The new bounty landed in the [Channel: Zero] interface like a block of ice, chilling the triumphant atmosphere from their previous victory.
[INVESTIGATIVE BOUNTY: The Black Site Confession - ID: 2002]
The objective was as simple as it was impossible: discover what the captured members of the 'Specter' assassin team were telling their government interrogators inside the "Dragon's Maw," the Concord's most secure and infamous black site facility.
The reaction from the inner circle was immediate and grim.
Nomad-Lead: "The Dragon's Maw is a fortress, Oracle. It's said to be buried a kilometer underground beneath a military base. My team can't get within ten kilometers of the perimeter without being flagged. A physical infiltration is not just off the table; it's in another galaxy."
Hephaestus: "Digital is just as bad, if not worse. A facility like that is on a closed, military-grade network. It's completely 'air-gapped' from the public internet. The Leech is useless here. Trying to hack it from the outside is like trying to punch a hole in a star with a wet noodle."
Old-Man-Jiang: "This is not a mission of force, but of subtlety. Oracle does not set impossible tasks. We are not meant to break down the door. We are meant to find the key that is already there. The question is, how do we get a listening device inside a place that is hermetically sealed from the rest of the world?"
The challenge seemed insurmountable. They could topple corporations and out-predict government agencies, but how could they listen to a conversation happening inside a sealed tomb?
It was Su Liying, their new Chief Analyst, who provided the answer. She had been silent until now, her Analysis Core working in a furious, silent burst of data-processing since the bounty was posted.
Crystalline_Mind: "There is a way."
A new intelligence brief, compiled by her team, appeared in the channel. It was a masterpiece of lateral thinking.
Crystalline_Mind: "The Dragon's Maw is physically and digitally isolated. However, it is not self-sufficient. It has a supply chain. A very specific, very secure one. My team has cross-referenced the facility's construction records with all registered government military contractors. There is a single, private corporation with an exclusive, Tier-5 security contract to supply and maintain all of the black site's high-end medical and diagnostic equipment. The company is called 'OmniHealth Dynamics'."
A new file appeared. It was a profile of OmniHealth's CEO. Crystalline_Mind: "Further analysis of the Prometheus personnel roster we captured shows that the CEO of OmniHealth, Wei Tang, is a flagged, low-level financial contributor to the Prometheus Initiative. He is a greedy man, not a true believer. He is their man on the inside. But that also means there is a regular, trusted flow of equipment and personnel going from a Prometheus-linked entity directly into the heart of the Dragon's Maw."
She laid out her audacious plan. Crystalline_Mind: "OmniHealth is scheduled to deliver a new, Mark IV neural scanner to the facility in two days. We will intercept that delivery. Hephaestus will implant a listening device into the scanner. Then, we will let Prometheus's own mole unwittingly carry our Trojan horse into the very interrogation room we need to listen to."
A stunned silence filled the channel, quickly followed by a wave of profound admiration.
Old-Man-Jiang: "Magnificent. Absolutely magnificent. To use the enemy's own secret logistics network against both them and the government... it is a move of stunning elegance. A true spymaster's gambit."
But Hephaestus, the pragmatist, immediately saw the technical flaw. Hephaestus: "A brilliant plan, Chief. But it's a dead end. A standard listening device, no matter how microscopic, requires a power source and a transmitter. Both emit energy signatures. The moment that scanner passes through the Dragon's Maw's internal security sweeps, our bug will light up like a Christmas tree. The plan fails at the finish line."
The hope that had just surged through them died just as quickly. He was right.
It was then that Oracle came online. He had, as always, been watching. Oracle: You are thinking of conventional technology, Hephaestus. We will not be using a conventional bug.
A new, bizarre blueprint file was uploaded to the channel. Its title was something out of a theoretical physics textbook. [Blueprint: Quantum-Entangled Resonance Emitter (QERE)]
Oracle: This is a technology from an alternate path. It functions on the principles of quantum entanglement. Hephaestus, you will build two of these devices. They are a matched pair. They share the same quantum state. When a sound wave causes the diaphragm on one device to vibrate, the diaphragm on the other, no matter the distance or shielding between them, will vibrate in perfect, instantaneous sympathy.
Oracle: One device, 'the ear,' will be implanted into the medical scanner. We will keep the other device, 'the speaker,' here. No signal is ever transmitted. No energy is emitted. No data is sent. It is a whisper that travels across a dimension you do not perceive. It is undetectable by any known science on this planet.
The members of the inner circle were floored. This wasn't advanced technology. This was a violation of the known laws of reality. It was, for all intents and purposes, magic.
Hephaestus: "I... I... the physics of this... it's beautiful," he typed, his gruffness completely gone, replaced by the pure, unadulterated awe of a craftsman who had just been shown the blueprints of God. "I can build it."
The plan moved forward with the speed of a lightning strike. Hephaestus worked in a state of ecstatic frenzy, forging the two impossible devices. Old-Man-Jiang's network tracked the OmniHealth delivery shipment, mapping its route and schedule with perfect precision. Lin Mei's team, now fully recovered, planned the intercept.
Two days later, at a deserted service station on a long, lonely highway, a delivery truck was stopped by a "routine" transport authority checkpoint. The driver was detained for a minor paperwork violation. In the ten minutes he was gone, Lin Mei's team, moving like ghosts, opened the truck's cargo bay. They found the crate containing the neural scanner. They quickly swapped it with a perfect, identical duplicate that Hephaestus had prepared. The duplicate, however, contained a tiny, almost invisible addition: the QERE 'ear'.
The Trojan horse was now on its way to the Dragon's Maw.
That evening, the four core members of Project Zero gathered in a secure safe house. In the center of the room, on a sound-proofed table, sat the second QERE device, 'the speaker'. It was a simple, elegant disc of black metal and crystal, currently inert and silent.
They waited.
For hours, there was nothing. Then, just after midnight, the crystal in the center of the disc began to emit a faint, almost imperceptible hum. It was active. The scanner had been delivered and installed.
A moment later, a distorted whisper emanated from the device. "...don't know who he is... calls himself Oracle..."
They leaned closer. The voice was weak, filled with fear. It was the voice of a captured Prometheus agent, beginning his confession. They were in. They were about to hear everything.