Atlas Helicarrier
Barracks, Deck 14

En route to Santorini, Greece

Twilight was having trouble sleeping on this particular evening. Even though Joker, Mitchell, Ilona, and Gideon were slumbering in their own bunks, Twilight was still awake. They had just finished meeting with the United States Defense Department and General McDonnel to discuss the intel the Atlas teams recovered from both Danois and the mysterious text file.

Suffice to say, there was some heated talking on both Irons and McDonnel's part over sanctioning the operation, but Atlas won out. Now, Gideon and his team, Twilight included, were en route to Santorini. The game plan was at first seemingly simple, yet deceivingly complex.

While Gideon and five other Atlas soldiers took a truck to the conference center where the KVA were holding the meeting, Twilight, Mitchell, and Ilona, posing as tourists, would eliminate the KVA safehouse. Once they cleared a path to Hades using a WASP, or Weapon-Aligned Sniper Platform Drone, Gideon's team would capture Hades, dead or alive.

Dead being the preferred option, in this case.

Twilight tossed and turned in her bunk, before she sighed and snuck out of their dorm to the recreation lobby, and logged into the computer that was analyzing the two data drives they got from "Knox" in Detroit.

As she looked over the decryption proceess, she raised her eyebrows slightly. The two data drives were sym-encrypted, meaning that the data of the first had to be used to access the second, and vice versa. The two drives, now that they were together, they could be opened.

Twilight typed into the console, and to her nod of approval, the drives opened, and displayed an image of the globe and a command prompt window. Twilight watched as the globe on then screen slowly became overtaken by Atlas's infrastructure and military, as the necessary pieces to essentially rule the world slowly came into the hands of Atlas and Atlas alone.

Twilight knew about this, but she still felt it odd that Irons would need to keep standing military bases and necessary contracts in place even when the country in question was friendly to Atlas motives.

Then, she noticed the command prompt had a new line of text in it.

"Makes you think, doesn't it?"

She hastily typed a message back.

"Who is this? ID yourself immediately."

A response slowly appeared.

"You can call me Sentinel. And you're fighting on the wrong side, Twilight Sparkle. And I'm aware of where you come from."

Twilight's eyebrows widened at that line.

"How do you know about Equestria?"

"I have my ways. You've already met some of my best operatives."

"Knox, Harper, and Diaz? What do they have to do with this?" she typed.

"They work for me and the organization I answer to. That's beside the point, however. Irons is not the man you think he is."

"How so?" she typed slowly.

"He is slowly gathering the entire free world into his palms because of the KVA attacks four years ago. Ever since, he's done nothing but take over nation after nation, all in the name of security.

How much of that is enough for you?"

Twilight furrowed her eyes.

"And what does this have to do with me?"

"It has everything to do with you." was the reply. "Once Irons takes over Earth, he'll come for Equestria. And once he does, there won't be anyone left to stop him should he succeed."

Twilight looked away. She did have small feelings about Irons' new methods of acquiring loyalty from the soldiers in Atlas. The newer soldiers who joined up after the KVA attacks were more dedicated and almost fanatical in their loyalty to Jonathan Irons.

Twilight was tempted to delete the window, but she asked a question.

"What can you tell me?"

As the other side began sending text files over to her, Twilight looked them over. The files stated that Atlas was repsonsible for several "accidents" in multiple nations involving civilians and sometimes protesters. Many of these "accidents" were prominently written about in the local or national news, but in the Atlas news feed, there was no mention of them whatsoever.

Furthemore, the military complexes of multiple nations were handing over their regular soldiers to Atlas for training, but many of these trainees never came back to their original militaries and nations.

Finally, multiple politicians in nations currently under Atlas's control or influence who were critical of Irons' policies often died in accidents or attacks by "insurgents" or even a "KVA sub-faction". Except from what Twilight knew, the KVA ddn't have such factions and these hostiles were trained to use Exo Suits and compatible tech, which the KVA didn't have access to.

"Like I said, it makes you think about what side you're really on." was the line in the console window. "When you fall from grace in Atlas, we'll be there to catch you...but know this…it'll come a lot sooner than you expect. Sentinel out."

Twilight was about to respond when the window closed and the data drives closed their connections. She sat there for a few moments, before powering down the computer and returning to bed, being careful to not disturb her still-sleeping teammates.

====

"Oi, Twilight, you okay?"

Twilight looked up from her breakfast to see Gideon looking at her with a raised brow.

"Yeah, I didn't really sleep last night." she said. "Plus I was working on decrypting those data drives further."

"How'd that go?" Mitchell asked as he sat down nearby.

"Went fine, nothing else other than what we already found." she lied. Luckily, her teammates didn't say anything else and she continued to eat, her mind swirling with unanswered questions. As she went through the operation plan again in the briefing room, Twilight could only wonder what lay in store for her should what she was told by "Sentinel" be true after all.

Later, once the time came to deploy into Santorini, she changed into civilian clothes, stowed her gear, and retrieved the duffle bag with her kit, the WASP Drone, and Exo-suit. Then, she headed to a civilian-make private VTOL which Mitchell and Ilona had already prepared and boarded.

"We all set?" Mitchel asked as Ilona guided the VTOL out of the helicarrier and towards the Santorini airport.

"Yes, I'm good." Twilight replied. "What's our heading?"

As the VTOL descended into the airport terminal, Twilight tightened her grip on the duffel bag as Gideon spoke into her earpiece.

"Hades is confirmed to have already arrived and is set up at the conference center. Clock's ticking, team. Let's get this done."

Author's Note

Update!

Next time - Mission: Manhunt , followed by Mission: Utopia.