BREAKING NEWS: Three blocks have been evacuated around an apartment building in Washington DC this morning after a terrorist threat against the President was traced to the building!

BattleLord FlameHeart stared at the message from his subLord. “Can allow no further assistance”? He hadn’t sent any. He hadn’t even sent as much as he’d committed to before the attack began.

“Consider when the time to cut your losses and accept censure is”? Censure for a completely failed mission like this would be - no, was! Unacceptable. When he maneuvered to get the mission, he’d assumed that a low-world subjugation would be easy. It should have been. Sneak in, capture some resources outside the civilization, build up a force, capture the city.

It was a well-known and well-practiced plan for the Kaelitha Clan; they’d won two planets that way, even if they’d eventually had to give one of them up. More than half the current Kaelitha Settlements were originally founded through Invasion; most of the remainder were more straightforward conquest, but even many of those started from an Invasion beachhead. It was routine.

Even a failed conquest was routine; if things started going south, you stole what resources and slaves you could, then retreated through the portal. It wasn’t hard to get more than it cost for the portal; they weren’t cheap, but an army could carry a lot and low-Tier Sterath were cheap and easy to replace.

This world had been anything but routine from the beginning.

The entry portal was inside a building; not only that, it was an exceedingly expensive building; the roof was so wide it had to be magically reinforced somehow, even though none of the mages could find the magic. It was also in continual use; humans streamed in and out in clumps, almost like an overused city portal, only worse. It was fortunate the portal was in a far corner, but even then it was much too exposed to actually set up even a small command station; they were lucky they’d managed to locate a storage room of some sort that seemed unused to use as a staging and portal location.

The portal was usually in a low-traffic area, often an abandoned building. Retreat would be difficult.

It was also usually near the edge of the city; they’d explored for miles before they realized that the closest edge was water, and even that was miles away. The city was enormous.

FlameHeart hadn’t even been able to gather significant supplies; for the first couple of weeks, things had seemed fairly normal, but they’d been busy finding staging and barracks points. Once he’d finally started setting mages to hunt down the material the Voice should be showering on the world, they’d reported back oddity after oddity.

The ley lines were far too common and far too weak; they weren’t growing secondary resources the way they should be. The dungeons seemed to have all been found by the overpopulated humans before the Sterath could get there. There wasn’t any countryside to comb for atliik or tkenthan, if it even existed here. None of the animals even had cores.

The locals didn’t seem to bring raw materials into the city; everything came in already finished, so they couldn’t even get good base materials! All they’d managed to get was already-worked materials, such as the strange outer shell on the ground-flyers. They’d sent over what they could, but the lack of results was maddening.

And now the subLord was refusing to send reinforcements.

It was a good thing he didn’t currently have a protegee; hopefully the two years since BrightFang earned her name would be enough to insulate her from his failure. There was no point in planning to retreat. As badly as this had gone, he’d get more mercy from a Shameful One or the natives than he would from his Lord.

Fifty three. There were fifty three more Sterath at the group of houses than his scouting had indicated, and it had only been two days before the assault. Serenity absently wished he knew whether that was Sterath moving around the city or if they’d pulled that many more people through the portal. The child hadn’t been able to tell them that - he’d been hiding in the closet for “aaages”. Hopefully, some of the few survivors would know and be willing to say. Serenity had specifically asked Lieutenant Smith to see if he could find that out.

Serenity’s information about the gym had been accurate, to within one or two; close enough that it was probably Sterath he’d missed rather than Sterath arriving from elsewhere. Of course, it’d been only a few hours old - he’d scouted it that morning. His information about the housing group was from days earlier.

He couldn’t count on any of the scouting he’d done while waiting on Raz and Katya. At least, he couldn’t count on the details; the locations were still valuable.

Serenity stared at the map. Where to begin? What he wanted to do was go after either the portal or the BattleLord, but without more-

Serenity’s phone rang, knocking him out of his thoughts.

“Serenity? This is Dr. Mattingly.”

Serenity already knew that; he’d seen it on his caller ID. It was polite of her to say it, though. He could only think of one reason why she’d be calling. “Is the portal detector finally working again?”

Dr. Mattingly chuckled. “Yes and no. It’s repaired, but that’s not what I called about. While the portable version was down, Dr. Ridge managed to put together a high-power stationary version. The accuracy is terrible, but it was able to give some rough directions. We’ve lined that up with the maps we have; it’s not a perfect match, but at least it gives us a starting area. I’d like to get your opinion on it, since you helped with the initial detection; some of the portal signals are extremely anomalous.”

“Can you send me the maps?” They should be just what Serenity needed.

“No, but if you come in we can show them to you.”

She was bribing him to come in and look over the anomalous signals, wasn’t she?

It was working. “Where?”

Serenity took one look at the map on the display and knew exactly why Dr. Mattingly had called one of the signals “anomalous”. There were two relatively strong “permanent” signals, and they came from very different directions. One of them - the one more or less due east - could have matched up with any of the locations Ita had picked out as possible portal locations.

The other seemed to be coming from the southeast. It couldn’t have been from the cluster of houses Serenity and the others dealt with the previous day; they weren’t quite on the line, though they were close. Nothing they’d heard about went as far south as this seemed to, so either it was closer than they were estimating or it was the farthest location they’d identified.

“Thanks for coming.” Dr. Ridge walked up to Serenity. The standoffishness he’d shown before was notably absent; instead, Serenity felt like he was being addressed as a valued colleague. It was one heck of a change. “Any idea what we’re looking at?”

“The more northern one has to be the portal. The southern one is interesting; can you show me the data?”

Dr. Ridge sat down at the computer next to the display and pulled up a series of charts. Dr. Ridge walked him through what they were; as he showed off the different charts, something nagged at Serenity.

He’d seen that pattern before. More than once, and relatively recently. It definitely didn’t match the signature of a portal; the reason it’d been picked out of the noise was how strong it was and the fact that it was more or less on the same frequencies as a portal. There was something else Serenity had seen that was on those frequencies; it was right on the tip of his tongue.

Serenity flipped through the charts again. “I feel like this is incredibly familiar. Something we looked at back at the rockfin portal.”

Dr. Ridge shook his head. “It doesn’t match any of the signals from any of the portals. There’s a little more similarity to the one you built, but it’s still not a match.”

Serenity’s mind jumped to another problem. “Speaking of matches, did you manage to match the actual portal signal to the location data?”

Dr. Ridge shook his head. “The sensor’s not good enough. Too much noise. We’ll have to collect the data with the portable detector; it’ll be closer so we should have less impact from intervening noise.”

Serenity nodded, then stopped. There was something important in what the scientist said. “Repeat that.”

“We’ll have to use the mobile sensor?” Dr. Ridge sounded confused.

“No, before that.”

Dr Ridge shook his head, but tried anyway. “The sensor’s not good enough, it can’t always reliably pull the signal from the noise at this distance.”

“That. That’s it. That’s where I saw this. You compared it to all the signals but did you compare it to the noise?” Serenity started to hunt for that, but it looked like there wasn’t a chart with noise called out yet.

Dr. Ridge reached for the mouse and Serenity got out of his way. It wasn’t long until he pulled up the data from the tests back at the rockfin portal and had several charts of the different types of noise they’d seen. He grunted. “It’s close. Not exact, but close. A lot stronger, though.”

Serenity nodded. “That’s because it’s residue from a spell of some sort. A big one, probably continuous. Well, either it’s big or it’s very leaky.” Serenity paused as he realized there was another possibility. “Or it’s someone too powerful for this world.”

Serenity hoped that meant it was the Sterath BattleLord and not Tranquil Conviction, and he was pretty sure he knew how to find out. “Did you happen to have this running yesterday evening? At-” When had he seen Tranquil Conviction? “At about 6:27 PM?”

Dr. Ridge nodded. “Yeah, I finished it yesterday afternoon and let it run all last night. It’s not continuous though; in order to get the directionality it has to sweep the area. That’s a lot of the reason the directions are so fuzzy. I’m only really able to get about two sweeps a minute with the antenna I’m using; that’s as fast as it’s designed to go. It’s not a problem for this use, fortunately.”

Serenity nodded; he wasn’t an antenna specialist, but he knew enough to know that getting high gain required limiting the beam angle, so it made sense that you could get direction with a moving high-gain antenna. Two sweeps a minute wasn’t fast, but he was confident he’d spoken to Tranquil Conviction for more than a minute; the Shameful One was probably laughing for longer than that. “Yeah, that’ll be fine.”

It took Dr. Ridge a few minutes to narrow down the timeframe and turn the resulting data into a nice display, but once he did, the result was obvious: for several minutes around 6:30 the previous evening, there were three strong signals in the area.

The third came from the direction of the group of houses they’d cleared out that evening. It was either Tranquil Conviction or the spell the Sterath mage cast; Serenity couldn’t tell which, and he had a sinking suspicion it was the spell. It still told him the important thing, though: the source to the south was probably not Tranquil Conviction. It might be the BattleLord or it might be a spell ; either way, it was something that needed to be chased down.

While Serenity stared at the map and thought, Dr. Ridge was working with the data. “The frequency signature on that new anomaly doesn’t match either of the others. It’s still a closer match to the noise than the portal signal. It was lost in the composite data, since I was looking for longer-lasting signatures; I don’t seem to be catching many short ones. How’d you know to look for it?”

Serenity tapped the map where the houses were. “A Sterath mage cast a really nasty sacrificial spell here at about that time yesterday. It backlashed; I wanted to see if it or anything else would show up. It’s entirely possible that we’re looking at a huge maintained spell in the southern location. I think you’ve found their headquarters.”

“Sort of.” Dr. Ridge frowned. “That’s still a lot of area to cover. But at least the mobile device is back up and running. Rachel and I will be heading out in it to search for more exact locations soon; this time we’ll have an escort. Will you be with us as well?”

That wasn’t something Serenity could turn down. “Yes, but I think I’ll have my team with me, too.”