“Good morning,” Thorn said. He’d already been to the armory to pick up his weapons, and was wearing his new gear. He’d felt decked out and ready for anything when he’d left his room, but seeing that suit of armor brought him back to feeling like an imposter.
“Good morning,” Sergeant Lee replied. “You’ve met Private Mejer before, I understand?”
Thorn pulled up Kels’s details out of the mission packet he’d received from Sergeant Lee.
“Yes, Sergeant,” Thorn replied. He gave a little wave, but Kels walked over and gave him a fist bump. “Is that your armor?” Thorn asked.
“Oh yeah,” Kels said, grinning. “I’m sure if I could use it in that simulation I’d be able to beat your time.”
“I didn’t actually finish the sim, so you still got me beat.”
“A technicality,” she said. “Anyways, I’ll be having fun riding rear guard.”
“The client is on schedule and will land upstairs in just a few minutes,” Sergeant Lee said, interrupting them. “I will meet him at his dropship and escort him here.”
She pointed at the final member of their small team, a tall lanky man with a perfectly trimmed beard and a long gun slung over his shoulder. He flashed a smile of white teeth and shook Thorn’s hand. “Call me Sedge.”
“Nice to meet you,” Thorn said.
“Sedge’s driving the limo—” Sergeant Lee pointed at a long, armored limousine. “And you’ll ride shotgun. I’m in the cabin with the client and Kels will follow along behind. When we make a stop, Sedge and Thorn will stay with the vehicle, setting a perimeter. Kels and I will follow the client inside buildings, but usually take up positions outside of any meeting rooms.”
Her short briefing complete, Sergeant Lee left them to go pick up their client.
“Anything in particular I should know or look out for?” Thorn asked Sedge.
“Naw, this is easy money,” Sedge said, smiling easily. “We’re just here to look pretty and flex for the holo-sensors.”
“Who’re you calling pretty?” Kels asked.
“Myself. Who else?”
Kels shook her head as if she’d expected that answer.
“That being said, maybe this guy has enemies,” Sedge shrugged. “Who knows? Anyways, your job is to focus on keeping your eyes peeled for anything suspicious, particularly anyone trying to get sneaky. If you do see anything out of place, let the Sergeant know. And if anything happens to me, you can take over driving.”
“Copy that,” Thorn said. “By the way, can I set up a System connection with you two? Long story, but I can’t send normal comms through my System and the Crow network. I have to connect with you first.”
“Sure,” Sedge shrugged and accepted the connection. “Not the weirdest way someone’s slid into my comms.”
“You’re gonna weird him out.” Kels rolled her eyes. She also accepted the connection. “Where’s Korakis?”
“He’s staying at home for this one,” Thorn said.
“Aww,” Kels said. “He’s cute.”
“Who’s that?” Sedge asked.
“Thorn’s pet crow. Sits on his shoulder and caws,” Kels said, then threw out a few mock caws of her own, mimicking Korakis.
“A pet crow? That’s awesome man. Can it do tricks?” Sedge asked.
“Well, he’s actually not a—” Thorn trailed off when he saw Sergeant Lee round the corner, followed by a very large man. Their client wasn’t tall, or muscular though; he was fat, almost to an absurd degree. He was almost as wide as someone wearing armor. He also wasn’t walking; he was floating along the ground using tech that Thorn couldn’t see.
“Go time,” Sedge said, noticing the sergeant and their client as well. He slapped the top of the limo and climbed into the driver’s seat, storing his rifle next to him.
Thorn watched in fascination as Kels stepped backwards into her armor. Panels shot forward and snapped shut around her with a hydraulic hiss, starting at her legs and flowing upwards to her chest and then head, enclosing her completely from the outside. Despite being encased in a ton of metal and machine, she moved easily and quickly, trotting over to a position in rear of the limo. He’d seen armor before, of course, but never from this close up.
Thorn unslung his rifle and hopped into the seat next to Sedge. The front of the limo was sectioned off from the rear, and had multiple fail-safes built into the dash: manual driving modes, buttons for activating the kinetic or energy shields, and a ‘turtle’ mode where the armor plates would shift and collapse around the interior space, providing additional protection for the passenger compartment.
All of those elements could and would be deployed using System integration, but the manual backups were there in case of a jamming field disrupting their connections.
Thorn watched Sergeant Lee escort the client to the passenger compartment. After they were situated, Sedge pulled the limo out of the Crows base and set out towards Aba. Thorn decided it was a good time to start running one of the custom agents he’d set up last night. It used Meditate to detect signatures in the quintessence field, and he’d named it “Map.”
Agent Map, just like Agent Boom, had an interesting way with words. Thorn assumed it was a quirk of his System and the nature of custom agents, and didn’t think more of it.
Map wasn’t as useful as Thorn had hoped. When he had the initial idea, he’d hoped that a custom agent could use Meditate without him losing his normal awareness of the surroundings. That wasn’t possible, unfortunately, but the agent still did do a few useful things for him.
When Thorn emerged from the Meditate trance, a corner of his HUD showed his local surroundings with an overlay of his sensations of the quintessence field. It wasn’t very accurate in terms of placing quintessence signatures on the map, which was frustrating because Thorn couldn’t figure out why. He also had a System message in his HUD that summarized any conversations, actions, or things that happened while he’d been in Meditate. His custom agent couldn’t use Meditate on its own, but at least his System could listen in on his surroundings while he wasn’t paying attention.
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The road from the Crows’ Guild nest down to Aba was empty at this time of day. There were no other vehicles either going up or down the mountain. Thus Thorn was surprised to count not five, but six quintessence signatures on Map’s output. He counted again. There was his own team: Sergeant Lee, Sedge, Kels, and himself. That was four. Add the client, and that was five. Who was the sixth?
“Sedge, do you have a drone out?” Thorn asked. “I’m seeing two quint signatures behind us. One is closer to the ground, which is Kels, and another is up in the air.”
“No,” Sedge said. “No drones. You sure about seeing something?”
“Yeah, I double-checked. I’m letting the Sergeant know now.”
Thorn sent a snippet of Map’s output, helpfully labelling the vehicle, and each member of their team. Behind and above the armored limo was a purplish blob with a series of question marks above it.
It was very strange. How could they be tailed by some unknown entity right after they left the Crows’ Guild? There should be sensors and protection in place within the Guild itself. Had their tail been waiting for them outside the gates?
Thorn was tense as he waited for a response. A minute went by until he received an answer.
“Ah, that makes sense,” Sedge said, looking over at Thorn. “Sergeant sent a comm out to the rest of the team as well. Nothing to worry about, Thorn. You can lean back in your seat and relax.”
Thorn hadn’t realized that he was leaning forward so far. His knee was bouncing up and down rapidly.
Thorn forced himself to relax. He was too anxious and keyed up; this wasn’t a mission diving into some beast wave or a dead zone. They were going on a drive through Aba, the city that he’d lived in for years, would be bored out of their minds all day, and then return home and make some quints.
A thought nagged at him though. What had Sergeant Lee called their client? French? The name was familiar for some reason.
The red sun rose on the outskirts of Aba. The north side looked even worse than he recalled; the number of tents and shelters huddled against the river had increased dramatically in the past few weeks. A fair number of listless residents shambled down the sidewalks and along the roads south. Sedge got off the local road and took a tollway into the heart of the city.
Traffic built up behind them as the morning rush hour began. Other vehicles avoided their procession, moving out of their way in the same way schools of fish flee in the presence of a shark. The armored form of Kels following behind the thick, armored limo made for an intimidating presence, even if their max speed was only fifty kilometers per hour.
Thorn alternated between deploying Agent Map and watching the tall, gray buildings flash by outside his window. Not the fastest he’d ever moved through the city, but definitely the flashiest.
When they stopped at the tallest building downtown, a luxury office building for some of the high-end merchants and brokers in the city, Thorn exited the vehicle and took up a position on the north side of the block. Sedge engaged his flight Skill and floated in the air close to the vehicle but a bit to the south. Kels posted up at the entrance to the office building, forming a loose triangle around the entrance to the office building, where Sergeant Lee followed the client, Mr. French, inside.
Workers scurried around Thorn, avoiding eye contact and staying well outside of his personal space. At first the reaction of fear and caution was unsettling to Thorn; he’d never been avoided like this before in his life. But if he considered the situation from the unarmed workers around him who may not have a System with any combat utility, it was a reasonable reaction. It also helped him do his job; if he’d been crowded and pushed and shoved in the same way as the old level one, no-Guild Thorn Farmer, then he would not have been able to look out for threats.
He only used Agent Map sparingly, since he would have difficulty reacting to a threat if his custom agent didn’t take him out of Meditate immediately. In such a crowded area, with so many moving people, it was difficult to use Scan to try and track stealthed entities anyways, but it did have a different type of utility.
For one, he knew that the invisible bodyguard had gone inside the building with the client, or was otherwise outside of his range, because there was no entity with that strong of a quintessence signature. He’d perceived the bodyguard as “brighter” than even Sergeant Lee, who was level twelve. So instead of trying to map the individual quintessence signatures to the people he could see, he just used it to track the people with a relatively higher power level.
Using Scan in this way also led him to an interesting observation. Everyone was weak. At least, compared to what he had expected. If he had to guess, the average power level of the normal people within his range was only seven or eight, the same as himself. There were a few exceptions, but the exceptions proved the rule. Thorn had expected the average level of people with steady jobs, working for legitimate guilds or merchants to be much higher. From what he knew of pestering his parents and neighbors, the typical level of middle-aged adults in his village had been closer to twelve or thirteen.
Why were the levels of people here so low? It was something to think about, but that would need to be later, as there was movement at the door of the office building.
Sedge moved in closer, while Thorn shooed scurrying pedestrians out of the direct path from the door to the vehicle. Thorn kept his eyes on the crowd in front of him, but he could see the client and a few others exiting the building out of the corner of his eye, now flanked by his teammates in their armor.
When the group passed behind him, he heard a gravelly voice call out behind him.
“Crow.”
French was gesturing at him, waving him closer with two fingers.
Thorn turned all the way around, careful to keep his rifle pointing down and away from the client, and walked closer. He was immediately distracted by the people standing behind the large man.
“Yes, sir?” he managed to spit out, tearing his gaze away from none other than that annoying cretin, Grif Scrivler, standing in the back. What the hell was she doing here?
“Are you the one who caught sight of Flor here?” French gestured behind him at the figure clad head-to-toe in glimmering, polychromatic metal pieces. Thorn had never seen a suit like that before, but he assumed it enabled the bodyguard’s stealth.
“Yes, sir,” he replied.
“Thermal? Sonar? Something more exotic?” French asked.
Thorn raced for some kind of reply that might be acceptable. He glanced over at the bodyguard and mumbled out an answer. “Um, uh, trade secret, sir.”
French laughed, his gravelly voice coughing out a harsh staccato. “Fair enough. Here, take this.”
He tossed a small core to Thorn.
“You helped me win a bet, so it’s only fair that I share. It’s about the only thing that’s gone right today.” He turned and entered the vehicle. Flor, the bodyguard, immediately disappeared from view, likely taking to the air as well. Neat trick.
Another man, who had been mostly hidden behind French’s prodigious bulk, also stepped past and into the limo.
Grif entered the vehicle last, behind Sergeant Lee. He met her eyes as she walked past. When he’d first seen her, there had been a tiny look of surprise that was immediately replaced with an uncharacteristically grim expression. That frown was still there, and this time she also gave him a slight shake of her head. Not one for catching up over old times, then.
Thorn shook off his surprise, pocketed the tip from French, and got into the front of the cab next to Sedge.
Aba wasn’t a small city, but what were the chances that he’d run into Grif on an escort mission for the Crows? They had to be low. So what the hell was going on? Thorn had made the connection, but just to be sure, he confirmed it with his System.
French had been the name with the largest numbers next to it, if Thorn recalled correctly. Seeing them next to each other, in person, removed any doubt that the names were incidental.
What had Jemison called the Quartermaster? Pubert?
Thorn took a deep breath and organized his thoughts. He knew that a Crow named Marta had kept a journal of names and numbers. She had died in the cavern beneath the glitter farm, most likely to an awakened fincroc, and most likely after she had murdered the rest of the operators of the glitter farm.
Had she betrayed her fellow conspirators for more quints? Or was she a double-agent who had infiltrated the operation in order to take it out? Could have been either; he had not gotten a straight answer from Smithson.
In either case, the identities of the people she’d killed in the cavern could have been some of the names written in her journal, but Thorn doubted that. He could connect three of those names: French, an elite merchant with an official protection contact with the Crows. Scrivler, a local tough and fixer in Aba. And finally, Hubert: the Quartermaster at the Guild.
French was obviously a buyer or distributor from out of town. Scrivler, a go-between to the sellers in Aba. If Thorn had to guess, Hubert’s part of the conspiracy was laundering quints. Or, perhaps more likely, in his role as a Quartermaster, he’d been able to purchase all of the heavy equipment and tech that had been needed to set up the glitter farm. Another possibility was that he’d discovered the conspiracy, and been paid to keep his silence.
Thorn couldn’t prove anything, but this might be actionable intelligence.
He had another, more immediate and disturbing thought. What was Sergeant Lee’s role in this? Did she have one? Why was she in charge of this mission with French? The questions continued pouring into his mind.
Was the connection purely coincidental, or did she have a deeper connection to French? Had she scouted him for this mission because she knew that he’d been in the dead zone, the same as Lief, and wanted to get closer to him?
Had she approached Gammon, or had Gammon approached her? How deep did the conspiracy go?
Damn.