Six months earlier...
It had been a long day in Freedom Headquarters for Torn. Stacks of boring paperwork were piled high on his desk like a model fortress, many detailing the sheer extent of the damage that had been suffered in the civil war for Haven City, and what it would cost to get it all fixed. He was not looking forward to processing all of this.
As he idly flicked through one of these many reports, his mind was partially elsewhere, unable to take in yet more columns of numbers at this point in time. He glanced over at the clock on the wall, and sighed when he saw that it was only just past midday. This morning felt twice as long as it should have been already, and he still had half the day ahead of him. He needed a break, and he leaned back in his chair, resting his feet upon the one space on the desktop not covered in papers, trying to let his overloaded mind breathe and clear itself for a moment, reflecting on the bigger picture.
Haven was in the wake of what had become known as The War for Haven City. Well, actually, Haven City's entire history seemed to be nothing but war. As far back as their records went, an endless, ravenous horde of dark monsters called the Metal Heads had hounded its people. Only the impregnable Shield Wall that surrounded the entire city like a fortress kept them out, as if they lived on an island battered from all sides by a destructive tide.
But The War for Haven City had been bloodier and more dire than any battle in Haven's long, violent history. The Shield Wall no longer functioned as it once did, and the streets themselves became a lethal battle ground as three factions slew each other for power: the desperate soldiers of the Freedom League, their forces divided and dwindling, hanging on to what they had left; the indomitable Metal Head horde, which had returned with a vengeance after the fall of their leader; and the merciless machines of the old KG faction, which had been resurrected with renewed thirst for destruction. Things had seemed bleak and hopeless on many an occasion, but if it weren't for Jak and his irreplaceable heroism, the city would now be but a pile of smoking rubble, its only landmarks the mauled bodies of its former populace. They had survived, but only just.
But despite the city-wide damage and the many losses they had suffered, things were now actually looking positive for Haven City, and Torn felt quite proud about it. The Metal Heads were gone, the KG Robots were all destroyed, and a new city council had been established to help restore life and glory to the city. This took some of the pressure off himself and Ashelin, who despite being at the peak of chain of command, no longer had to be the sole figures of authority. It was a big job, too big for the two of them to handle alone, and responsibilities had been divided amongst the council members. As a result, his job had become a lot easier and the Freedom League was running more smoothly than ever. Of course, there had been a few raucous parties that had got out of hand here and there, thrown by clusters of citizens celebrating the end of the war a little too hard, but nothing more serious than that. However, he knew the work was not over yet. In fact, it had only just earnestly begun. Hence why his desk was covered in papers.
They were about a month in to what had officially been termed 'The Great Restoration', and already, the Freedom League was hard at work and had achieved a lot: mending roads, rebuilding homes, and so forth, and a dedicated team of architects was tirelessly designing the new layouts of the city districts. The hardest part so far had been taking down the KG War Factory, a floating fortress that had remained suspended above the city after it had been shut down in the latter days of the War. It had taken many engineers and a lot of heavy equipment to move it out of city airspace, and it was now lying outside the walls being slowly dismantled for scrap and reusable parts.
However, an even more complicated job lay ahead in the restoration of the old city gardens. These had fallen under Metal Head control during the war, and they had corrupted all plant life there until it became a stinking, festering canal of slime and acid, littered with infectious dark eco and living earth that would swallow anyone who did not tread carefully. And of course, there were the remnants of the Metal Heads' enormous, organic tower that had set the limits of the city's new skyline. A few brave men had already ventured in with chemical equipment to try and begin the healing process, but it would likely take several years before the gardens were recognisable again.
The people were also campaigning for the resurrection of the Mar Memorial Stadium, where the city's popular races used to be held. That still lay in ruins at the very north end of the city, a skeleton of its former splendour, and crushed beneath the Baron's huge palace tower when it fell. The Metal Heads had taken up residence there too, but thankfully had not dealt it the same fate as the gardens, and everything was still salvageable. Broken and scarred, but salvageable. Torn was determined that the Stadium would rise again, but still, it would be a difficult and expensive job that would likely cause many a headache, and there were more vital things to be considered first.
That annoying rodent Daxter was also protesting for the return of his bar in the port. It had been used as a secondary southern base for the Freedom League during the War, and there were still a lot of important supplies left down there that needed picking up. Torn hoped to high heaven that the ottsel had not tampered with anything he shouldn't have done, as was his penchant.
All of these daunting tasks, plus a general repair of everywhere else in the city, would keep him, Ashelin and the new council busy for years to come. It was a global job that would require the co-operation of everyone, as everyone had been affected by the War; everyone had lost someone they knew and cared for, and many were without permanent homes now. No one had yet calculated the total number of casualties, and Torn doubted that anyone ever would.
He took another sweeping look around his office. It wasn't really his office, but just a spare storeroom he had chosen to occupy one day so he could try to process some important documents in peace and privacy. Ever since then, others had treated it like his adopted office space and had dropped off more things for him there, but it was far from the sort of state he desired for working in. He was the kind of person who wanted everything neatly organised in its rightful place, but these past few months he had been working in bureaucratic squalor. The papers on his desk were just the start of it. There were piles on the floor too, with the odd bullet casing or weapons crate or suit of armour thrown in for good measure. Cupboard doors and drawers were permanently clogged open, from which yet more papers and other Freedom regalia seemed to spill out. The window in the far wall, half-hidden by tall stacks of crates, looked upon the mountains bordering the west of the city, but Torn did not find it very interesting. He preferred to keep his attention on this side of the city walls, for now at least. First, fix the city. Then, if there was time, they could look further afield in the hope of expanding to new land, if they needed it, and Torn had a feeling that they undoubtedly would.
Then there was a knock on his door which broke his absent concentrations.
"Come in," Torn called, taking his feet off the table.
In stepped a Freedom Fighter, clad in his blue armour and carrying his helmet under his arm. Torn knew him by his round face and his blue eyes that matched his armour: his name was Olto, and he was a young and fairly new member of the Freedom League who had joined late in the war, and thus had had little chance to prove himself in the field of battle. However, he had since then been doing his utmost to complete his duties and follow the Freedom code of conduct, and was fast becoming a model soldier.
"Commander, I bring a message from the governor!" he said in his most official-sounding voice. "She wishes to see you as soon as possible in the Power Room."
"The Power Room?" said Torn, a little surprised by this unusual choice of meeting place. "Why does she want to meet me there?"
"She would not tell me, commander," Olto replied, "But she has asked me to convey the utmost urgency to you. I recommend you head there immediately, sir."
Torn was puzzled but intrigued. Whatever this was, he knew that Ashelin would not summon him like this for no good reason; it had to be important, important enough to discuss in person instead of over the communicator, and he was stirred into action right away. In fact, he was quite relieved to have an excuse to get out of this cluttered room.
"OK, thank you, private," he replied, standing up. "I'll head over there now. Return to your duties, and stay safe."
"I will. Thank you, commander."
Olto saluted, then marched off through the door and down the hallway, replacing his helmet as he went. Torn got to his feet, checked that his handgun was still in its holster on his belt, and then locked his room. He went the opposite way Olto had taken, into a lift which took him down twenty floors to ground level. It brought him to the hangar at the rear of the building, where a Hellcat Cruiser awaited him. This was one of the newly made V4 range, and it handled much better than the clunky old models used during the Baron's reign, the ones he had learned to fly in. Torn climbed in and switched on the engine, and the cruiser came to life. It hovered upwards, and Torn flew it out into the sky through the opening hatch in the ceiling.
As he cruised over the city on his journey to the Power Station, he looked around at all the areas that he had read about in his reports, viewing them from the sky to survey the damage for himself. The 'New Haven' district where Freedom HQ was located, though still bearing the scars of battle in places, had survived the War largely intact and still looked perfectly inhabitable, at least from this altitude. Quite pretty even, if he were a man to use such a word. The buildings were stylish and well-fashioned, and those who occupied them were generally the wealthiest survivors of the city's enduring dramas. Waterways and fountains lined the streets, and there was even a tree growing here and there on circular plantations of grass on the corners and intersections, although some had been burned to black, bone-like totems by the stray fury of the war.
The rest of Haven south of this district was an unattractive mess. Compared to the polished metal and stone of New Haven, the adjoining slums were grey and dull, both from lack of care and ashy smoke-stains. Well, this part of the city had never looked very pleasant to begin with; Torn knew this all too well, having spent a number of years living secretly in this very sector, where the old Underground movement's headquarters had been based. Nevertheless, he felt no special attachment to this district; it only reminded him of dark and difficult days. The buildings were ragged and lopsided, some looking so flimsy that they seemed to sway in the wind. The uneven streets wormed around them in no identifiable pattern of organisation, as if a child with a crayon had scribbled playful and ignorant lines on the city blueprints. Some essential repairs had already begun here however, and there were people carrying building materials around, small machines filling in the most hazardous craters in the road, and several Freedom Fighters supervising the entire effort. This was good, but Torn felt this part of the city ought to be bulldozed entirely, to make way for better quality housing like those in New Haven.
Next came the industrial sector. One of the city's most important districts, it had been the scene of some of the heaviest fighting during the war, so it had received a high priority for repairs to remain operational, and much had been done already. Nearly all the buildings here were generator hubs, factories or processing plants, which all seemed to connect together into one large mainframe of technology. But there were wide open spaces as well, courtyards and plazas of metal. The dominant colour scheme here was a grimy dark red and black, which only reminded Torn of the KG it still pained him to admit he had once been a part of. But in the approaching distance, he sighted the communications tower which now stood atop the Power Room, his destination.
It was the heart of the city's life force, pumping eco and electricity to the four corners of the grid. Somehow, it had survived the war relatively undamaged, and it was a good thing that it had; if the city's power supply had been disrupted, the war may have ended very differently. A few dedicated technicians worked there now, maintaining the city's Eco Grid and what was left of the Shield Wall system, as well as some communications hubs the Freedom League had recently set up. All of it was overseen by Vin, an intelligent but very frenetic technician who used to work for Baron Praxis, but at the same time had been secretly passing information to Torn's underground resistance movement, a position that made him extremely paranoid. Somehow — Torn still was not sure exactly how — he had turned himself into a computer program, and now existed only in digital form. But that did not hinder him in the slightest; he still did a spectacular job of keeping all of the city's most important systems running at peak efficiency, and nobody knew the Eco Grid and the city's power networks better than he did.
Torn brought the cruiser down and parked it close to the wall where it was out of the way of the reconstruction work. Ashelin was already waiting for him at the door, and called him over the moment she saw him, an ambivalent smile on her red lips.
"Torn," she said calmly, placing a hand on his shoulder almost automatically. "Thanks for coming at such short notice."
"Ashelin, what's this about?" asked Torn, getting straight to business.
Ashelin looked around before answering, as if she suspected eavesdroppers. "I'll tell you inside," she said, typing the access code into the door panel. This made Torn even more curious, but he understood. Clearly whatever she wanted to tell him was not meant for public reception. He hoped it was not an unforeseen issue with the power grids that could threaten to drop the whole city into silence and darkness, but if the meeting had to take place here, he was afraid it might be.
They entered the Power Room together, where several computer workers were intensively typing on keyboards and monitoring on-screen readings, keeping a sharp eye and ear on everything that was happening in the city. All around there were large towers of electronic machinery and computer hardware, glistening with a technological blue light, and in the centre of it all was Vin, a large holographic head floating in mid-air, and spinning this way and that in response to unseen coded messages that were beaming between the servers. Numbers flickered in his eyes. When Ashelin and Torn stopped before him, he halted and gave his full attention to them.
"Torn. Long time, no see," he said in his synthesised voice, which scarily resembled his original. "How you doin'?"
Torn merely nodded in curt reply. He respected Vin's knowledge, his essential role in the city grid, and all he had done for the Underground back in the day, but he could be a real pain to talk to sometimes, due to his penchant to break into rapid, endless technical monologues. Therefore Torn was determined to keep the number of words exchanged between them to a minimum.
"Torn, Vin says he discovered a strange signal a little while ago," Ashelin explained, and Vin's head nodded proudly.
"Really? What kind of signal?" Torn asked.
"Take a look," said Vin, and his head threw up several digital maps and data screens. "I detected an anomaly outside the city on our long range scanners, way away from the walls. I triangulated its position to here."
A tiny dot appeared at the top of one of the maps, with the city marked as another tiny dot in the centre. The space between them did not look so significant at this resolution, but the scale in the corner showed that it was a distance of many leagues.
"What do you mean 'an anomaly'?" asked Torn.
"I mean nothing like what we usually pick up," Vin explained. "I couldn't I.D. it. All of our own vehicles give off data readings that allow us to see its registration and who's flying it and whatnot, but this one was giving off nothing at all. Nothing I could recognise, at least."
"Hmm... well none of our vehicles would be flying that far out from the city anyway," Torn said, inspecting the marks on the map.
"Right," said Vin. "Whatever this thing is, it didn't come from us."
Ashelin and Torn looked at each other, as Torn now understood the significance of his summoning. In the past, whenever strange signals such as this one were detected outside the city, it meant only one thing with certainty: Metal Heads.
"Could be another Metal nest taking shape," said Torn knowingly.
Vin gave a nervous twitch and he blinked out for a second. Even now, Metal Heads still terrified him.
"Probably just some stragglers trying to build up strength again," continued Torn.
"Wait," Ashelin cut in. "There's more."
Torn raised an eyebrow just slightly. "More?"
"Play the sound, Vin," Ashelin ordered, and Vin's head brought up yet more graphical displays all around him.
"Sound?" Torn enquired.
"Yeah, I reconstructed the signal into audio," Vin gibbered. "I mean, I've done the best I could. There's an ideal signal-to-noise ratio, you see, and if you go too far over then you lose quality. It's even harder with our long-range scanners that picked this up, because the signal's weaker and there's even more —"
"Just play the damn thing, Vin," Torn interrupted, suppressing his irritation.
"Oh yeah, right," said Vin, and the graphs around him started to animate.
Moving lines danced up and down, accompanied by the unmistakeable buzz of radio frequencies, as Vin intensively watched them. For the first few seconds there was nothing out of the ordinary, just background static, but then there came a loud noise like a sonic boom, and the sound lines went wild. Torn looked straight at Ashelin, who had uncertainty written in her eyes as she listened as well. When the boom faded away, it was replaced with a quiet humming noise that sounded suspiciously like an engine, before that too faded away into static. Then the recording ended.
"That did not sound like Metal Heads," said Torn with a hard look on his face.
"That's what I thought too," said Ashelin seriously. "But then what do you think made it?"
"I don't know," said Torn. "Vin, did anything else happen when this appeared?"
"No, and it was only there for a second," Vin explained, "But it was enough for me to notice. Usually I can identify anything beaming around the city right away, but I've never seen anything like this before."
"Is it still there now, or has it happened again since?" Torn asked.
"Negative to both," answered Vin. "There's nothing out there right now."
"Could it be something from Spargus then?" Ashelin questioned hopefully after a moment's silence.
Torn considered it. Spargus was a town that existed out in the Wasteland, populated and ruled by hardened desert-dwellers, many of whom had once been citizens right here in Haven until they were banished by Ashelin's father, the Baron. They had thrived and really made a life for themselves out there, and the majority of Haven's current populace were still not aware that they actually existed, for many of the Wastelanders were bitter from their exile and did not choose to involve themselves in Haven's affairs.
"Could be," responded Torn, rubbing his chin, "But if it is, then what are the Wastelanders doing way out there? Could you get anything else out of the signal, Vin?"
Vin shook his digital head. "For all we know it could have been some indigenous creature or a weird weather pattern. We just can't tell. Oh boy, I sure hope it wasn't Metal Heads." His image was trembling again.
"Are you sure you haven't just made a mistake, Vin?" Torn asked.
At once, Vin's head began shaking around angrily. "Mistake? Mistake? I don't make mistakes! What nerve!"
"Alright, alright," said Torn irritably. He had forgotten how sensitive Vin could be about his work. "Ashelin, have someone get in touch with Spargus to find out if they sent anyone out there recently."
Ashelin nodded, and began speaking with one of the nearby computer workers. Even though she technically out-ranked Torn, the only person in the city who did, they shared a long working history and the two of them were near enough equals on a personal level. Therefore she had no qualms about letting Torn make the orders like this sometimes, because she knew that his decisions were sound and she trusted his judgements.
"Vin, keep analysing that signal, and see if you can dig out anything else from it," Torn ordered further. "And keep listening in case it comes back."
"You got it," said Vin enthusiastically, and his head returned to work.
The investigation commenced, and Torn remained in the Power Room for a while longer in case of any immediate developments. But nothing came up. He listened to the recording several more times, but still he could not place its identity.
Before he left, Ashelin took him aside for a word in private. "Tell me honestly, Torn, what do you think this could possibly be?" she asked.
Torn pouted in thought. He was a sceptical man, and did not like having to make guesses without firm evidence. "It's probably just stray Metal Heads," he said dismissively, but Ashelin was not convinced.
"Is that what you really think, or just what you want to believe?" she asked. "It didn't sound like Metal Heads. You said so yourself. If you want my opinion, that noise sounded advanced and intelligent. It could be dangerous, and if it gets any nearer to the city, it could be on us before we even know what it's capable of."
"Nothing's going to happen," Torn tried to reassure her. "Vin's working on it and I'm sure he'll come up with something. You know how good he is. And we're still waiting for word from Spargus. Hopefully that'll give us some answers, and everything will be fine."
"And if it doesn't?" pressed Ashelin. "We need to be ready for any possibility."
"Then I'll look into it myself," Torn answered.
But Ashelin held him by the arm and led him around the corner, out of sight. "I didn't want to say this in front of anyone else, but this has made me worry. Every time Haven looks like it has a time of peace on the way, something else always jumps on us from out of nowhere and causes us more trouble. It happened with the Metal Heads; we thought we'd beaten them but they just came back. Then the KG Robots, and the Dark Makers. I'm starting to think this city's cursed. What if this is the next thing?"
Torn looked at her rationally. It surprised him that Ashelin had even said this, but he cared for her, and always listened to what she had to say. She was right to be concerned about the city's welfare in any case. He was too.
"Ashelin, you're worrying yourself too much. There's no such thing as curses."
"I know, but... something about this doesn't feel right to me, Torn. I can't explain it. I just feel like something bad's going to happen."
Torn sighed deeply. "Look, we've got a lot to deal with right now. We've just come out of a long war, and we're all stressed out, probably still imagining things. Let's just let the men do their work for now. If Spargus and Vin don't come up with anything, I'll start a proper investigation on this. I promise."
Ashelin seemed assuaged by his answer. For now. "You're right, Torn," she said with a tired sigh of her own. "We have been through a lot. I just don't think we should rule anything out yet, and I just want to be sure that the city'll be safe."
"It will be," said Torn confidently, and he held Ashelin by the hand. It was a rare display of comfort that he reserved just for her, and one that he hoped no one else ever saw him doing. "You just leave this to me, Ashelin. I'll get to the bottom of this, one way or another."
Ashelin nodded resolutely, and gave him a light smile. "Right. Thanks Torn, but keep me posted. Be safe, and good luck."
Torn left the building feeling rather conflicted. He stuck to what he had said to Ashelin, that this mysterious signal was nothing to be concerned about, but he knew that her instinct was often good, and deserved to be taken seriously. The last thing he wanted to accept, however, was that there could be yet another possibly hostile force out there, ready to bear down on the city before anyone was ready for it. They were in no state to face yet another war, but it was better to be safe than sorry.
As Torn restarted his cruiser and headed back to Freedom HQ, his tactical mind was already beginning to form defensive plans and strategies which he hoped he would never have to put into action. But he forced himself to wait until Spargus responded to their message before seriously considering any of them. Hopefully it was just a small, harmless band of Metal Heads just like he thought, or the Wastelanders doing a bit of exploring, and nothing more.
In all, this was not the end of the day he had been hoping for.