Notes: Originally written for the Complete au Bigbang challenge on LJ but that kind of went sideways. Still the fic got written so please enjoy.
Praise goes out to Deanangst and LMX3point3 for their efforts as betas
Steal the Sky
The Roadhouse Bar
Omaha's fourth moon
Nathan Ford: Former Investigator for the IYS branch of Blue Sun
"So we're in agreement?" Nate asked, signaling the bar tender for another shot. God, he hoped they were in agreement. If this fell through, the others might be dead by the time he found another half-decent mechanic.
These foster sons of an old Browncoat had been luck of a kind Nate hadn't seen in far too long.
The… mark? Client? Potential handler...? nodded, downing his own shot. "You got a deal, Ford. The boys'll be on your ship at sun-up. I'll contact ya soon as I hear somethin'." He wheeled himself back from the bar and Nate knew better than to mention that electronic wheelchairs had been invented quite a while ago. Even if one wouldn't have stood out in a backwards place like this it just wasn't Singer's style. "Now if there's nothing else I've got a pair of idjits I need to make sure are getting ready to ship out."
From the time Nate had spent with the boys… well that sounded about right.
The other man didn't give him a chance to respond before wheeling himself back out into the dusty streets.
Typical.
With a sigh, Nate paid and left the bar, raising a hand to the com unit in his ear. "Hardison?"
"Yeah boss?"
"We have a pilot and a mechanic. They'll be on board by morning. Things ready on your end?"
"All's shiny Captain. Only thing left to keep her grounded is she's a little empty."
Nate could hear the excitement in his voice, all but asking the question he'd been holding onto for months. "All right." He said with a nod, not that Hardison could see it but it was more for himself than anything. "Call them."
Hearts are worn in these dark ages
You're not alone in this story's pages
Night has fallen amongst the living and the dying
And you try to hold it in
You try to hold it in
"Some Bar"
Osiris
Nathan Ford: Unemployed Drunk
Later Nate would remember when the 'verse changed with a sense of irony.
It wasn't in a burst of light or flash of inspiration or at the hands of some beautiful woman.
It was when some random man he wouldn't care until later was called Victor Dubenich walked up to him in a bar on Osiris and told him that he knew who Nate was.
Or maybe it was after he threatened to punch the guy in the neck nine or ten times.
He was there to lose himself in drink. To forget about Blue Sun, like you even could in this verse, and the death of his son. He wasn't there to have some fat little man tell him what a tragedy it was that they had let his son die.
Then Dubenich had offered him a job and really, that was when the verse began to change, even if it would be awhile before he understood.
"Somebody stole my designs."
Nate raised his eyes from his now empty glass, sparing Dubenich just one 'oh really' look before motioning to the bartender. "Oh, I see, and you want me to find them."
"No," Dubenich said, not giving up. "I know where they are. I want you to steal them back."
That was interesting.
"If you know where they are, stealing them seems like a stupid risk. You're the head of a major branch of Blue Sun," Another reason for Nate to steer clear. "You could make a claim through internal channels."
"I have a board meeting at the end of this month. I've already spent five years, a hundred million credits. I go to that meeting with nothing to show for it, I am dead." He reached for the files he'd brought with him. "I mean, look at the people I've already hired."
Nate looked into the top file, surprised as he checked the other two, confirming it. "These are agents from the Department of Internal Defense." He glanced up at Dubenich, not needing to say that to be able to get three D.I.D. agents on such short notice… Didn't normally happen.
"Someone in the department owes me a favor. A big favor." Dubenich tapped the files nervously. "Do you recognize any of their names?"
Nate looked more closely at the files. Eliot Spencer he'd worked in parallel with on a couple of occasions, probably the most competent specialist he'd ever met and definitely the most dangerous. Alec Hardison had just started making his mark when Nate was on his way out but he'd heard enough to know the guy was good. "IYS has had dealings with them at some point or another." Even if their names and information never got officially logged other than as anonymous agents. He opened the last file. "Parker. You have Parker."
"Is there someone better?"
Nate shook his head. There really wasn't. Not anywhere in the verse he'd seen. "No. But Parker is insane."
"Which is why I need you."
"No." Nate put the files back on the table. "I'm not a thief."
"Thieves I got." Dubenich said, tapping the files. Almost no-one knew the specifics about agents, or even that they existed at all, but those who were in the know understood they had mostly been thieves and criminals until they were caught by the alliance and rehabilitated enough to do work for the greater good. It was half the reason that no agent did work without a handler to keep an eye on them and keep them in control should they go off script. "This is under the table, I don't have access to a handler. I need an honest man who knows agents to watch them."
"This isn't going to work. These agents, they all have the same rep. They run jobs alone, no exceptions, and they each need a handler just to keep them on script. There's no way they're going to do this job."
"No, no, they will. For three hundred thousand credits each they will. And for you, for running it, it's double that. And that's completely off the books. Look at me, I'm desperate here."
Nate just sighed.
"And there is a bonus," Dubenich added. Nate looked up. "Peirson insured this technology with the IYS branch, it's a five hundred million credit intellectual rights policy. Just how badly do you want to screw over the company that let your son die."
oOo
In retrospect his world probably hadn't changed until he found himself in a hotel suite on Osiris watching as the three agents entered the room for the planning portion of their little heist.
Eliot Spencer arrived first looking almost exactly like Nate remembered. His hair was longer than the short cut most male agents he'd seen sported, but he knew from Spencer's file that the hitter could and did go undercover when the need called for it which mostly explained the break from normal standards.
Next came Alec Hardison with a bag slung over his shoulders, the tech equipment that came with the ex-hacker. He looked younger than Nate would have thought. Probably only in his early twenties. Mentally Nate counted back. Hardison had just begun working as an agent three years ago. Supposedly they didn't send out agents with less than five years of rehabilitation after their criminal lives came to an end and the agency only took in criminals that had made a big enough name for themselves to be worth the effort.
No matter which way Nate looked at it, Hardison had to have started his criminal history before he was ten for the numbers to even begin to add up. Interesting.
Maybe the rules were different with younger criminals.
Parker arrived last though, Nate noted, he never actually saw how she came in. One moment Spencer and Hardison were standing off to the side not talking to each other, Nate had looked down to his computer and the next time he looked up Parker was with them.
He watched subtly as the three looked between each other, curious as they introduced themselves.
"Eliot Spencer, Classification Delta, Low Tech Offense with medical and covert specifications." Spencer said. "You can call me Eliot."
There was a strange pause before Parker continued. "Parker." Another strange pause and both Eliot and Hardison changed the way they were looking at her, like that name alone told them something.
Then again *he* knew Parker was insane without all the details a fellow agent might be aware of.
"Classification Delta, All-Tech Infiltration with explosive specification," she continued in the uncomfortable silence.
Alec Hardison picked up the last, looking down and away from the other two, almost seeming embarrassed about something. "Alec Hardison. Classification Beta. High tech offense." A slightly awkward pause. "…Call me Hardison."
They all went quiet and Nate turned his attention back to the information on the screen he'd soon be showing them, quietly intrigued.
He'd never seen Agents interact with one another before. He'd been vaguely aware from a couple conversations with various people that there was a rather strict hierarchy within the agency but he had a feeling he'd just seen proof of that hierarchy between agents firsthand.
A moment later Eliot led the other three forward, probably to ask him if they were going to do this or sit around all night.
What he didn't expect was for Eliot to keep his eyes down and to the side, almost submissively as much as the word felt wrong in his mind, cocking his head to one side and pushing the hair away from his neck.
"…Eliot?" Nate asked, confusion in his voice.
"You're acting as our handler. Dubenich gave you an Olympiad Transmitter right?" Eliot stated, a note of frustration on his voice. When Nate didn't seem to understand he dropped his hand and looked up.
Looking back, the moment his verse started to change was probably when Eliot met his eyes and calmly said. "We were only given enough leash to get here to you. The transmitter Dubenich gave you will key into our devices, allowing you to give us the range we need to do our jobs and keep tabs on us."
Slowly Nate nodded, turning back to his bag to pull out the device he'd been given when he'd agreed to take the job. It was cylindrical, a little more than four inches long and fitting comfortably in his hand with several small buttons on the top, a large orange one and what looked like a switch on the side, with a panel on the bottom.
"Press the red button on the top, then the first blue one." Hardison stated, coming forward to stand next to Eliot where he could see and give instructions better, even as Eliot pulled his hair out of the way again. Nate did so, surprised and getting a bad feeling as the panel on the bottom opened and two small steel points emerged. "Then hold it to his neck and press the red button again."
That caused him to pause a moment longer. He'd figured the D.I.D. had some way of keeping tabs on their agents, but this was giving him a very bad feeling.
Part of him was how much this was reminding him of a method used on some of the borderworlds for tracking cattle.
The other part was wondering if they were lying and he was being told how to switch off whatever tracking devices they might have.
But none of the three were acting like this was anything unusual and Parker was too crazy to lie this well.
He shook it off, those thoughts passing in only a heartbeat and really these were just ex-cons. He'd spent years chasing criminals like them. The D.I.D. probably needed all the resources they could to keep them doing honest work.
Without further hesitation he touched the spikes to Eliot's neck and pressed the button, following Hardison's instructions to key the transmitter to Parker's using the second blue button.
Later he would understand the forced blank look on Hardison's face when Nate keyed into his receiver.
"Anything else I need to know?" Nate asked, glancing between Hardison and Eliot. He was guessing Eliot was the highest ranking of the three of them, but Hardison was the one who knew the tech best.
"I'll show you how to set our ranges after the briefing," Hardison said before suddenly backtracking. "Unless you want to know now. That's cool too." His eyes flicking to the device in Nate's hand.
"No. After the briefing is fine," Nate said, before glancing between the three of them. "Speaking of which, let's get on with the job."
They all nodded and shuffled about, finding places to sit or stand while he outlined the break-in.
He still couldn't quite shake the feeling he was missing something.
oOo
The job had been running smoothly, almost too smoothly all things considered. Nate was familiar with the reps of agents in general and these agents in particular. In how many cases had he come to the end of his investigation, located his target, worked his way into position and called in an agent?
They always came, a person dressed in black wearing gloves, a name you couldn't find anywhere in any file even with his clearance level, and a handler dressed in a suit with eyes always on their charge and a quick sharp word at the ready to keep their rehabilitated partner on the straight and narrow.
Sure, something about it bothered him, especially the way younger agents would flinch and older agents wouldn't, but he'd never second guessed the results.
But really, for all their rep for being trouble of the highest degree, these agents seemed focused on the task at hand, needing him only to set the plan and give them a nudge in the right direction.
He listened over the com as they bantered and chatted with one another, swapping insults and shorthanded war stories that made use of strange jargon and slang and what Nate thought might be Greek or Latin but didn't understand enough of to really follow the train of conversation.
He stayed tuned anyway, curiosity mixing with an instinct to collect information on people of interest.
"Here, latest from Hephaestus," Hardison said over their coms. "Added a couple modifications of my own, just been waiting for a test run." A few seconds later he heard the sound of Eliot switching out for what Nate assumed was the new com. being handed over to him. "Won't get cut off by a jammer and it runs on a shadow frequency. Impossible for someone to stumble on and even harder to track. You could hold a scanner right next to it and not see a blip."
"You're not as useless as you look," Eliot muttered.
"Dude, I don't even know why they have the LTO class anymore. Aint anyone at Olympus heard of guns?"
Olympus, the home of the mythological Greek gods on Earth that Was. Add to that a mention of Hephaestus, the god of the forge, and agents that spoke Greek like Chinese and things were getting interesting.
But the job was still going and from the sound of it, the team was ready.
He gave the count, noting there was at least a little sign of the reason for handlers as Parker jumped early and the other two seemed about ready to fly off-script, like kids noticing a peer getting away with breaking the rules.
At least they were mostly following script.
Once they were inside the building he went from watching them through his scope to following the movements of their transmitters through the projection of the building's blueprints, watching and listening as they made their way through the building.
All in all, things were going smoothly.
Even guards doing a walkthrough an hour early upset the agents more than him. He could see the pieces moving in his head and called the play, listening to Hardison mumble, annoyed as Eliot cleared the zone and Parker attempting to… he wasn't exactly sure what the intention behind her question of "Do you think they'll shoot you or try to arrest you first?" was.
"Not gonna happen," Hardison snapped back before adding in a quieter mumble, more to himself. "No one ever catches a Hardison… Almost got caught on New Iceland but… forget it."
Nate refused to acknowledge the possibility that the squeal of excitement he heard from Parker was because she'd heard the sound of pressurized stun guns charging and more traditional weapons being readied.
There was a moment of silence followed by the sounds of a fight and last but not least a clip being discharged from a weapon and hitting the floor.
He could almost see Eliot's smirk as he remarked. "That's what LTOs are for."
For almost three minutes, the job was running smoothly again as Hardison got into the server room and downloaded the data required and then, just as he was ready to get them out and put this job behind him, Parker's voice broke back over the coms.
"They've reset the alarms on all the floors above us," Parker stated, her voice sounding more frustrated then panicked. "We can't go up."
Nate turned, looking at the 3D projection of the building's schematics, the small blinking dots of the three agent's locations, and the swiftly changing puzzle.
"Alright, we have to go down. Hit the front fast and hard. Get out before they know we're there, trust the cleaners to get rid of any leftover evidence," Eliot said.
"Hit the front?" Hardison's voice sounded almost indignant. "What part of high-tech don't you understand? I don't fight. If you get me to a security station, I might be able to hack it."
"Oh, and accidentally set off the alarm so we all get caught?" Parker snapped. "I'm not going down. I have an exit."
"And I have a plan," Nate cut in. "Now I know you three don't play well with others but I need you to hold it together for just ten more minutes." He turned, already starting to shut it down. "We're going with the burn scam."
There was a single, weighted, pause before Eliot's voice sounded the affirmative over the coms.
He finished breaking down his station, listening over the coms as the three agents moved through the burn scam, listening as Eliot asked quietly if both Parker and Hardison knew the play.
Hadn't they been criminals before? Then again he supposed a Hacker and a Thief might not have cause to know all the scams.
"Alright. Time for plan B," Hardison commented with far too much enthusiasm.
Criminals.
"Technically it's plan G," Nate countered.
"Do you have like a plan M or something?"
"Hardison gets arrested again in plan M."
"Wait you've actually been arrested?" Parker asked, sounding confused, though she didn't seemed destined to have it explained to her since Hardison and Eliot both immediately gave her an exasperated 'PARKER' that probably had something to do with her needing to hold still while they put on the makeup and Nate had decided to not get involved with explaining agents to agents.
Besides he'd reached the shuttle he'd be picking them up in and he needed to focus on flying the gorram thing.
Tense moments passed as he listened to the three con their way out the lobby even as he pulled up in front.
Without a backwards glance they climbed into the shuttle and he pulled away.
"Hardison," he called into the back.
"Already getting the files ready to send, just find someplace to stop for a minute so I can get a steady interplanetary connection."
Nate nodded, touching down in an empty air field and climbing out, watching the others slide out and come to stand, flanking Eliot closely even now that the job was done.
Silence lasted a few moments as Hardison typed, muttering to himself in Chinese about crappy bandwidths and Earth-That-Was age technology.
"Sent the files and a backup," he stated finally. "Job done, boss."
Nate slid the transmitter out from his pocket. "Alright, I'm extending your range and putting the transmitters in travel mode." Assuming he could remember what Hardison had shown him. "I trust you'll be able to find your way back to your headquarters on your own. The money will be in your accounts in the morning."
"Anyone else notice how hard we rocked?" Hardison asked.
"One show only, no encores, so don't get used to it," Eliot stated. "High Tech Offensive like you ain't gonna find yourself in the field much."
"I already forgot your names," Parker added.
There was another pause and then, almost as one, they turned their backs and walked their separate ways.
The job was over.
oOo
The job had been over.
The job was supposed to have been over.
They'd finished and gone their separate ways and that was that.
Only it wasn't, because someone screwed something up.
And he had a hangover that was not at all helped by his com device waking him this morning so Dubenich could bitch at him about the designs never getting to him.
And then, oh then, he had to get up and go fix this mess.
No it was not a good morning.
He made his way through the old and semi-abandoned warehouse, hearing the argument already echoing through the warehouse, not even caring about what he was hearing.
"I sent the files. I sent a back up. I checked it the morning to make sure it went through. You musta done something. You've been a delta class what, fifteen years? You decide to take as many of us with ya as you can? What the fuck is wrong with you, man?"
"I stole 'em?" There was something strangely close to fear in Eliot's voice as it bounced around the warehouse, already there and arguing with someone. But he wasn't caring about inter agency squabbles. "L. T. O.," Eliot emphasized. "Low tech, man. I'm lucky they taught me how ta read. I don't even know how ta operate that computer of yours. You messed up. If they hurt anyone in my clan, I'm takin' it out of your ass."
What?
Nate came around the corner, not understanding what he was hearing, but understanding Hardison was about ten seconds away from getting the hand pointing a gun at Eliot's face broken.
Well until Eliot turned to look at him, hearing him arrive. "Did you do it? IYS hires us for inter-branch espionage all the time."
Nate shook his head. "You look pretty calm for someone with a gun pointed at him."
"Safety's on," Eliot answered not even taking his eyes off Nate.
"Hello. HTO, that's High Tech Offensive, not High Tech Stupid. I know how to handle a gun. Safety is off, thank you so very much," Hardison said, shifting his stance. Nate gave him slightly better odds for getting a hit in before Eliot took him down.
He neutralized the situation first, twisting the gun from Hardison's grip, turning instinctively toward the sound of another gun readying to fire as Parker made her way onto the scene.
"My father is not going to be happy," she said. "And that makes me cry for him in my special angry room."
"Parker…" he reached out, ignoring the ramblings of an agent possibly driven over the edge, easing her gun out of her hands and discharging the clip. "Alright. You all are here because the job wasn't finished and… you're going to be in trouble with the agency you work for?"
Money he'd suspected, but considering the influence thrown around to get them there an unsatisfied customer was probably a bigger issue for them than not being paid.
Eliot was the one to nod. "Me 'n' Parker are Deltas, we go back to home base with Dubenich this mad… they might decide we've outlived our usefulness. An' Hardison's barely still a Beta class. They might put us all down."
Nate felt something inside his gut twist a little. This wasn't right. They were thieves but…
"So you're here to figure out what went wrong," he said, suddenly a thought creeping in, up the back of his mind. "And I'm… In fact, the only way to get us in the same place at the same time is…"
Suddenly one of the busted up screens on a nearby wall flickered into life, Dubenich's face on the screen. "All here. Good. Good."
"Get out…" Nate muttered, taking a step back.
"Well, no chit chat then. Fine. Eliot Spencer." Dubenich's gaze looked past Nate to where he knew Eliot was standing behind him. "Marcarbe San Mallis."
The screen went black and two pairs of hands grabbed his arms, Hardison shouting as the two of them dragged him along. "He's an Ares! Run!"
Maybe the next moment, when he, Parker, and Hardison all but collided into the warehouse door, desperately trying to open it without success, when he glanced back to see Eliot's figure crouched on the floor slowly rise and stalk toward them a look of disassociation on his face but deadly intent in every step.
Yeah. That was probably the moment his verse changed.
