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THE WILD STORM #7-12 NOVEMBER 2017 - MAY 2018 BY WARREN ELLIS, JON DAVIS-HUNT AND STEVE BUCCELLATO

SYNOPSIS (FROM DC DATABASE)

Yesterday was a day like a lightning strike, a day of movers and shakers, runners and gunners. But today dawns brightly over New York, as a woman prepares for work, says goodbye to her cat, and takes a bus. In the lobby of an office building, she signs in - Jacklyn King, IO's Chief of Analysis.

On Sub-Level 5, Jackie meets her underling, Mitchell Saunders, who hands her her morning coffee. Armed, she walks into the office, where her whole staff is assembled for a briefing. She begins: Angela Spica, an IO research engineer, built technology into herself which IO had stolen from Skywatch. She subsequently used this technology to save Jacob Marlowe, billionaire head of the Halo Corporation, from an assassination. Marlowe was a sanctioned IO hit, assigned to Michael Cray, an IO "hitter". For his failure, Cray was disbarred from IO, and a two-man Warblade team was sent to "hit" him. However, the team was unsuccessful, and Cray is now in the wind. Spica, meanwhile, ran to Camp Hero, a disused IO bunker. IO sent a covert action team (CAT) to finally sanction her, but this team ran afoul of a wild CAT, and in the confusion, Spica escaped.

Mitchell points out that she could be dead, but Jackie says then they need to find her body. Spica's technology is proof that IO has stolen technology from Skywatch, the secret space agency. Skywatch & IO agree to stay out of each other's way, but if someone else finds the body, it could spark a covert war that would destroy both agencies.

Connected to this, Mitchell explains that Christine Trelane cannot be found at Skywatch Ground Division in New York, and they think she's in San Francisco. Jackie says they need to make sure, and also need to work out who is temporarily replacing her, pointing out that Lucy Blaze, Skywatch's senior investigator, was at Camp Hero after the firefight.

Meanwhile, at a brownstone safehouse, Adrianna Tereshkova is reading the newspaper, much to the confusion of Cole Cash who is only now waking up. They receive a phone call from John Colt, a double agent working at a blacksite, Hightower, who has important data but thinks he's been discovered. Cole & Adrianna know John, but cannot teleport him out from the corridor because they are trying to hide the existence of Adrianna from IO. They tell him to find a broom closet, and not to break his second cover as a corporate spy.

John shoots through two teams of armed guards using a graphene/plastic handgun with isobutane propellant. He ducks into a broom closet, but when the third team arrives, he is gone...

At the brownstone safehouse, Angie Spica wakes up to discover she is bleeding from her side. She goes to the kitchen to get paper towels, and her arrival causes John - who was explaining about the information he found, that Hightower was secretly an IO research effort into "machine telepathy" - to clam up. John introduces himself as a normal man, but Angie uses her technology to do a deep scan of him before leaving.

A once-majestic ruined building with trees growing out of it, under two suns in an orange sky. A rotating ring habitat, built to mimic a biosphere, slowly falling apart. Jacob Marlowe blinks in the back of his limousine, and leans forward.

At the safehouse, John, Cole and Adrianna meet Kenesha in the drawing room, and pass the time waiting for Jacob Marlowe by voicing their theory that IO wanted Marlowe dead because they knew he was an alien. John dismisses this, saying there is no angle to this theory that makes sense. They discuss the facts. The assassin's weapon was polonium. Death by polonium, under normal circumstances, precipitates an autopsy, which is an inefficient method of spreading news of aliens. John points out that Jacob Marlowe has made a lot of human enemies. Adrianna adds that the kill only failed because the assassin, having bypassed all the other alarms, tripped a secret alarm for extraterrestrials, and this shocked the assassin - and then the assassin demonstrated a strange ability, which shocked both him and Marlowe.

John says he needs to assess all this news. Kenesha says she needs to assess the data that John brought back from Hightower. Jacob Marlowe walks in the door, ready to begin, only for Cole to point out that they already covered everything, and he needs to calm down Angie, the houseguest of their weirdness.

Jacob knocks on Angie's door as she is trying to mop the blood that spilled on the bed during the night. Angie says she needs painkillers before she leaves them. Marlowe says she can stay as long as she wants, but Angie declines - of this group, Adrianna and Cole are weird, but they are weird in very human ways. Jacob and John and Kenesha, however, are weird in very inhuman ways, and if she stays, she wants to know the whole truth. She is confident it is something easily-comprehensible.

Ichthyoid bipeds, chanting crosslegged around glowing blue methane vents beneath a blue-black sea. A long spacecraft with a non-rocket drive system, approaching the edge of a nebula. Jacob Marlowe steeples his fingers, and leans forward.

Sitting down, Jacob Marlowe begins his story with a bombshell: he is not a human with dwarfism, but rather a member of an extraterrestrial species. His species is divided into five intelligent sub-species - similar to how humans were related to homo neanderthalensis, homo floriensis, and so on - and thousands of years ago, his species sent an expedition to space, with representatives of the five races, to seek out life. Life is easy to kill in the universe, and intelligent life rarely evolves fast enough to truly blossom.

The expedition, informed of tool-using primitives on Earth, came here, but the ship was damaged and was forced to make a landing. Their superiors assumed them dead and, because interstellar travel is expensive, never came looking for them. After arrival, some of the aliens decided that they would use their extensive knowledge to assist humans in getting off the planet. This is the vocation Jacob has today. By using the data and material of his people, his goal is to subtly prompt the engineers he employs through the Halo Corporation to achieve technological milestones and get humans to space.

Angela Spica, who is the audience of this story, remarks that the narrative seems simplified. Jacob admits that it is, but says he has told her the story to prove that he trusts her with his secrets. He offers her the use of the Halo Corporation's technology, to improve or enhance her relationship to the technology she implanted into herself, as it is hampering her immune system and causing her to bleed sporadically. All he asks in return is a data dump about the technology she has now, to gauge what data and technology her former employers, I.O., have access to, and then a second data dump when she is finished, to see what she has done. Angela accepts the offer.

After Jacob leaves the room, Kenesha accuses him of leaving out significant parts of the story. Jacob explains that Angie is smart enough, and resourceful enough, that she could kill them all if they made her their enemy. He insists that they can never tell Angie the real reason for the expedition.

In I.O.'s Analysis Division, Jacklyn King takes a break from pestering her underling to receive data - of the three members of the wild CAT they are hunting, they have a positive ID on exactly one - Cole Cash, a former I.O. field specialist, listed as having died on a mission ten years ago. When Jacklyn relates this to Miles Craven, her superior, she adds that after searching every database on the planet, they have nothing on the other two renegades, which leaves only one suspect she can think of - Skywatch, the secret space agency. Craven counters that Skywatch is not allowed to have a covert action team on Earth, due to the treaty between their two agencies, and that he will not take further action without more data.

So Jacklyn goes back to her underling, Mitchell Saunders, and orders him to form a working group, in an Event-shielded room, with no computers, to assess the possibility of hacking into Skywatch's computer database. Mitchell underlines that that's illegal, and Jacklyn orders him to tell anyone who asks that it is a harmless exploration of hypotheticals. Mitchell underlines that based on everything they know, it's also impossible, and Jacklyn responds that this is why she's asking him to check.

In a café in Amsterdam, a young woman named Evi is telling her friend Bram about a guided drug trip she just did with a healer named Shen Li-Men. On the trip, Shen Li-Min seemed to sprout wings, and introduced herself as "the Doctor". Her group passed through the center of a lotus, into a dimension of pink energy, where they saw a mighty metal ship with a thousand identical passengers, sailing on a wild storm-cloud. At the end of the trip, there was a garden, and Shen Li-Men reached into Evi's heart and healed her. It was incredible... except that one member of the group didn't wake up.

In her workspace, Shen Li-Men is standing over the comatose young Englishwoman. She journeys into the woman's headspace, to find her mind intact, standing at the entrance of a tunnel. Curious, Li-Men follows the tunnel, through tableaux of past times when events of singular importance unfolded, each one empty except for a faceless woman in the garb of that time. And at the very back, she finds a machine shaped like a human heart, with a gestating human fetus inside it, guarded by two hooded bipeds with inhuman faces.

One sees and recognises her, which abruptly ends the trip. The young woman admits that it was quite a sight. Li-Men demands answers. The young woman explains that she came to see what sort of person Shen Li-Men was, and that to tell all, she will need Li-Men to open a livestream in London on her phone. Confused, Li-Men complies - and suddenly the young woman is in the livestream, and not in the workspace. With a lazy wave, the young woman walks out of frame, leaving Li-Men with no answers.

Reluctantly, Li-Men calls on the resource she likes the least - the Hospital, a bardo realm of infinite sunlight, manicured lawns, and free-floating stone cuboids, inhabited by people from the past who have held the role of the Doctor. Here, she unburdens herself to these "mad dead old farts", who explain that the identical people on the metal ship are a rarely-seen class of beings called Daemon - and that the Englishwoman is something they've seen before: a unique spirit of the mechanical arts and crafts, personified as a woman, equipped with powers related to the technologies of her time... and whose like is only seen at moments of critical importance. The opinion of the Doctors is that these women function as a planetary defense system.

As the Doctors try to provide helpful information from their long-past lives, Shen Li-Min ponders the strange case of the Englishwoman she knows only as Jenny Mei Sparks...

Jacob Marlowe and Adrianna Tereshkova have delivered Angie Spica to a space where Marlowe store their stuff. Marlowe explains that this warehouse of immense solitude has the security of a fortress, and part of that security is that he won't tell her where it is. Adrianna will act as a 'taxi' service, responding to a phone he hands Angie. Marlowe lists off the amenities, and then mentions that there is a field medic kit in one of the side rooms, which he assumes she will need. Marlowe offers to bring her a doctor, but Angie, toying with a pastel-colored pistol she found on a nearby table, says she will be fine.

At IO HQ, Mitch Saunders walks into Jackie King's office and lays out a story: a contractor named "Wilson Flowers" at the Hightower facility, who passed every background check, was caught hacking into the computers. He killed some of the guards, walked into a supply closet... and vanished. But the strangest thing is that his profile also vanished. They don't even have a picture now. Saunders wonders what he is becoming, that he can rattle off these facts without thinking of the families of the bereaved. Jackie muses at this, and then says she needs to talk to the director.

On the way to Miles Craven's office, she runs into Ivana Baiul, the Deputy Director, who questions her on the working group she has set up, but Jackie keeps her cool, and walks on. In Craven's office, she says that her research into Cole Cash lists him as working for something called "Project Thunderbook", which she can find nothing on. Craven says Project Thunderbook was classified Director's Eyes Only, and when Jackie objects, he specifies - it was classified as such by his predecessor, John Lynch.

Before he quit, Lynch destroyed the files on Project Thunderbook, and also a bunch of the staff committed suicide. And also three of their buildings burned down. Thunderbook is a locked box, but Jackie says she will look into it. Craven asks what about the purpose of her new working group. Jackie tries to stonewall, but eventually confesses that she is wargaming a method of hacking into Skywatch's computers. Craven orders her not to do anything without consulting him.

It is raining on Brooklyn, which makes John Colt pause as he puts on his suit, and remember another time, when he confronted a group of warriors in 17th century Japan. With a mix of sword skill and superhuman power, he had cut his way through the group, only for the driver to remark that if he had asked, he would have given him the thing he's transporting.

In the back of the wagon, John had found a piece of nonhuman technology, and cursed someone named Emp who had clumsily stored it under his bed.

In the present, Kenesha calls John to go over their plans for Hightower. John wonders aloud if there is any champagne in the house, which irritates Kenesha, who fires back that they have lived through times when clean running water was a luxury. Coldly, John points out the class difference between the two of them: Kenesha, with her three-syllable name, honored as a savant, selected to serve on the expedition led by Emp, who was so important he had a one-syllable name. John, meanwhile, was a frontline grunt with an eight-syllable name, marked as an "individual of no value". At home, he would never be allowed near the luxury that champagne and fine suits represents in New York, which is why he intends to indulge himself. Kenesha remarks that between one-syllable rulers and three-syllable savants, there are two-syllable names like "Zannah".

Across town, in the Skywatch Ground Division office, Lucy Blaze is looking out the window when she gets a call from Lauren Pennington, who is speaking on behalf of Director Bendix. Pennington orders her to prioritize the exosuit case[1]. Lucy asks why, and though Pennington initially bridles at even being asked, she admits that Bendix believes the exosuit case will reveal that IO has stolen Skywatch hardware, and she is to watch IO's Analysis section for leads on who they need to blame.

At the end of the workday at IO, Jackie is waiting for the bus when she sees Mitch using a rideshare app. Jackie pulls him aside and tries to lecture him on the terrible operation security that apps represent. Mitch gets defensive - he acknowledges that she is right, but says that he spends his days doing a job he cannot tell anyone about, working to help IO control and create the real world. He wants to feel normal. And in the world IO has created, rideshare apps are normal. Jackie asks him to think about security, and then catches the bus. Feeling adrift, Mitch opens a dating app.

At the warehouse, Angie has taken the medical kit and set up an intravenous drip via a stent she grew around the peripheral veins in her left hand. Picking up the pastel-colored pistol, she muses that it is time to learn about guns.

In the safehouse, Jacob Marlowe’s wild CAT are strategizing the best way to destroy the I.O. blacksite codenamed ‘Hightower’. Kenesha immediately suggests that they blow it up, but this is vetoed by Cole, Adrianna and John. Cole presents the ideal plan: trick the occupants into leaving the building, by faking an environmental breach or by pulling a fire alarm, and then after everyone has left, inflict damage which destroys the facility but can plausibly be written off as coincidental.

After John and Adrianna give a brief explanation of “event shielding” - a technology at I.O.’s disposal which can generate a screen of “fake time” around a space, rendering it physically unscannable by an outside body - Cole hits on the idea of using one of the microdrones Angie used back at Camp Hero to remotely hack Hightower’s systems to get the results they want. Kenesha agrees with this, thinking she can put explosives in the drone also.

As it is time for her to come home, Adrianna goes to retrieve Angie from the warehouse where she is working, taking Cole with her. At the warehouse, Cole asks for her help, making the suggestion. Angie is initially leery of the idea, but warms up when she realises that they want to blow up an I.O. facility. She remotely interfaces with the safehouse’s computer hub and downloads the drone stats for Kenesha’s use... which causes Kenesha to become defensive, as she had not given Angie the passcodes, and Kenesha prides herself on her ability to secure data from people.

On Skywatch’s space station headquarters, Ms Pennington walks into Henry Bendix’s office, where he is reading a report from Christine Trelane. Bendix is pleased: Trelane was able to use the chaos surrounding the Marlowe Incident to recruit Michael Cray, an assassin, away from I.O. and into Skywatch. Now he is on the other side of the country, merrily working for them, oblivious to his new employer’s true nature, and ensconced in a support structure of her creation. But the most surprising part of the report is that Michael Cray joined the organization saying he needed medical treatment for a brain tumor - but the tumor is anything but, and the doctor wants to do more scans.

Ms Pennington wonders aloud what could be causing the tumor. Bendix has a suspicion - reptilian humanoids. This exasperates Pennington, who has heard this line from Bendix before, but has gone over the files available to her and found nothing to support this old story. As they walk, Bendix reiterates that when he is dead and she has his job, she will understand everything.

Bendix pivots the conversation, announcing that he has put Lucy Blaze on the task of surveilling I.O. Analysis, to see what she can get out of the most guarded office in I.O. Bendix wonders aloud if he can have a few I.O. agents killed to “send a message”. As he pulls out a syringe and gets Pennington to inject him with it, he muses on what Skywatch could have accomplished by now if they didn’t have to maintain their secrecy.

Ennervated by the syringe contents, Bendix marches off through an iris doorway. Pennington, turning the other way, pulls out her phone and makes an open transmission to all Mission Control officers - the Weatherman is on deck.

In London, Jenny Mei Sparks is waiting at a bus stop when Shen Li-Men steps up to her and starts talking. Jenny’s eyes glow and she refuses to answer, but Li-Men smiles as Jenny glances around in dull confusion. Li-Men explains that she has turned all the communication signals within fifty meters into music. Jenny acknowledges that she owes Li-Men an explanation, preferably in conjunction with alcohol, but she begs Li-Men to turn all the music off, as it is giving her a headache.

So at Jenny’s flat, Jenny gives Li-Men her whisky and explains what she knows: International Operations is an American intelligence agency that has grown to the point where it subtly controls society. Skywatch, meanwhile, is a secret space program which carefully controls who gets to leave Earth. The two organizations have a non-interference agreement, because if they fought, civilization would collapse. Li-Men asks how Jenny could know this. Reluctantly, Jenny admits that she was there when the agreement was hammered out. Belying her seeming youth, she is in fact roughly 120 years old. However, after the agreement, Jenny fell into a decades-long drunken stupor. When recently she came to the conclusion that she could not die of alcohol poisoning, she forced herself to recover, and is now researching the state of the world.

Swirling her whisky, Li-Men taps on a point on Jenny’s board, “reptilian aliens”. Li-Men believes that this refers to The Daemon, a class of beings she has seen in visions. Jenny admits that she heard stories about reptilians, but has never seen hard evidence for them. Li-Men says that she never left evidence, but Jenny still came looking for her. Stories have to start somewhere. Underlining her position as the Doctor - a planetary shaman who is part of an unbroken spiritual tradition going all the way back to the earliest humans on the African savannah - and, crucially, who has the ability to draw on the knowledge of her predecessors - Li-Men explains that when Jenny came to see her, she looks into Jenny’s head to view Jenny’s lineage. And while the things she saw were presented mostly in visual metaphors, the earliest image was a machine, built by the Daemon, which Li-Men believes is what created Jenny. If she is right, Jenny is a planetary defense system, created by aliens to protect the human race.

Jenny takes this information with a mute scowl, and then says she will need more whisky to accept this knowledge.

In Brooklyn, Kenesha is going to a bodega. She stops outside to ask an unkempt man in a suit why he is looking up in the sky. With a sheepish grin, the man explains that he is watching out for flying robots which might attack people. He advises her to look after herself as he ”can’t be everywhere”.

Going into the bodega, Kenesha asks the shopkeeper who the guy is. The shopkeeper says he knows him only as “the mayor”, a homeless man who wanders the city, asking people if they are alright. Sometimes he can go missing for months at a time, but always shows up... and he has a way of lifting people spirit’s. Everyone feels valued after a visit from “the mayor”.

Outside, “the mayor” picks a cigarette butt from between the silvery treads on the soles of his feet, and curses the litterers of New York. He remarks that Copenhagen is usually clean this time of year. Running up a nearby wall, he backflips into a dive, landing head-first in the middle of the road... and vanishes with a ripple, like a swimmer.

A nearby limousine stops on the road, disgorging Pris “Voodoo” Kitaen, the pop singer, and her assistant. The two have been on a hedonistic tear of cocaine and fine champagne for at least six hours, but Pris has just enough presence of mind to recognise what “the mayor” just did as something she saw in a dream recently - and if the rest of the dream is true, then a war is about to break out!

Waking up in bed together the day after their late-night whiskey session, Jenny Mei Sparks and Shen Li-Men share cigarettes. Jenny confesses that when she first went to investigate Li-Men, she just thought she was one of the anomalous people who struggle to live between the twin controlling powers of Skywatch and IO. Shocked by the realization that there might be more like them, Li-Men savours her cigarette, already planning for them to find and protect these people.

In New York, IO analyst Mitchell Saunders is using a rideshare app to get home. As he looks at the screen, he does not notice a passing jogger in a black hoodie - Lucy Blaze, who uses software called ‘Ambush Bug’ to suborn his phone’s microphone to her use as a listening device.

Later, Mitchell is in a meeting to show Jackie King his team’s first plan for how to hack into Skywatch’s orbiting server, to find out if they are running an illegal covert action team. The team’s plan is simple: every day, IO & Skywatch exchange data, as part of an effort to keep each other honest. So, they will put an infiltration package in the data exchange, to search Skywatch’s database for info on the CAT. To get the data out, they will then fake a swarm attack on the IO satellites, by bots programmed in Korean to cover their tracks. The bots will swarm and multiply, and will by simple proximity, try to get into Skywatch’s system. This attack will draw the attention of the admins, and allow the infiltration package to narrowcast back the info. IO will look like fools, Skywatch will feel smug, Skywatch will not know they have been robbed, everybody wins.

Jackie congratulates the team, then asks Mitchell to talk to her outside. There, she asks him how feasible it is. Mitchell, checking his phone as they are not allowed to bring them into the meeting room, says they are confident, but that his main problem is that this an act of aggression which could start a fight between the two organizations. Jackie says she needed the plan because she believes that Skywatch broke the treaty first. And while the director doesn’t know about the plan yet, she thinks he will agree. If Mitchell and the team are working on that, she can focus on her own current target - Project Thunderbook, the mysterious IO operation that trained Cole, and whose records were all sealed or destroyed by the previous director.

On the Skywatch satellite headquarters, Henry Bendix and Lauren Pennington are meeting after their work shift. They make small talk, and then Lauren asks Henry why he is so keen to break Skywatch’s treaty with IO. Henry sneers, saying that he was there when the treaty was signed, and does not have the respect for the treaty that his younger co-workers do. Lauren argues that the treaty protects both organizations from potential catastrophe. Henry corrects her - the treaty protects the organizations from certain catastrophe. The conflict would expose both organizations to the world. Skywatch, on the one hand, has space stations, Mars bases, and scientific and medical technology far beyond the mainline society, which will inspire fear and greed, which would inspire theft. IO, meanwhile, would need to rely on the resources of various states, which would be destroyed in self-defense by IO, which would result in counter-attacks, as not all the nuclear-armed countries can be controlled by IO.

Sitting down with a cocktail, Henry tells Lauren about the incident that led to the signing of the treaty, during the Seventies. Skywatch had been created to ensure that any aliens who made first contact with humans would only be able to interact with one polity, and so Skywatch maintained a secret veto on any spacelaunches. But during the Seventies, as part of a covert agreement between IO and the Soviet Politburo, the two organizations build a secret facility for military research, including spacelaunch technology. So Skywatch sent a flight of spacecraft to frighten this facility, which they had discovered was using the name “Science City Zero”.

When the spacecraft got to the facility, the defenses were aimed at them, but Skywatch’s assessment was that the city was trying to parallel their technology but had no idea how to replicate it. Skywatch had no respect for their neighbors.

The opening salvo destroyed the lead spacecrafting, killing its crew of four. The other spacecraft opened fire in response. The facility was destroyed, its population of twenty thousand reduced to thirty-five survivors. Of the seven Skywatch spacecraft in the attack, only one returned. On that craft had been a young Henry Bendix. In the city had been the then-director of IO, John Lynch, who survived with a noticeable injury.

In New York, Jackie is explaining her plan to Miles Craven, the current director of IO. He has worries, but he agrees to let her run the raid against Skywatch. He also asks her not to tell him whatever Thunderbook was doing, as he is queasy that it will hamper his ability to do his job.

In Jacob Marlowe’s secret storehouse, Angie Spica has found and activates a blue goop which is nanotechnological on nature. Swallowing the goop and waiting for it to interface with her systems, she activates her ‘base integument’, which is a new intermediate stage between her armor and her normal self. It feels cold as it coats her body and shocking as it coats her throat and eyes, but when it has passed, her internal injuries are healed and her vitals are seemingly fine. Putting her equipment to the final test, she activates her full armor, which is now a stark white and black, in contrast to the previous black-and-grey. Amazed at her success, Angie poses in victory.

In the Brooklyn safehouse, Kenesha and Cole Cash are discussing their upcoming mission against the Hightower facility, when Cole gets a strangely-worded text message and says he wants to go for a walk. On the roof of a skyscraper, he meets Lucy Blaze, who cuts to the point - IO knows he is alive, but they think he has betrayed them to Skywatch and they are going to respond accordingly. She thinks this is all he needs to know. Cole grabs her arm, saying that she must know more. Lucy goes stiff, and in the tone of a threat says that she taught him much of combat and that John Lynch and Project Thunderbook did not teach him enough to outmatch her.

Retreating hastily, Cole asks Lucy why she is even telling him. Lucy says she has a code... and that Cole belongs to her. Shocked by this, Cole does not stop her as she leaves. In the stairwell, Lucy says the he should give her regards to Jacob Marlowe and Kenesha, and tell them that Zannah says hello.

In a warehouse, Jackie King has found a specific box. In the box is a collection of ring binders, and in one of the ring binders is the index for Project Thunderbook, the I.O. group that trained Cole Cash before he faked his death and joined a team of wildcat operators who Jackie is now trying to defeat. However, as she opens the file, a small device sparks and breaks. Jackie pockets the remains, sure that it is a failed incendiary left by John Lynch, who started Project Thunderbook and subsequently tried to bury it.

Later, in their Brooklyn safehouse, Cole Cash and his team are preparing for a mission. The first part of the plan is simple: Adri Tereshkova will teleport into an I.O. blacksite codenamed “Hightower”, and release a robot drone the size of an insect using a smartphone app. When it activates the environmental alarms, she is to teleport back to get the rest of them. Adri, shocked by the functionality of the tiny drone, departs.

Meanwhile, across town, at the I.O. headquarters in Manhattan, Jackie King is heading a big Analysis op against Skywatch. Cognizant of the high-stakes nature of the job, she orders all workers present, including Mitch Saunders, to turn their phones off. Miles Craven, director of I.O., walks into the room, and though he is hesitant, he orders the mission to go ahead. A chorus of return-keys being pressed is rewarded, about a minute later, with some of the lights on the big board going green. Jackie explains to Miles that when all the lights on the board go green, that is the signal that they have all the data, and then they will shut it down. Miles' mood perks up, and he hopes aloud that after their recent run of bad luck, maybe they will have a profitable day.

At Hightower, the wild CAT steps out of a closet after the last stragglers flee the alarms. Using John Colt's knowledge of the layout, they go down a stairwell, into the area protected by event shielding. They are convinced that they will encounter no-one... but immediately they meet a group of guards in hazmat suits with guns, which frustrates Cole.

Kenesha, John Colt, and Cole Cash make short work of the guards while Adri hides behind a wall, her senses hampered by the event shielding. When the guards are dead, they move onto the lab doing the “machine telepathy” research. Here, they find 500 human brains, kept alive in jars. Cole is unnerved, but John Colt and Kenesha are unfazed. Kenesha, caressing the main console, deactivates the event shielding, much to the relief of Adri. Looking further, she realises that she has a direct line to the I.O. main servers, which she can use to delete everything tagged as originating in Hightower. Cole is hesitant, but agrees.

Her hacking complete, Kenesha whips out an incendiary she has labelled “explodey!” Cole and Adri disapprove of her enthusiasm for explosives, which leads her to denounce Cole as “the worst human in the history of humans”, adding as the group teleports away, “and I am thousands of years old, so, you know, I've met most of them.”

On Skywatch's satellite headquarters, Henry Bendix is frustrated by the swarm of North Korean bots that are attacking his network, when he is handed an emergency message from Skywatch Ground Division in New York, who says that her suborned phone microphone led to her hearing that I.O. was about to do something significant to Skywatch. Bendix, coming to the conclusion that I.O. is playing him, orders Blaze to give their crime a cost, by killing one of the I.O. Analysis people.

At I.O., deputy director Ivana Baiul tries to pull rank on Jackie King, but stops when she sees Miles Craven is present. She tells him that disaster has struck at Hightower. Craven orders the site be evacuated, and when he is informed that they have, orders her to start allocating bodies so they can speedily investigate what went wrong.

At this point, Mitch notices that the data link from Hightower is hitting them with a software package which is deleting all of their data they had previously received from that blacksite. Ordinarily, they could stop the software by shutting down their system, but they are currently hacking Skywatch and cannot do that. They are forced to watch as the Skywatch download completes, before they shut down the entire system.

Jackie King, Miles Craven and Ivana Baiul meet in a corner to assess the situation. Jackie underlines her position: Skywatch has no idea what they did, the Hightower hack must be a continuation of previous actions which happened to coincide with their efforts. Nevertheless, the Hightower data, even the parts of it stored securely offsite, are gone forever. Baiul interrupts in to add that the Hightower staff are reporting an on-site explosion. Craven orders that tomorrow, Jackie will personally sift the Skywatch haul, in search of whatever leverage he can use to get Henry Bendix, who he is sure is behind this, to back down. Craven says he has no desire to start a war.

Jackie says that, based on today, they may already be at war.

Later that day, Mitch and Jackie are leaving work. Mitch gets a lift using the Overshare app, but the driver is Lucy Blaze. She drives down an alley, abruptly shoots Mitch in the head, and leaves the dead body in the car, with the lights on.

In a snow-covered rural homestead, a man walks into the kitchen where there is an animal carcass on the countertop. Leaving his gun in a gun rack, he goes to a computer, where he is informed that the “index file” has been discovered. The audience is led to the realisation that this man is John Lynch, former head of I.O., just as he decides to go on a road trip!

REVIEW

I have mixed feelings about this book. On one side, I like how all the characters are being introduced or re-invented for this volume. On the other side, it is taking too long and some of this characters don’t seem to play a role just yet, and they are making me lose track of all the characters on the board.

I also wonder what the future of this incarnation will be. DC has had problems handling WildStorm since they acquired it. Considering the lack of news for this universe or imprint and how new 52 failed to merge them into the main universe, I am feeling that, whatever is left unexplored at the end of this story, will remain that way forever.

Besides the extreme decompression, the visuals are very good, and sometimes, very creative, dynamic and spectacular. This euro look really pays off to make the story move more than it is actually moving.

I recognize most of the new characters from previous incarnations, but others, like Spartan, are harder to remember (and changed a lot visually).

I give these issues a score of 8.

#jon davis-hunt #dc comics #comics #review #2017 #2018 #post modern age #wildstorm #the wild storm #spartan #grifter #stormwatch

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