it.

The field was updating on his screen when he caught something out of the corner of his eye. A hunter drone, homing in on him. It wasn’t his. Had to be from Strategic Explorations.

He jumped as it fired.

A winged dart shot through the air and shattered the branch in front of him. If the wind were blowing the other way, the dart would have hit him. The drone hovered in the air, and Hank could see the camera rotate in its gimbal to retarget him.

It can’t miss now.

Then bam! It exploded into a cloud of shrapnel and plastic. Rosier’s drone blew through the debris.

“Good job, Rosier,” Hank said into his headset.

“Yeah, they’ve got some pretty neat stuff,” Rosier’s voice replied.

Until now, Strategic Explorations was only a theoretical presence. Now their remote tech had reached deep into the jungle and nearly stabbed Hank. He also knew another thing: their drone tech was on par with his. And where there were drones, there would soon be troops. Faceless, nameless mercs led by Antoine Smith. Wouldn’t surprise Hank if he knew some of them, but he could expect no special regard. He’d just be another heat signature in an infrared scope to them.

He considered his options. There was no hope for reinforcements from Montgomery. He couldn’t stand and fight with only three men. So the decision was either withdraw now or resonate the portal and then withdraw. The latter was the more dangerous option, and the former wasn’t an option. Hank was going deep in.

This was as good a night for dying as any.

“It’ll be slow going to the site,” he radioed Rosier, who was probably just as nervous back inside the trailer. “If I go down, do not attempt a rescue. Evac immediately. Assume they are aware of your position.”

Rosier’s voice said, “Copy that.”

“Cover me,” Hank said with grim resolve. “I’m going in.”