The lockdown was indeed lifted, but Roble and his merry men kept me
too busy to enjoy it for the first couple of days. When I wasn't making
more illegal forays into other people's computer systems, I was writing
reports and helping my machines project route suggestions, escort
strengths, necessary weapons minimums and other things that I didn't
understand nearly so well, but that Roble insisted he needed to have. I
shrugged and typed in commands. My computers shrugged and did what I told
them. Roble told me what to do and went away happy at the end of the day,
having all the graphs, charts, maps, and recommendations my babies could
spew forth.
In the brief moments of spare time I had, I opened up my key stroke file and recreated the map and the little blue dots, though I used green instead. Not the most clever deception I've ever come up with, but it served my purpose. When Death walked away for the day, muttering to himself about what he saw on the hard copies he was carrying, I brought the map back up and began to study it. I wasn't worried about Mason seeing it since he was out on patrol with a group of others.
The dots didn't seem to make a lot of sense. They were grouped along territory borders, but other than that, there was nothing about them that jumped out at me as a possible connection.
"You've got a good memory for the skirmishes, Crash."
I jolted slightly at Trapper's voice behind me. He was leaning over my shoulder slightly, his finger tracing a few of the dots. "Skirmishes?"
"I'm very impressed. You've even got the two that happened just after lockdown was called," he continued.
Going into overdrive, my mind spun with the implications. These dots were the locations of the various skirmishes? That made a whole lot more sense than any theories I'd come up with over the last day and a half.
"Yeah, but I'm having trouble remembering when they happened," I lied through my teeth to him. "Do you remember enough of them to at least give me a good start?"
He shrugged nonchalantly and dropped into a chair as if he had suddenly been de-boned. "Sure."
I pulled up the locations and he either told me when they happened or told me that he didn't know. As soon as I had gone through the whole list, Trapper rose and slouched away to find something a little more interesting to do and I hunched forward to give the computers a few last commands. I erased all the previous dots and told my babies to put them all back up again, but color coded for when they happened, moving slowly through the rainbow of colors over the last few months that the gang hostilities had been escalating.
The picture showed me something I had halfway expected. There was really no pattern to it. First here, then there, with no rhyme or reason. Then I looked closer. A few of them I could see where one skirmish had happened, then several had been retaliations back and forth for the original fight. But there were others that made no sense, even the one that had wounded Shael. They looked random. Then I looked again. Mason had to have been looking for something among all this, I needed to look too.
It made perfect sense that the only territory border relatively free of dots was our own. After all, when the skirmish went down Roble declared a lockdown. We weren't out there to be fighting with, so of course we hadn't had any others. As I recalled, we still hadn't decided which of the other gangs had hit us that time, either. It had sure made us mad though. //If Death weren't so worried about keeping every member of this strange family alive and kicking we'd have gone out and bloodied the nose of whoever did that.//
I sat up straighter suddenly. Maybe that was it? I looked again. Sure enough, whenever the fighting in an area would die down a bit another first strike would show up and start things off again. Someone was prodding at us all, trying to keep us fighting, or make the fighting hotter and nastier. Up in the northeast corner of the sector where the little gangs were battling to the death, several warehouses, factories, commercial transports, and perfectly innocent civilian traffic had become casualties.
//What if that's the point? But who would want to hurt people? That's just sick.// There had to be some kind of purpose behind all this, even if it was beyond me to guess at what it was. That was Mason's job. Mine was only to help as best I could.
"What'cha got there, Crash?"
Mason's voice coming from nowhere right behind me jolted me enough to rattle the keyboard. I couldn't keep a flush of guilt from running through my system, but I just prayed that in the burst of surprise it would be lost. After a bare second I knew the futility of that and decided just to come clean. Lying to Jedi isn't something that anyone does very well.
"Mason, I thought you were out on patrol?"
"I was. We got back in about fifteen minutes ago."
I glanced at my chrono. I'd been sitting there staring at the map for much longer than I had thought. A rueful smile tugged at my lips and I shrugged. "Slicers are famous for losing track of time when plying their trade," I explained.
"So I see." He straddled a chair, looking much more natural this time. "This looks familiar."
"Should, it's your work, with a bit of modification."
"Photographic memory? I didn't know you saw it."
"I did. I'm paranoid about my babies." I patted the monitor lovingly before continuing. "I have a program that keeps track of all the keystrokes made. I used that to put all the dots back up. Trapper helped me with the rest."
"I take it the colors have to do with ..." he trailed off and stared hard at the seemingly random nature of the color assignments. "I give up, what's the color about?"
"Time. The color indicates when the skirmish happened. Take a look and tell me what you see," I requested. "I've got a theory, but I want a second opinion."
His blue-grey eyes scanned the whole map and for just a moment, when all his concentration was focused on seeing everything there was to see, he stopped looking like just another gang-banger. He looked like a formidable foe and an able protector, everything a Jedi Knight should be.
"Someone is starting these fights?"
"That's what I thought," I confirmed. "Whenever things quiet down too much there's another fight in disputed territory."
"Could one of the other gangs be behind all this?"
I beamed with pride at him. Right off the bat he assumed, or maybe he knew, that the Horsemen weren't behind it. He was becoming quite the loyal member.
"Could be, but I really don't see what they could hope to gain from it. No one gang could run the whole sector. And the competition keeps the cops busy. If they only had one gang to focus on it'd be like a swoop trying to take on an armed shuttle. Sure the swoop has more places to hide, but the shuttle's got sensors and weapons and shields. No contest."
Mason kept me busy the rest of the night. Since he knew about the skirmishes that had happened while we were in lockdown, I assumed he had some means of communication with his superiors that I didn't know about and that no one else had caught him at. But they didn't seem to be able to get him the information that I could. He had me create maps of the sector's property values, of crime hot spots, of anything and everything we both could think of, but none of it seemed to mesh up with what we already had.
Finally he slouched back into his chair, long legs jutting out, fingers laced behind his head, looking every inch the swooprider he was rapidly becoming. "There must be something here that we're missing."
I sighed in exasperation. My eyes were dry and tired from staring at screens all night. My shoulders and back ached from leaning over my keyboard, and I wanted nothing more than to collapse on my bed and sleep through the entire next day. "Look, this is useless. We're not getting anywhere at all. It's like that stupid file you had me pull down, just garbage."
"What file?" he muttered.
"That police report file. I glanced through it and it was totally unrelated to anything we're working on here."
Mason sat up straight and concentrated for a moment as he recalled the instance I was describing. "What was it? Pull it up."
"It was nothing!" I moaned, but typed in the necessary commands anyway. When it came up Mason leaned in to read it through and I leaned back, trying to ease my shoulders. The only one still up was Nash, who only slept in two or three hour blocks at a time. She was essentially always up. Me, I wanted to sleep before my eyelids dried open.
"Crash, where is this location mentioned here?" Mason's mellow voice pulled me out of a half doze and I had to blink a minute before I found the line he was pointing to.
"Oh, uh, that's over in the northern half of the Hounds' territory," I told him blearily. "Forget it, it's nothing but a disturbance report."
"Yes, but I feel that there's something more here. Can you bring up a street map of the area?"
"Sure, why not?" The map soon spread in its electronic blandness across my main monitor. I pointed out the building the disturbance had been called in from. "There it is. See? Nothing. It's not even in disputed territory or anywhere near a border. I don't," I stifled a yawn, "see the connection."
"What's this building here, next to it?"
I leaned in and glanced at the map. "Uh, CoruCorp's sector office."
"CoruCorp?"
"Yeah."
"Aren't they Teletron's leading competitor for that new comm chip?"
"So?" My bed was no longer just calling to me, it was flashing neon signs and chanting, "Sleep, sleep, sleep."
"So it appears that they had a break-in and didn't report it." "Mason, I didn't pull down B&Es, just piracy, highjackings and drive- bys. You don't know if there was a report filed or not."
"No, but you can check."
"True," I shook my head at him, "but not tonight. I'm tired and if I slice cop central when I can't hardly tell the keys on my board apart, I'm going to get us in deep trouble."
"Tomorrow then?"
"Yeah, sure, tomorrow." //Anything if you'll let me sleep now.//
*******
He let me sleep, but it wasn't long enough. I'd been up for nearly twenty hours and he woke me after a measly four. My eyes felt gritty and dry, my arms and shoulders still ached and my blood sugar level wasn't nearly high enough. Grumpy is not a strong enough word to describe what I was feeling. I wanted to tie him to the back of Shael's swoop and drag him through afternoon traffic.
"Do you need me to time you?"
"No," I snapped. "You're looking for a specific file. I've written a program that will sort through the reports for me and download anything that matches your very particular specifications while I hold off the security measures. Not that I expect it to take very long at all, though."
"So time is no longer important?"
"Well, yes, but only sleep time, or the lack thereof." Unfortunately, strangling the Jedi wasn't a viable option.
Mason was trying not to laugh, his blue eyes glinted merrily, and I desperately wanted to hit him. "Not a morning person, are you?"
"No," I grumbled at him. "Sane people don't wake up before the sun rises, especially after being up the whole night before."
"I'm sorry, but I can't help feeling that we've got something important here."
"Fine, fine, just sit there and don't make any noise while I work my magic."
Since we were only looking for one single file with fairly specific qualities, I could indeed write a program that would seek it out for me. My normal runs in and out of cop central were fast and furious because I hadn't yet perfected a program that could pull down all of what we wanted as efficiently as I could myself. This one would be a breeze in comparison.
Mason did sit quietly while I worked, for which I blessed him. If I was going to have to be awake at that early an hour after that little sleep, I deserved a little peace and quiet in which to work. The Jedi even rose silently at one point and returned with a steaming mug of hot caf.
Once the program was done, I loaded it up and linked into the sector net. I sliced my way into cop central and set my program loose. In no time at all, the program was cleaning up all traces of its invasion, and I pulled out and took us off-line.
"Well?"
"Cool your jets a second," I told him. "There, see?"
"See what?"
"Oh," I tried not to sound as chagrined as I felt, "well, you were right, there's no file for a break-in at the CoruCorp office."
"So they didn't report it." Mason steepled his fingers and thought, his face losing almost all expression.
I waited as long as I had patience for, which that morning wasn't long at all, before breaking into his thoughts to ask a question. "So what?"
"There was a break in, or at least a suspicious disturbance at the CoruCorp office. It was significant enough that the office next door reported it. But CoruCorp themselves didn't lodge a complaint or call the cops?" he asked.
I just shook my head. This wasn't my area of expertise. I was much better with security systems and their weaknesses than bureaucratic thinking and its various idiocies. I couldn't see what bearing this had on anything at all.
"Why wouldn't a big company like that call in the cops if there'd been a break-in?" Mason asked me slowly.
A light blinked on in my skull. "Because they didn't want the cops in their building?" I hazarded.
"And why not?"
I drew the obvious conclusion, but still couldn't find the link back to our particular problem. "Because there's something there they don't want the cops to see. But I don't see how that helps us." "It may not, right now, but I'll see what other information I can get about that break-in."
I blinked at him and smiled hopefully. "Does that mean I can go back to sleep now?"
Mason laughed. It was an eye-twinkling, full-face, belly-holding laugh. I narrowed my eyes at him, less than amused. It wasn't my fault he had the genetic defect that tended towards early rising. "Yes," he finally managed to say, "you can go back to sleep now, if that's what you really want."
I rose from my seat with what dignity I could muster. "Thank you," I told him gravely and walked away.
I didn't make it far.
"Crash," Famine's nasal tenor made me grimace and hunch my shoulders in expectation of what was to come. I reluctantly turned from my bed with a look of desperate longing and faced him. "Death needs you to re-do that ground-freight route analysis again. We got some new numbers from CNB and that patrol yesterday."
"Sure," I nearly snarled, "fine, whatever."
*******
I don't know who Mason asked to check into the break-in, but he must have asked someone because he only left Armageddon when on a patrol and we got the information in less time than I would have thought possible without paying off a cop sector chief. Whoever it was managed to do some quick and serious checking, because it only took two days for us to learn that someone had indeed broken into the CoruCorp sector offices. That unnamed someone claimed that they hadn't gotten anything worthwhile. That they'd seen a glimpse of some kind of strange pay vouchers, but nothing that they could use. I figured it must have been someone looking for technical schematics or the like who wanted to sell them to black market producers. It's not uncommon.
Anyway, Mason decided that he wanted to check it out himself.
That left me standing in front of Roble's desk again. Only this time I was actually asking permission to take off. Normally I wouldn't have bothered, lockdown being lifted and all, but Mason had correctly pointed out that it wouldn't be the best idea to walk into the building during the light of day. We wouldn't get much more than the runaround.
Roble sighed. His face, his posture, they told me he knew he shouldn't be saying yes, but also that he couldn't think of a single reason why not. I kept my expression calm and confidently expectant. I didn't try for innocent because he'd never have believed it.
"And you're going where again?" he asked as he rubbed tiredly at the bridge of his nose. "We're just going for a ride," I explained again. "I wanted to show Mason the best way to navigate the airlanes at night, and the best places to hide, should cops or rivals take to chasing him. He's been doing day patrols, but as soon as he learns that stuff he can start doing night patrols, or even loners. That, and I want to drill him on his tap-code. He's been practicing, but I want to see how well he's really learned it."
Death tiredly held up a hand to forestall any further explanation. "Sure, go. Just try and stay out of anyone else's territory, Crash. Shael won't beat me to death if something happens to you, but he'll sure give it his best effort."
"Thanks, now I have some advice. Get some sleep. You look like a Jawa who's been dead a week."
"Thanks for the candor," he replied drily. "Now, get out of here before I change my mind and find something for you to do to keep you out of trouble."
I beat a hasty retreat for the door, knowing that he would be only too happy to do just that. "I don't have to go looking for trouble, boss. You know that. It comes looking for me."
The door swung shut on his derisive snort.
Mason was waiting, completely confident that I would win Roble over. He held both his helmet and my own. We still hadn't found enough spare parts to cobble together a communit for his, which is why I wanted to make sure he had the tap-code down pat, so to speak.
"Let's go," I told him. He headed right for his ride, but I detoured to where Shael was lifting weights in the corner. "Hey, flyboy."
He eyed my riding leathers. "Where you off to, and with who?"
"Mason needs the night flying lessons. I figured tonight would be a good time. Things are quiet and we're not likely to run into trouble." I leaned against the bench and rested my hands on his chest. "I also wanted to drill him on tap-codes."
He reached out and grabbed hold of my dark braid, tugging me close enough for a long kiss. "Shall I wait up for you?"
I could see he was fighting down jealousy, but at least he wasn't giving me the third degree anytime I wanted to go out with Mason any more. "Best not," I pouted, "we'll probably be most of the night. I hoped to get all the lessons I could out of the way in one go. Can't ever tell these days when some idiot will take a shot at us again because he's feeling lucky."
Shael kissed me again. "Tell Cade that if you aren't brought back in one piece," he planted a soft kiss on the end of my nose, "one beautiful," kiss, "alive and unharmed piece," kiss, "that I'll skin him alive and use what's left for target practice."
"Mmm, I'll tell him," I promised. I trailed a single finger along his jaw line in parting and strode to where Mason's ride hovered, engine thrumming. I tucked my braid down the back of my jacket, plopped my helmet onto my head, swung aboard behind the Jedi and we were off.
We did indeed practice tap-code, and I did show Mason the best ways to ditch trails and hide from cops, at least along a rather direct route straight to the north half of the Hound's spread. In the dwindling evening traffic, Mason did just fine navigating around the other vehicles and keeping up a reasonable speed, but I could tell that I needed to take him out during the noon crunch to teach him proper traffic techniques. He was far too courteous and patient to be a believable gangbanger.
When we crossed out of Horsemen territory I found myself suddenly very grateful that I was wearing a plain black jacket, rather than my gang jacket. The medium grey, with its bright scarlet chess knight, was unmistakable, purposefully so. But tonight I had no desire to attract any attention. My instincts now told me that the momentary peace was but the lull before the storm. There was a strange, expectant hush in the darker places, instead of the active night life I had grown up with. There might not have been any active hostilities, but the street folk were still keeping their heads down. They were the best indicators I knew of.
It might have been quiet, but it wasn't over.
By tapping and pointing I directed Mason to our goal. We parked the swoop on a shadowed ledge and edged our way along the thin eyebrow of the building to the opening of the parking level. At the terminus of the ledge I flattened myself even closer to the wall and peered slowly and cautiously around the corner. Without moving my head, I let my eyes carefully search the nearly empty lot before me. Try as I might, I couldn't spot the security cams that I knew had to be there.
A tap on my shoulder almost jolted me, but I kept perfectly still and eased back around the corner. As soon as I was sure the security cams couldn't see me, I jabbed Mason in the ribs with an elbow. I jerked off my helmet and glared at him. After all, do I interrupt him when he's doing his Jedi stuff?!
"Will you cut it out? I don't want to be the subject of my very own police report, if you don't mind!" I hissed at him angrily. He was immediately contrite, but my sense of professionalism was still outraged. I decided to explain to head off any further complications. "There are always security cams in the parking garages. That's the first mistake newbies make."
I kept my voice low and my head turned away from the garage to minimize the risk of our conversation being picked up. "The cams are usually triggered by sound and/or motion. I have to figure out where they are and where they are pointed before we can go any farther."
I ran a critical eye over him. With that thick shoulder length hair and that striking face, he would be hard to mistake for anyone else, no matter how bad the resolution on the security holos might be. We needed to take what precautions we could to keep him from showing up on them at all. "Do you know any Lorrdian hand speech?"
"Enough to get by, I think," he answered hesitantly.
I nodded. "Fine. Keep your helmet on then. Even if the cams catch us, I want to minimize the chances for identification." I plopped my own helmet back on and settled it with a thump to end any talk. I was turning back to the corner when Mason's hand on my shoulder interrupted me again. I was going to give him a piece of my mind, but his hands stuttered through a short phrase of pidgin Lorrdian.
*Please to me let?*
I nodded in exasperation, but curious to see what he had in mind, I dropped into a tight crouch to let him step over me. He promptly hopped over my head and landed lightly with practiced grace. He eased slowly around the corner, as I had, and after a moment his whole body seemed to relax and go very still. I scuttled forward, still crouched low, to peek around his long, leather-clad legs. Out near the middle of the garage, a sheet of flimsy-plast, probably a daily news report, fluttered and whisked along the permacrete floor in a non-existent breeze. Even as I watched, no less than seven cams turned to track its progress.
Tap-stroke-tap-tap-pause-tap, I rapped out against his leg. Slow ahead. Mason slid, with painstaking slowness, around the corner of the wall and I followed him, carefully rising from my crouch. The knight's hand stayed pointing in the flimsy's direction as we crept our way to the garage's entrance to the building. At the door I hooked up my datapad and engaged my standard lockbreaker program. The door whooshed open even sooner than I had expected, but I was ready and dashed through, pulling Mason with me, before the cams could turn and orient on the sudden fast movement.
Once inside I let Mason lead the way. The helmets we wore muted all sounds and we moved in eerie silence through the lower level offices. I hoped that the Jedi knew what he was looking for, because I sure didn't.
Mason's friend must have passed along more to him than he did to me, since the tall Jedi led the way through the building with no pauses or guess work. We headed straight for an office, and once inside, I decided that it must have belonged to the senior manager or at least his assistant. There was the inevitable computer console, as well as several filing cabinets for old-fashioned hard-copy storage.
I checked the room over, being as careful and thorough as a decade on the streets could teach me to be. There were no security cams in this office. I'd have bet all the swoops in Armageddon that if this was the assistant's office, the boss's office didn't have any cams either, or at least none that functioned properly.
I sat down behind the monitor and removed my helmet. That way I could work my magic on the machine and still be able to communicate with Mason. "What am I looking for?"
He'd removed his helmet as soon as I did mine, quite willing to follow my lead in such matters. He now leaned over my shoulder, one hand braced on the desk and one on the back of the chair. "Accounting files, or bank statements would be our best bet."
I cruised through the system like I belonged there. The paltry security that had been put in place was mainly designed to keep the other employees from stumbling onto something they weren't supposed to know about. It was no barrier to someone like me who not only had the skills, but was actively looking. The bank reports seemed fairly normal for a company and branch of this size. Nothing looked terribly unusual, so I brought up the accounting files for the various projects that were currently being run in this branch office.
"Project Xylenn, project Iphecles, project Tiros, project Organa, project Ho'tem," I read from the list.
"Bring up project Tiros," Mason instructed me.
"Why that one?" I asked, even as I made the appropriate clicks.
"All the others are named for Alderaani philosophers. Tiros was a Corellian warlord," he explained absently, eyes intent on the information scrolling across the screen.
I muttered derisively to myself as I too scanned the information being presented to us. What did I care about philosophy or history on other worlds? It wasn't like I was ever going to [i]go[/i] to those places.
"See here?" Mason brought my attention to the listing of monthly expenses for the project. "They are making large payments with cash chips. Untraceable. That means they're paying someone who doesn't want any real record of the transaction. Scroll down, I want to see if they made any notes."
Sure enough, down at the bottom of the page, the assistant had diligently marked down his reservations about the outcome of this particular project. "This person is notoriously unreliable," I read aloud, "and I have been threatened on several occasions when it was patently unnecessary. The effort required to sustain such an ego much be tremendous, and I fear that our instructions will be totally disregarded should pride become an issue."
I leaned back in the chair and gazed thoughtfully up at Mason. "Hmmm," I said, in a mock contemplative tone. "Who do I know who has an overblown ego, can't be counted on farther than you can throw a bantha, would sell their soul to a Sith for a ten credit chip, and is hip deep in this gang war business?" Mason seemed amused by my blasé tone contrasted with my uncomplimentary words. "I take it you know such a person?"
"Velocity, leader of the Angels, fits the bill perfectly," I practically snarled. "She hasn't hardly got the morals of a Jawa, and she's been the one responsible for the killings of too many undercover cops. Don't get me wrong," I told him, "I'm not fond of cops myself, but I don't like the idea of killing so many. It's a bad world and most of the cops in this sector are keeping it from getting any worse. It's the ones helping the decay along that I'd like to see on the business end of a heavy blaster. Unfortunately, they aren't usually the ones attracted to undercover work."
Mason stared hard at the screen, occasionally closing his eyes for a moment. I can only guess that he was committing the information to memory. It would have been easier, I'm sure, to just load a copy of the file onto my datapad, but that would also leave evidence, something to be avoided if at all possible.
When he was done, I closed the file and erased the log note that had recorded its opening. Then I shut the system back down and scooped up my helmet. "Let's get out of here before someone spots your ride and gets suspicious," I advised.
In the brief moments of spare time I had, I opened up my key stroke file and recreated the map and the little blue dots, though I used green instead. Not the most clever deception I've ever come up with, but it served my purpose. When Death walked away for the day, muttering to himself about what he saw on the hard copies he was carrying, I brought the map back up and began to study it. I wasn't worried about Mason seeing it since he was out on patrol with a group of others.
The dots didn't seem to make a lot of sense. They were grouped along territory borders, but other than that, there was nothing about them that jumped out at me as a possible connection.
"You've got a good memory for the skirmishes, Crash."
I jolted slightly at Trapper's voice behind me. He was leaning over my shoulder slightly, his finger tracing a few of the dots. "Skirmishes?"
"I'm very impressed. You've even got the two that happened just after lockdown was called," he continued.
Going into overdrive, my mind spun with the implications. These dots were the locations of the various skirmishes? That made a whole lot more sense than any theories I'd come up with over the last day and a half.
"Yeah, but I'm having trouble remembering when they happened," I lied through my teeth to him. "Do you remember enough of them to at least give me a good start?"
He shrugged nonchalantly and dropped into a chair as if he had suddenly been de-boned. "Sure."
I pulled up the locations and he either told me when they happened or told me that he didn't know. As soon as I had gone through the whole list, Trapper rose and slouched away to find something a little more interesting to do and I hunched forward to give the computers a few last commands. I erased all the previous dots and told my babies to put them all back up again, but color coded for when they happened, moving slowly through the rainbow of colors over the last few months that the gang hostilities had been escalating.
The picture showed me something I had halfway expected. There was really no pattern to it. First here, then there, with no rhyme or reason. Then I looked closer. A few of them I could see where one skirmish had happened, then several had been retaliations back and forth for the original fight. But there were others that made no sense, even the one that had wounded Shael. They looked random. Then I looked again. Mason had to have been looking for something among all this, I needed to look too.
It made perfect sense that the only territory border relatively free of dots was our own. After all, when the skirmish went down Roble declared a lockdown. We weren't out there to be fighting with, so of course we hadn't had any others. As I recalled, we still hadn't decided which of the other gangs had hit us that time, either. It had sure made us mad though. //If Death weren't so worried about keeping every member of this strange family alive and kicking we'd have gone out and bloodied the nose of whoever did that.//
I sat up straighter suddenly. Maybe that was it? I looked again. Sure enough, whenever the fighting in an area would die down a bit another first strike would show up and start things off again. Someone was prodding at us all, trying to keep us fighting, or make the fighting hotter and nastier. Up in the northeast corner of the sector where the little gangs were battling to the death, several warehouses, factories, commercial transports, and perfectly innocent civilian traffic had become casualties.
//What if that's the point? But who would want to hurt people? That's just sick.// There had to be some kind of purpose behind all this, even if it was beyond me to guess at what it was. That was Mason's job. Mine was only to help as best I could.
"What'cha got there, Crash?"
Mason's voice coming from nowhere right behind me jolted me enough to rattle the keyboard. I couldn't keep a flush of guilt from running through my system, but I just prayed that in the burst of surprise it would be lost. After a bare second I knew the futility of that and decided just to come clean. Lying to Jedi isn't something that anyone does very well.
"Mason, I thought you were out on patrol?"
"I was. We got back in about fifteen minutes ago."
I glanced at my chrono. I'd been sitting there staring at the map for much longer than I had thought. A rueful smile tugged at my lips and I shrugged. "Slicers are famous for losing track of time when plying their trade," I explained.
"So I see." He straddled a chair, looking much more natural this time. "This looks familiar."
"Should, it's your work, with a bit of modification."
"Photographic memory? I didn't know you saw it."
"I did. I'm paranoid about my babies." I patted the monitor lovingly before continuing. "I have a program that keeps track of all the keystrokes made. I used that to put all the dots back up. Trapper helped me with the rest."
"I take it the colors have to do with ..." he trailed off and stared hard at the seemingly random nature of the color assignments. "I give up, what's the color about?"
"Time. The color indicates when the skirmish happened. Take a look and tell me what you see," I requested. "I've got a theory, but I want a second opinion."
His blue-grey eyes scanned the whole map and for just a moment, when all his concentration was focused on seeing everything there was to see, he stopped looking like just another gang-banger. He looked like a formidable foe and an able protector, everything a Jedi Knight should be.
"Someone is starting these fights?"
"That's what I thought," I confirmed. "Whenever things quiet down too much there's another fight in disputed territory."
"Could one of the other gangs be behind all this?"
I beamed with pride at him. Right off the bat he assumed, or maybe he knew, that the Horsemen weren't behind it. He was becoming quite the loyal member.
"Could be, but I really don't see what they could hope to gain from it. No one gang could run the whole sector. And the competition keeps the cops busy. If they only had one gang to focus on it'd be like a swoop trying to take on an armed shuttle. Sure the swoop has more places to hide, but the shuttle's got sensors and weapons and shields. No contest."
Mason kept me busy the rest of the night. Since he knew about the skirmishes that had happened while we were in lockdown, I assumed he had some means of communication with his superiors that I didn't know about and that no one else had caught him at. But they didn't seem to be able to get him the information that I could. He had me create maps of the sector's property values, of crime hot spots, of anything and everything we both could think of, but none of it seemed to mesh up with what we already had.
Finally he slouched back into his chair, long legs jutting out, fingers laced behind his head, looking every inch the swooprider he was rapidly becoming. "There must be something here that we're missing."
I sighed in exasperation. My eyes were dry and tired from staring at screens all night. My shoulders and back ached from leaning over my keyboard, and I wanted nothing more than to collapse on my bed and sleep through the entire next day. "Look, this is useless. We're not getting anywhere at all. It's like that stupid file you had me pull down, just garbage."
"What file?" he muttered.
"That police report file. I glanced through it and it was totally unrelated to anything we're working on here."
Mason sat up straight and concentrated for a moment as he recalled the instance I was describing. "What was it? Pull it up."
"It was nothing!" I moaned, but typed in the necessary commands anyway. When it came up Mason leaned in to read it through and I leaned back, trying to ease my shoulders. The only one still up was Nash, who only slept in two or three hour blocks at a time. She was essentially always up. Me, I wanted to sleep before my eyelids dried open.
"Crash, where is this location mentioned here?" Mason's mellow voice pulled me out of a half doze and I had to blink a minute before I found the line he was pointing to.
"Oh, uh, that's over in the northern half of the Hounds' territory," I told him blearily. "Forget it, it's nothing but a disturbance report."
"Yes, but I feel that there's something more here. Can you bring up a street map of the area?"
"Sure, why not?" The map soon spread in its electronic blandness across my main monitor. I pointed out the building the disturbance had been called in from. "There it is. See? Nothing. It's not even in disputed territory or anywhere near a border. I don't," I stifled a yawn, "see the connection."
"What's this building here, next to it?"
I leaned in and glanced at the map. "Uh, CoruCorp's sector office."
"CoruCorp?"
"Yeah."
"Aren't they Teletron's leading competitor for that new comm chip?"
"So?" My bed was no longer just calling to me, it was flashing neon signs and chanting, "Sleep, sleep, sleep."
"So it appears that they had a break-in and didn't report it." "Mason, I didn't pull down B&Es, just piracy, highjackings and drive- bys. You don't know if there was a report filed or not."
"No, but you can check."
"True," I shook my head at him, "but not tonight. I'm tired and if I slice cop central when I can't hardly tell the keys on my board apart, I'm going to get us in deep trouble."
"Tomorrow then?"
"Yeah, sure, tomorrow." //Anything if you'll let me sleep now.//
*******
He let me sleep, but it wasn't long enough. I'd been up for nearly twenty hours and he woke me after a measly four. My eyes felt gritty and dry, my arms and shoulders still ached and my blood sugar level wasn't nearly high enough. Grumpy is not a strong enough word to describe what I was feeling. I wanted to tie him to the back of Shael's swoop and drag him through afternoon traffic.
"Do you need me to time you?"
"No," I snapped. "You're looking for a specific file. I've written a program that will sort through the reports for me and download anything that matches your very particular specifications while I hold off the security measures. Not that I expect it to take very long at all, though."
"So time is no longer important?"
"Well, yes, but only sleep time, or the lack thereof." Unfortunately, strangling the Jedi wasn't a viable option.
Mason was trying not to laugh, his blue eyes glinted merrily, and I desperately wanted to hit him. "Not a morning person, are you?"
"No," I grumbled at him. "Sane people don't wake up before the sun rises, especially after being up the whole night before."
"I'm sorry, but I can't help feeling that we've got something important here."
"Fine, fine, just sit there and don't make any noise while I work my magic."
Since we were only looking for one single file with fairly specific qualities, I could indeed write a program that would seek it out for me. My normal runs in and out of cop central were fast and furious because I hadn't yet perfected a program that could pull down all of what we wanted as efficiently as I could myself. This one would be a breeze in comparison.
Mason did sit quietly while I worked, for which I blessed him. If I was going to have to be awake at that early an hour after that little sleep, I deserved a little peace and quiet in which to work. The Jedi even rose silently at one point and returned with a steaming mug of hot caf.
Once the program was done, I loaded it up and linked into the sector net. I sliced my way into cop central and set my program loose. In no time at all, the program was cleaning up all traces of its invasion, and I pulled out and took us off-line.
"Well?"
"Cool your jets a second," I told him. "There, see?"
"See what?"
"Oh," I tried not to sound as chagrined as I felt, "well, you were right, there's no file for a break-in at the CoruCorp office."
"So they didn't report it." Mason steepled his fingers and thought, his face losing almost all expression.
I waited as long as I had patience for, which that morning wasn't long at all, before breaking into his thoughts to ask a question. "So what?"
"There was a break in, or at least a suspicious disturbance at the CoruCorp office. It was significant enough that the office next door reported it. But CoruCorp themselves didn't lodge a complaint or call the cops?" he asked.
I just shook my head. This wasn't my area of expertise. I was much better with security systems and their weaknesses than bureaucratic thinking and its various idiocies. I couldn't see what bearing this had on anything at all.
"Why wouldn't a big company like that call in the cops if there'd been a break-in?" Mason asked me slowly.
A light blinked on in my skull. "Because they didn't want the cops in their building?" I hazarded.
"And why not?"
I drew the obvious conclusion, but still couldn't find the link back to our particular problem. "Because there's something there they don't want the cops to see. But I don't see how that helps us." "It may not, right now, but I'll see what other information I can get about that break-in."
I blinked at him and smiled hopefully. "Does that mean I can go back to sleep now?"
Mason laughed. It was an eye-twinkling, full-face, belly-holding laugh. I narrowed my eyes at him, less than amused. It wasn't my fault he had the genetic defect that tended towards early rising. "Yes," he finally managed to say, "you can go back to sleep now, if that's what you really want."
I rose from my seat with what dignity I could muster. "Thank you," I told him gravely and walked away.
I didn't make it far.
"Crash," Famine's nasal tenor made me grimace and hunch my shoulders in expectation of what was to come. I reluctantly turned from my bed with a look of desperate longing and faced him. "Death needs you to re-do that ground-freight route analysis again. We got some new numbers from CNB and that patrol yesterday."
"Sure," I nearly snarled, "fine, whatever."
*******
I don't know who Mason asked to check into the break-in, but he must have asked someone because he only left Armageddon when on a patrol and we got the information in less time than I would have thought possible without paying off a cop sector chief. Whoever it was managed to do some quick and serious checking, because it only took two days for us to learn that someone had indeed broken into the CoruCorp sector offices. That unnamed someone claimed that they hadn't gotten anything worthwhile. That they'd seen a glimpse of some kind of strange pay vouchers, but nothing that they could use. I figured it must have been someone looking for technical schematics or the like who wanted to sell them to black market producers. It's not uncommon.
Anyway, Mason decided that he wanted to check it out himself.
That left me standing in front of Roble's desk again. Only this time I was actually asking permission to take off. Normally I wouldn't have bothered, lockdown being lifted and all, but Mason had correctly pointed out that it wouldn't be the best idea to walk into the building during the light of day. We wouldn't get much more than the runaround.
Roble sighed. His face, his posture, they told me he knew he shouldn't be saying yes, but also that he couldn't think of a single reason why not. I kept my expression calm and confidently expectant. I didn't try for innocent because he'd never have believed it.
"And you're going where again?" he asked as he rubbed tiredly at the bridge of his nose. "We're just going for a ride," I explained again. "I wanted to show Mason the best way to navigate the airlanes at night, and the best places to hide, should cops or rivals take to chasing him. He's been doing day patrols, but as soon as he learns that stuff he can start doing night patrols, or even loners. That, and I want to drill him on his tap-code. He's been practicing, but I want to see how well he's really learned it."
Death tiredly held up a hand to forestall any further explanation. "Sure, go. Just try and stay out of anyone else's territory, Crash. Shael won't beat me to death if something happens to you, but he'll sure give it his best effort."
"Thanks, now I have some advice. Get some sleep. You look like a Jawa who's been dead a week."
"Thanks for the candor," he replied drily. "Now, get out of here before I change my mind and find something for you to do to keep you out of trouble."
I beat a hasty retreat for the door, knowing that he would be only too happy to do just that. "I don't have to go looking for trouble, boss. You know that. It comes looking for me."
The door swung shut on his derisive snort.
Mason was waiting, completely confident that I would win Roble over. He held both his helmet and my own. We still hadn't found enough spare parts to cobble together a communit for his, which is why I wanted to make sure he had the tap-code down pat, so to speak.
"Let's go," I told him. He headed right for his ride, but I detoured to where Shael was lifting weights in the corner. "Hey, flyboy."
He eyed my riding leathers. "Where you off to, and with who?"
"Mason needs the night flying lessons. I figured tonight would be a good time. Things are quiet and we're not likely to run into trouble." I leaned against the bench and rested my hands on his chest. "I also wanted to drill him on tap-codes."
He reached out and grabbed hold of my dark braid, tugging me close enough for a long kiss. "Shall I wait up for you?"
I could see he was fighting down jealousy, but at least he wasn't giving me the third degree anytime I wanted to go out with Mason any more. "Best not," I pouted, "we'll probably be most of the night. I hoped to get all the lessons I could out of the way in one go. Can't ever tell these days when some idiot will take a shot at us again because he's feeling lucky."
Shael kissed me again. "Tell Cade that if you aren't brought back in one piece," he planted a soft kiss on the end of my nose, "one beautiful," kiss, "alive and unharmed piece," kiss, "that I'll skin him alive and use what's left for target practice."
"Mmm, I'll tell him," I promised. I trailed a single finger along his jaw line in parting and strode to where Mason's ride hovered, engine thrumming. I tucked my braid down the back of my jacket, plopped my helmet onto my head, swung aboard behind the Jedi and we were off.
We did indeed practice tap-code, and I did show Mason the best ways to ditch trails and hide from cops, at least along a rather direct route straight to the north half of the Hound's spread. In the dwindling evening traffic, Mason did just fine navigating around the other vehicles and keeping up a reasonable speed, but I could tell that I needed to take him out during the noon crunch to teach him proper traffic techniques. He was far too courteous and patient to be a believable gangbanger.
When we crossed out of Horsemen territory I found myself suddenly very grateful that I was wearing a plain black jacket, rather than my gang jacket. The medium grey, with its bright scarlet chess knight, was unmistakable, purposefully so. But tonight I had no desire to attract any attention. My instincts now told me that the momentary peace was but the lull before the storm. There was a strange, expectant hush in the darker places, instead of the active night life I had grown up with. There might not have been any active hostilities, but the street folk were still keeping their heads down. They were the best indicators I knew of.
It might have been quiet, but it wasn't over.
By tapping and pointing I directed Mason to our goal. We parked the swoop on a shadowed ledge and edged our way along the thin eyebrow of the building to the opening of the parking level. At the terminus of the ledge I flattened myself even closer to the wall and peered slowly and cautiously around the corner. Without moving my head, I let my eyes carefully search the nearly empty lot before me. Try as I might, I couldn't spot the security cams that I knew had to be there.
A tap on my shoulder almost jolted me, but I kept perfectly still and eased back around the corner. As soon as I was sure the security cams couldn't see me, I jabbed Mason in the ribs with an elbow. I jerked off my helmet and glared at him. After all, do I interrupt him when he's doing his Jedi stuff?!
"Will you cut it out? I don't want to be the subject of my very own police report, if you don't mind!" I hissed at him angrily. He was immediately contrite, but my sense of professionalism was still outraged. I decided to explain to head off any further complications. "There are always security cams in the parking garages. That's the first mistake newbies make."
I kept my voice low and my head turned away from the garage to minimize the risk of our conversation being picked up. "The cams are usually triggered by sound and/or motion. I have to figure out where they are and where they are pointed before we can go any farther."
I ran a critical eye over him. With that thick shoulder length hair and that striking face, he would be hard to mistake for anyone else, no matter how bad the resolution on the security holos might be. We needed to take what precautions we could to keep him from showing up on them at all. "Do you know any Lorrdian hand speech?"
"Enough to get by, I think," he answered hesitantly.
I nodded. "Fine. Keep your helmet on then. Even if the cams catch us, I want to minimize the chances for identification." I plopped my own helmet back on and settled it with a thump to end any talk. I was turning back to the corner when Mason's hand on my shoulder interrupted me again. I was going to give him a piece of my mind, but his hands stuttered through a short phrase of pidgin Lorrdian.
*Please to me let?*
I nodded in exasperation, but curious to see what he had in mind, I dropped into a tight crouch to let him step over me. He promptly hopped over my head and landed lightly with practiced grace. He eased slowly around the corner, as I had, and after a moment his whole body seemed to relax and go very still. I scuttled forward, still crouched low, to peek around his long, leather-clad legs. Out near the middle of the garage, a sheet of flimsy-plast, probably a daily news report, fluttered and whisked along the permacrete floor in a non-existent breeze. Even as I watched, no less than seven cams turned to track its progress.
Tap-stroke-tap-tap-pause-tap, I rapped out against his leg. Slow ahead. Mason slid, with painstaking slowness, around the corner of the wall and I followed him, carefully rising from my crouch. The knight's hand stayed pointing in the flimsy's direction as we crept our way to the garage's entrance to the building. At the door I hooked up my datapad and engaged my standard lockbreaker program. The door whooshed open even sooner than I had expected, but I was ready and dashed through, pulling Mason with me, before the cams could turn and orient on the sudden fast movement.
Once inside I let Mason lead the way. The helmets we wore muted all sounds and we moved in eerie silence through the lower level offices. I hoped that the Jedi knew what he was looking for, because I sure didn't.
Mason's friend must have passed along more to him than he did to me, since the tall Jedi led the way through the building with no pauses or guess work. We headed straight for an office, and once inside, I decided that it must have belonged to the senior manager or at least his assistant. There was the inevitable computer console, as well as several filing cabinets for old-fashioned hard-copy storage.
I checked the room over, being as careful and thorough as a decade on the streets could teach me to be. There were no security cams in this office. I'd have bet all the swoops in Armageddon that if this was the assistant's office, the boss's office didn't have any cams either, or at least none that functioned properly.
I sat down behind the monitor and removed my helmet. That way I could work my magic on the machine and still be able to communicate with Mason. "What am I looking for?"
He'd removed his helmet as soon as I did mine, quite willing to follow my lead in such matters. He now leaned over my shoulder, one hand braced on the desk and one on the back of the chair. "Accounting files, or bank statements would be our best bet."
I cruised through the system like I belonged there. The paltry security that had been put in place was mainly designed to keep the other employees from stumbling onto something they weren't supposed to know about. It was no barrier to someone like me who not only had the skills, but was actively looking. The bank reports seemed fairly normal for a company and branch of this size. Nothing looked terribly unusual, so I brought up the accounting files for the various projects that were currently being run in this branch office.
"Project Xylenn, project Iphecles, project Tiros, project Organa, project Ho'tem," I read from the list.
"Bring up project Tiros," Mason instructed me.
"Why that one?" I asked, even as I made the appropriate clicks.
"All the others are named for Alderaani philosophers. Tiros was a Corellian warlord," he explained absently, eyes intent on the information scrolling across the screen.
I muttered derisively to myself as I too scanned the information being presented to us. What did I care about philosophy or history on other worlds? It wasn't like I was ever going to [i]go[/i] to those places.
"See here?" Mason brought my attention to the listing of monthly expenses for the project. "They are making large payments with cash chips. Untraceable. That means they're paying someone who doesn't want any real record of the transaction. Scroll down, I want to see if they made any notes."
Sure enough, down at the bottom of the page, the assistant had diligently marked down his reservations about the outcome of this particular project. "This person is notoriously unreliable," I read aloud, "and I have been threatened on several occasions when it was patently unnecessary. The effort required to sustain such an ego much be tremendous, and I fear that our instructions will be totally disregarded should pride become an issue."
I leaned back in the chair and gazed thoughtfully up at Mason. "Hmmm," I said, in a mock contemplative tone. "Who do I know who has an overblown ego, can't be counted on farther than you can throw a bantha, would sell their soul to a Sith for a ten credit chip, and is hip deep in this gang war business?" Mason seemed amused by my blasé tone contrasted with my uncomplimentary words. "I take it you know such a person?"
"Velocity, leader of the Angels, fits the bill perfectly," I practically snarled. "She hasn't hardly got the morals of a Jawa, and she's been the one responsible for the killings of too many undercover cops. Don't get me wrong," I told him, "I'm not fond of cops myself, but I don't like the idea of killing so many. It's a bad world and most of the cops in this sector are keeping it from getting any worse. It's the ones helping the decay along that I'd like to see on the business end of a heavy blaster. Unfortunately, they aren't usually the ones attracted to undercover work."
Mason stared hard at the screen, occasionally closing his eyes for a moment. I can only guess that he was committing the information to memory. It would have been easier, I'm sure, to just load a copy of the file onto my datapad, but that would also leave evidence, something to be avoided if at all possible.
When he was done, I closed the file and erased the log note that had recorded its opening. Then I shut the system back down and scooped up my helmet. "Let's get out of here before someone spots your ride and gets suspicious," I advised.
