Baroness: Midnight Tactician by Jade Gretz

https://www.deviantart.com/jadegretzai/art/Baroness-Midnight-Tactician-1300653471?file=1

The Narcissus Protocol

Black water lapped against the toes of her polished tactical boots, the only sound in the abyssal silence of Sector Four. Anastasia Cisarovna, known to the world’s intelligence agencies as the Baroness, adjusted the focal ring of her night-vision lens. The subterranean world snapped into a harsh, monochromatic emerald green. Rusting girders hung like the ribs of a rotting leviathan above her, and the smell of ancient cordite and stagnant moisture clung heavily to the freezing air.

She was three hundred feet below the ruins of a medieval keep in the Carpathian Mountains. The forgotten Cobra black-site had been sealed for a decade, abandoned after a catastrophic laboratory failure that even Doctor Mindbender refused to document. Anastasia was here for a singular purpose: a localized hard drive containing the biometric blueprints of the Emperor Project. A simple infiltration, a midnight retrieval, and an exfiltration by dawn.

Raising her left wrist, she tapped the communication array embedded in the sleek black leather of her gauntlet. "Ironcast, this is Raven. The descent is complete. I am entering the primary vault."

Static hissed through her earpiece, a dry susurrus like dead leaves scraping across stone. The signal was expected to be weak, buried beneath so much granite and lead, but the total absence of a carrier wave was troubling. She tapped the array again.

"Ironcast, acknowledge," she whispered, her voice a precise, aristocratic purr that carried effortless authority.

"I hear you perfectly, darling," a voice replied in her earpiece.

Anastasia froze. Her finger tightened on the trigger of her suppressed compact submachine gun. The voice was not Destro’s deep, metallic baritone. It was not the high, frantic rasp of the Commander.

It was her own voice.

Perfectly pitched, laced with the exact same European inflection, the identical sultry cadence, and the same underlying current of absolute control.

"Who is on this frequency?" Anastasia demanded, her eyes sweeping the emerald shadows of the cavernous room. Her pulse remained remarkably steady. She was a professional. Psychological warfare was merely a game of chess, and she was a grandmaster.

"I am on this frequency," the voice answered, echoing not just in her earpiece, but from the darkness of the flooded corridor ahead. The acoustic delay was barely half a second. "And I have been waiting in the dark for a very, very long time."

Anastasia moved with liquid grace, stepping out of the water and onto a raised concrete catwalk to eliminate the noise of her own footsteps. She raised her weapon, sweeping the laser sight through the gloom. "A voice synthesizer. How dreadfully unimaginative. If the Joes sent you, I must admit I am disappointed in their theatricality. Come out into the light."

A soft, melodic laugh floated out of the subterranean gloom. It sent a highly uncharacteristic chill down Anastasia’s spine. It was exactly the laugh she used when she had cornered a politician at a gala, just before twisting the metaphorical knife. It was a laugh of profound, predatory seduction.

"The Joes? Please, Anastasia. Do not insult us. We are far beyond the petty squabbles of men in brightly colored uniforms. We are a study in perfection. Do you know how cold it gets down here when the generators sleep?"

"Identify yourself," Anastasia commanded, continuing her advance along the catwalk. She was closing in on the vault’s reinforced door. If she could extract the drive, she could detonate her planted charges and bury this mimic under ten thousand tons of rock.

"I am the reflection you avoid in the mirror when the evening gowns are put away and the armor is removed," her own voice whispered. This time, the sound originated from the ventilation shaft directly above her.

Anastasia instinctively ducked, rolling forward along the grating, her weapon tracking upward. She fired a suppressed three-round burst into the aluminum duct. The metallic clatter echoed violently, followed by the sound of something heavy and wet shifting rapidly through the ceiling space, scurrying with a distinctly non-human rhythm.

"Temper, temper," the voice tutted, echoing now from the far end of the room, near the vault door. "You always were so quick to resort to violence when your intellect was challenged. It ruins our posture, darling."

"You are a biological anomaly," Anastasia deduced, her brilliant mind categorizing the variables. Mindbender’s abandoned lab. A creature capable of mimicking pre
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