Victoria spat out some of the blood that had been building up in her mouth – that shotgun blast had probably done more damage than expected. It landed on the floor, not really making anyone more fond of her than they were before. "Oh? So we're going to braid each other's hair and gossip about boys?"
Unexpectedly, the Kate woman actually began to laugh. "Well, first of all, you don't really have enough hair to braid. And I'm dating Blue over there, so my gossip potential is pretty low at the moment. But no, that's not quite what I mean. See... I'm the only one in the room who doesn't want to see you get killed, or even hurt any further." That should have been a threat, but she still had that stupid look of genuine care on her face that was making it hard for Victoria to pin this woman down. Religious types up in Obsidian Springs were usually about as high profile as politicians or celebrities. So the question was, were things different out here, or was this woman just an exception?
"Because you're just that kind? Because your heart is just that big?"
The one affectionately called Blue chuckled softly. "Yes. Figuratively and literally." A glare from Kate shut her up and she started to backtrack. "What I mean is... yeah, that's half the reason I called her in. You catch more flies with honey and all that shit."
"Honey won't do you a lot of good when they realize I'm gone and send a strike team to pick me up."
Kate clicked her tongue softly and shook her head. "Victoria, I wanna tell you a story... My dad was Zephyr security too. Retired now. When I was super young, our family got entered into some kind of experimental biotech medical procedure. Even now, I don't completely understand the complexities of it all. As it turned out, it worked just fine on adults, but it had a devastating effect on children. My sisters, a baby and a toddler, died when their white blood cell count plummeted. I survived, but it left me with a chronic condition."
Not persuaded by a sad story, Victoria just glared. "Is this going somewhere or...?"
She seemed totally unbothered by the interruption. "I'd already lost my favorite people in the world, and with dad's job involving hunting down rogue androids and augged-up people in debt... I got pretty paranoid that he was going to die too. One day I finally broke and went running to my mom in tears, asking her point-blank if dad was gonna die. And she told me that her and dad had already done plenty of talking about the subject. No matter the mission, she told me, they always go out in teams of at least three soldiers. Dad was support, so he was least likely to get hurt. Heavies took the brunt of the danger, and commanders had to be flexible." She nodded her head, as though she had reached her point, but for Victoria this was like having to attend preschool all over again. She knew this, they drilled it into your head from day one of orientation.
"Daddy was support class, your sisters died, you have some kind of heart defect and it's all Zephyr's fault. Can you please just finish this story? Or is this my torture? Is that the real reason you're here?"
For just a moment, she could see the other woman's facade break slightly. Still, she seemed more tired than angry. "Three. There should be at least three of you. From what I hear, Max could crush your head on accident, so probably more than three. With big guns. But you show up by yourself with a pair of knives. Where's your team, Victoria? Are they hiding in the wings waiting for a signal?" Those questions sounded... hypothetical, challenging her.
However, Victoria wasn't in the mood for a mind game. Mostly she was just getting angry. She'd been dropped by a couple of nobodies and now they were wasting her time with this pointless bullcrap! "There is no team, you insufferable plebians! I had direct orders to capture Maxine Caulfield by myself! You went through my things already, just get out my comm... It's all there."
"Password?" Chloe asked casually as she fished it out of her jacket.
The code for the device definitely shouldn't be given out to random people. Security comms were essentially the catch-all device for officers. As the name implied, it provided communication, as well as data sending and receiving, some minor hacking technology, pretty much anything you might need in the field. But if she was going to earn their trust enough to get free, she would have to relent. "08142095..."
The blue-haired demon snickered as she punched in the code. "Oh my god is that... You used your fucking birthday? Holy crap, that's so fucking perfect."
"Chloe, be nice. Not everyone is as paranoid as you."
"It's only paranoia if nobody is out to get you." She motioned to Victoria. "I'm just saying." God damn their old married couple act was wearing thinner by the second. Thankfully Victoria didn't have to stomach it much longer. "Well shit. It's all here. Stealth op. Go alone."
Kate slumped in her seat, pouting now. "Victoria, I... don't know how to tell you this, but you might be screwed. These ops are tests. This... This isn't a line or an excuse. We could let you go right now and send you on your way. If you go back to them, you're dead. Not... suspended, not fired. Dead."
This did nothing to make her feel any better. Obviously. "Your dad teach you that one too? Come on, you could at least feed me a better lie than 'ohhh if you go back to HQ they're gonna kill you for reasons'!"
Just like that she was sitting back up, shaking her head desperately. "No, this is... not something we have the luxury of being cavalier about! You need to understand, this is your situation now. I can't say why, but I promise you, I know exactly what I'm talking about."
"So what..." the big one muttered from where she was propped up on the bar. "I know you're a lady of the cloth and all, but what does it matter to us if she dies?"
The Chloe woman shrugged half-heartedly. Clearly whipped. "She's an exemplar to the Children of the Spark. You're not gonna talk her out of this one, Alyssa."
She was with the sparks? Those android-lovers? What the hell were all these people even doing in the same place together? And none of this explained how a pastor knew so much about the inner workings of Zephyr security. "Enlighten me. If I can't return to HQ, then what do you propose are my options?"
Kate took time to actually contemplate the question, which was... still a bit strange. Her sincerity made things fluid and untenable. "You can make yourself scarce, move to a different city where Zephyr has no power. Or..." She trailed off for a moment, growing nervous. "...It seems like Max has a lot of questions that need answers. And I'm sure you have some questions too. After all, why in the hell would they send you out after such a powerful target all by yourself? You could work with us, help us out."
Everyone in the room tensed up just a little bit. Was she seriously proposing that they work together? She certainly appeared serious, but nobody else was eager to support her suggestion either. Victoria cleared her throat and tried to speak up before anyone could shoot it down. "Look, the loyal, dedicated side of my brain says that you're talking crazy. But... it's also not the most impossible thing that they would go so far as to kill me for failure. Some of the brass are... intense." She sighed sadly and slumped against the ropes holding her to the chair. "I... Jesus Christ, I don't know! I gave them years of my life, literally gave them my blood. I should just go back, it's what a good soldier would do. But I really like being alive, and I don't relish the idea of finding out the hard way whether they'd actually go that far."
"Well, you'll have some time to decide. We have to get out of here, and we can't risk letting you back into the world." Suddenly standing, Kate tapped at the small communication device nestled in her ear. "Hey, it's me. I need Brooke and Mina to meet us at safehouse twelve. Yeah. Yeah, the situation uh... well, it's complicated. You're amazing. Love you too."
"Wait, who's Mina? What happened to Warren? He and Brooke were so cute together." Really Maxine? Was now the time to talk about this stuff? Why did it even matter?
Well... it must have mattered to these people, because Chloe looked almost delighted at the prospect of the meeting. "Look, you're not allowed to tell her I phrased it this way, but for the sake of simplicity, Mina is Warren. You were... gone a long time..."
Gone a long time. If Victoria was honest, there was definitely a mystery to be uncovered here. She had met people who were regretful of augmentations they'd gotten installed. She'd dealt with people who just couldn't pay for their expensive upgrades. But she had never heard of someone taken and experimented on for several years against their will. Zephyr was just a company, how in the hell could they even pull something like that off.
And what was the deal with this preacher woman? How did a pastor with the sparks know where a safehouse was located?
If Victoria was honest with herself, these mysteries did have a kind of siren song to them. Maybe playing along wouldn't be so awful after all.
Looking back, it was incredibly easy for Kate to see the path of her life. Even if her story tended to shock people, for her there was no other way things could have played out.
After the incident with Zephyr's biotech, Kate found that she had developed a very complicated relationship with technology. She was fine with anything using a standard interface, but she refused to ever get an augment. Even as her enlarged heart became more of a stressor in her life, she only ever relied on traditional medicine. No matter how many people tried to sell her on life-saving augmentations, she refused.
Despite that, androids held a constant fascination for her. While most of her peers went out of their way to avoid or ignore robots, Kate would engage them in conversation whenever possible. In time, she felt like she had come to understand them, to see something in them that others refused to acknowledge. Her mother had tried to raise her in the church of Crux, but it just didn't capture her attention. Not like the Children of the Spark had.
In many ways, theirs was less a religion and more a philosophy, not unlike the Bodhi. The human mind, at the most basic level, was a construct of electrical impulses. If the same could be said of android processors, then at what point can you truly differentiate between the sparks? Of course the actual writings and beliefs varied from that point, but it was the core that kept Kate dedicated to the church in the end.
When your most basic religious tenet held that synthetic beings could be as holy as humans, the leap to more heretical action wasn't terribly difficult. One night, Kate was approached by someone who asked her exactly how far she was willing to go with her beliefs. Would she welcome an android into her home? Would she protect them? Would she break the law for them?
She knew her answer immediately.
Which was how she came to work for a group known as Polaris. Their mission was to assist androids who felt that their services, indeed their very existences, were being exploited for the sake of humanity. Polaris would give them new identities, fake documents, help them with their appearance, find them living situations, even secure them safe passage out of the city. It was dangerous work that put them in direct conflict with Zephyr on countless occasions.
But it was also what put Chloe in her life. So it all balanced out.
There were reports coming in over the scanner of an android making something of a scene in a local establishment. Kate arrived on location to find a badass beauty with blue hair threatening some yuppie jerk with an ancient-looking shotgun. "You don't seem to understand. This is my bar. This is my shotgun. And this delightful android is my new friend. If you wanna fuck with my new friend, you gotta get through me. I don't care if they 'work for you'. They don't anymore, because I said so."
By the time the situation was defused, Kate had a new client to put under Polaris' protection, and the phone number of a very cute bar owner.
In a dark room at Zephyr HQ, things were more than a little tense.
"Sir? Both signals are still active. I recommend we call in the strike force. Clean this situation up. Cut our losses."
"After five years? And all that money? No. We can't risk it. Let them be for now. Our moment will present itself. Jumping the gun will only create more chaos."
"...yes sir."
