Vanu Orbital Headquarters – 1017 hours

Edward took a seat at his desk, finally stripped of his purple nanoweave armor suit in favor of a well-worn lab coat, wrinkled button-up shirt, and the khaki chinos he had worn to his paper presentation last week. Before him on his desk sat the heavy NS-7 "Archer" anti-materiel rifle he had carried on his mission earlier that morning, accompanied by his third cup of synthetic coffee that was starting to go cold, and a small laptop encased in a bulletproof shell he normally used for his field work. Gulping down half of the lukewarm brew, he snapped the laptop out of its protective case and pulled open a drawer. Plugging the laptop into an array of cables mounted to the back of the drawer spurred a large overhead projector to life, casting his laptop's home screen onto the far wall of the room. He looked up at the projected image, admiring the peaceful serenity the photo of Indar's grassy fields and geological formations portrayed. When he wasn't busy violently dismembering people "in the name of Vanu" or for the sake of "science" out in the field, he liked to take photographs. "Something to show the future generations what life was like before we fucked it up and handed it to them on a shit-smeared silver platter," he thought, withdrawing two gloves from the laptop's drawer before pushing it shut. A laser-projected keyboard appeared on his desk, ready to receive inputs from the motion-tracking gloves he donned.

He had hardly managed to log in when someone knocked at his door. "Come in," he replied, not bothering to look up as he navigated to the document he had been working on last week. The door opened, casting light into the relatively dim, windowless office.

"Hey, Ed, the Council wanted me to remind you that they'd like to talk to you about your last mission. Post-ops report, you know the drill," the man said. "By the way, don't forget you still owe me a round at the bar for that super-hot exfil last week. I'd like to cash in on that later this evening, if you've got the time," the man said, leaning against the door as he cradled a cigarette in between his fingers, observing the slowly burning end.

Edward turned to face his friend, Felix Rolando. The man stood at six foot flat, with a jaw line that could cut glass and a matting of thick, scraggly brown hair on his head that matched his eyes and stubby facial hair. He looked, and smelled, like he had taken a shower in whatever fluids had leaked out of his Valkyrie, his pride and joy, but he reveled in the stuff much to others' disgust. Felix was one of the few people he truly enjoyed spending time with, whether it was getting shit-faced at the bar or slinging lead from the hotseat of his flying, pint-sized gunship. To his friend's dismay, though, he nodded to a clock that read two separate times; 10:21 AM, and 1 hour, 15 minutes. "I've hardly been punched in long enough for triple S, so I'll give you a call later this evening if this meeting goes smoothly. Just don't go french-kissing their anti-air, because you won't find a beer with your name on it at the Tubes this time." Triple S, a term they jokingly shared, stood for "Shit, Shower and a Shave".

Felix nodded, jamming the cigarette back in his mouth. "Right, I'll see you later. I'll tell Cecilia you said hi." With that, his friend disappeared into the hallway, shutting the door behind him with a muted click.

Turning in his swivel chair back to his work, he idly typed away at the document between sips of his coffee, detailing the events of that morning down to the most minute detail – the handling of the rifle, the effects on its target, the tactics employed by the Terran soldiers, everything. Ever since the Council had found out what a gem of a technical writer they had stumbled upon, they had become a stickler for detail, sometimes at the expense of the purpose of the paper. He knew the paper would be broken down by a series of computer algorithms, filing away segments on Terran Republic tactics and armament intelligence as a separate document for the Vanu Sovereignty's generals to look over outside of the original report, and so he wrote like it. The end product would read like trash, he felt like, but he knew that was just his mind conflicting with the muscle memory of how TR generals wanted their papers written.

What seemed like an eon later, Edward decided to call it quits. "That should do it for now," he thought, hitting the save button on the document several times in succession for no real reason other than bad habit. He pulled off his gloves and stood up, tossing them onto his desk as he headed for the door, off to see the Council.

"Interesting," one of the Council members said, thinking over what Edward had reported. "You say you took down a Prowler in a single shot?"

"As I said, it was a fluke, sir," Edward replied. "At such an elevated position, I was able to take advantage of a weak point too small for previous weapons to utilize, but that the tank exploded indicates that the tank crew were not following proper ammunition storage procedures."

"I see," the elderly man replied. Of the eleven men seated before Edward, this one whom he knew as Anuj Narayana was the only one with a body over the age of fifty, it seemed, although Edward knew they were all likely his peers in terms of knowledge, if not true age. "So it was a fluke. But what about this Sunderer you engaged? Certainly, that would be considered a reasonable scenario of engagement for this kind of weapon?'

Edward nodded, shrugging slightly. "Perhaps the weapon might face reduced angles at which it can successfully penetrate if the enemy were to utilize blockade armor upgrades, and the spaced armor would limit post-penetration effects… but I see no reason why the round wouldn't otherwise crack the engine block or similarly disable the vehicle." The borderline-legalese way he had to speak with the Council members drove him nuts. A voice in the back of his mind desperately pleaded to shout out "It'll make a big fucking hole in anything short of a Lightning, so shut up already!"

"I still believe this Nanite Systems project to be a waste of time and resources," another Council member said, rudely resting his face on one hand. "The Lancer project has proven a resounding success. Why even waste our time on primitive kinetic-energy weapons when the Sovereignty already has the production capacity for superior accelerated-plasma technology!"

"Hush now, General Dragoslav," the elderly man said, gesturing to Edward. "Let us hear his recommendations. Then, you may discuss it amongst your peers for adoption. It was you who brought this to our attention, after all."

"Right," Edward said. "It's hefty, but it's certainly lighter than any rocket launcher. It would be a suitable support-role weapon for an Engineer carrying more individual pieces of gear than a Heavy Assault soldier. As I understand it, Field Engineers currently lack much in the way of truly portable anti-vehicle options?" He knew other options such as deployable anti-tank missile launchers existed for Engineers, but no one ever had anything good to say about them. Like nearly everything else in combat, getting on one of those was an invitation to have your brain blown out by anything that so much as sneezed in your general direction. Using one, you weren't just a sitting duck. More like a quadriplegic duck sitting on a box of dynamite at a gun range.

"Yes, well, that's where the Heavy Assault platoons come in," General Dragoslav said.

One of the other eleven Council members slammed his fist against the giant half-circle desk. "Give it a break, Dragoslav! You and I both know your prized 82nd can't cover everything! As Saller's report said, the Terran Republic pushed in on Ymir Bio Lab faster than usual. We barely had enough time to upload the lab data and evacuate the scientists, and that was AFTER Saller slowed their assault! So unless you're willing to split up the 82nd into separate regiments and spread them out, we'll keep-"

"Enough!" Dragoslav yelled. "You've been nagging on me for months to break up the 82nd! Do you think I haven't thought of that? If we break them up, they'll simply be overwhelmed and crushed piece by piece. If we keep them together to focus on the largest targets, then we can hold critical assets. We just need to train more men!"

At this point, the argument began to spread to the other members, engulfing the room in a cacophony of heated yelling. Edward helplessly looked around as heated words flew, until finally the elderly Council member looked his way and waved toward the door with a smile, mouthing "You're dismissed." As hastily as he dared, he beat a retreat to the door and slipped out into the hallway, letting out a pent-up sigh of relief. "I don't know how we get anything done when those old codgers break down into a pissing match over every little thing," he thought, strolling through the halls toward his office once more.

He felt something buzz in his lab coat pocket. Pulling up the sleek purple phone with the Vanu three-pronged logo on the back, he turned the device on and scrolled through the many pieces of software to the email application. Sure enough, a new email was waiting for him, sent by the Council members he had just left behind. "Probably wrote the message in advance so they wouldn't interrupt their verbal circlejerk," he thought. At the top of the message, however, were the words "highly confidential" in bold surrounded by brackets, which caught his attention immediately. Underneath it was a twelve-digit code beginning in VS-4, his personnel ID code unique to him alone. Most of the Vanu personnel didn't even know that personnel clearance codes went above 3, assuming that the mythical VS-4 was saved for the Council themselves, but in truth, the Council were VS-5. Glancing around the hallway to make sure he was alone, he stopped and took a seat against the cold metal walls and began to read.

HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL: VS-4 Clearance only

VS-4UE1317KG6

To VS-4UE1317KG6,

There were more topics to discuss today, but you know how General Dragoslav can be. I thoroughly expect him to keep the rest of this meeting derailed about his favorite little toys like a child seeking attention, so I will spare you another meeting by detailing things here.

In a previous meeting some months ago, we had discussed among ourselves to close down projects at your clearance level to reallocate engineers to the Holy Spear project (which he knew to be the codename for the Lancer project). While the facilities have been successfully cleared, much of the paperwork and data remains on the closed-network server we review each month. At the request of the Council, we require you to search through the remaining paperwork to choose which documents require preservation, and which to delete. Please postpone further work on the Aldebaran project (The evaluation of the Nanite Systems "Archer" and "Emissary" pre-production weapons he had used that morning) and report to Lab 67C to ensure the hasty completion of this task.

Should any questions arise, you have my personal cellphone.

VS-5UD4825HY9

"Damn it, Nuj," he thought, rolling his eyes as he jammed the phone back in his lab coat pocket and stood up. Document management, as mundane as it sounds, was probably more risky than any battlefield for a member of the Vanu Sovereignty. They were tight-pressed for data storage after saving every scrap of testing data, like a slob hoarding garbage in the unused rooms of his house; a slob who would also explode into a fit of rage if the maid he hired threw away the wrong "collectible". Men who had worked for fifty years to climb the ranks into VS-3 clearance had been dropped back to VS-1 in a heartbeat for deleting the wrong document's master copy. Even for a skilled eye like his, it was still a solid 60% guesswork, because you just never knew just what document the Council might call for, and for files at his clearance level? They could very well put him on the firing line for suspected treason. Keeping secret backups of the files in case you accidentally deleted something the Council wanted was a no-go, too; personal storage of documents with any clearance requirements had seriously harsh penalties, again a death sentence for files of this caliber.

Then again, if there was anyone they trusted with these documents, it was him or one of the few other engineers with VS-4 clearance. It was a roll of the dice that had just happened to pick him. With a scowl on his face, he headed off for the laboratory quadrant of the space station.

Laboratory 67C was completely abandoned, per usual. To be accurate, it wasn't much of a lab any more: It was a specially cordoned-off room that had once been an active laboratory, but was now where the master servers that stored documents with VS-3 clearance and above were installed. Although it held documents of lower clearance, only VS-4's and the Council could get into the physical room itself as a safety protocol, to keep dangerously curious VS-3's from prying into documents they shouldn't. Some of his VS-4 colleagues' careers, in fact, revolved around this room alone, maintaining the physical servers in peak condition as well as the advanced protection devices built into the room. Tuning automated sentries, checking the wiring of the electromagnetic pulse protection system, ironing out the endless loopholes in the digital security. The Council had even debated rebuilding an entirely new server room on a spring suspension system to protect the servers from physical shock if the space station had ever been struck by a large object, say, an asteroid or an anti-satellite missile. A man could dedicate his life to that kind of work and still never be done.

As usual, the room was absolutely frigid, as most server rooms were, spurring Edward to draw his lab coat tighter about him. He sat down at one of the computers at a desk in the center of the room, punching in his VS-4 code and a password on the physical keyboard. "I forgot any machines on the station still had these," he thought, listening as the clacking of the keyboard drowned out the near-silent hum of the servers surrounding him. Once the machine had logged him in, he immediately navigated through the network of folders to a folder labeled "Closed-Unarchived". This folder would contain all of the paperwork from projects that had been terminated, but hadn't been declassified for storage in the Vanu Archives back on the planet, on the southern half of the continent of Indar.

"Let's see what we've got here," he thought as he opened up the folder, punching in his clearance ID and password into a popup window one more time before the contents of the folder revealed themselves. Six named folders appeared, each likely containing several papers and possibly hundreds of schematics for projects that had gotten as far as the prototyping stage. Projects Artemis, Goliath, and Betelgeuse were all familiar to him from his own hand in the work, the former two relating to up-arming and up-armoring the Sovereignty's equivalent to the Prowler tank, the Magrider. The latter was a new attempt at designing a light machine gun for the 82nd Heavy Infantry that utilized what was essentially micro-sized nuclear generators as magazines. While the design had worked rather well, providing effectively bottomless magazines for soldiers with good trigger discipline, that wasn't exactly the defining trait of the 82nd. And so, they complained about overheating enough to have the project scrapped.

To his surprise, Project Aldebaran, his most recent assignment with that anti-materiel rifle and pocket submachine gun, was also in the folder of closed projects, alongside another relatively successful project he had worked on a month ago that went by the name of Phaseshift. Accessing the folder properties, he found that VS-5UE4545KD2 had authorized the closure of Aldebaran that morning, and Phaseshift only a few days ago. "That has to be Dragoslav, that dirty cunt. How about I drag him kicking and screaming out in front of a TR armor column and let HIM fight for his life just to tell him the project's closed…"

Suddenly, a thought crossed his mind that put a devilish grin on his face. "You gave me authorization to delete it, how about authorization to un-delete it?" he thought, opening up a new file browser to navigate to the proper active-projects folder. "A little smudging of the lab room assignment, and he won't find it 'till I'm long done with the project and pushed it into service. Maybe old man Narayana could help keep Dragoslav busy until I'm done." He dragged the two project files from one folder to the other before opening up the project file to find the ancillary documents – information he knew would state which laboratory was hosting the projects, who was working on it, when they were scheduled to be completed, et cetera. Deleting the old assignments, he punched in his personal lab code and typed in his VS-4 ID as well as the VS-3 ID's of his trusted crew, including Felix and the gunner of his Valkyrie, Cecilia Monaghan. That would give him more than enough crew to work with for getting the projects completed before Dragoslav could make a stink about it to the Council.

"That should slim down on how much crap I need to read," he thought. Closing the folders of the newly-reappointed projects, he turned his attention to the final project on the list: Project Shadow. He couldn't help but frown as he wracked his mind for any memory of the project, but none came. "I can't even remember anyone talking about this by name…" he thought. "Maybe it's that rumor about the new wave of armor implants due to release soon. But that was recently demoted down to VS-2 clearance after a confirmed intel leak, so that wouldn't even be here any more…" He opened up the project folder, surprised to find it totally empty of technical documents. Only the ancillary document remained. He clicked on that to open it, not surprised to find it corrupted and unusable, according to the machine. "We'll see about that, you stupid brick," he thought, opening the file with a basic text editor. Through the wall of symbols, fragments of text remained, most interestingly a few fragmented VS-4 and VS-5 IDs, and the name Lab 69D. One of the VS-4 ID's looked suspiciously like his, aside from several digits replaced by strings of incoherent symbols from the corruption.

"Why the hell would I be assigned to a project and not even get a notification for it?" he muttered, double-checking the lab code as though it were a glitch in the computer. Aside from Specialized Containment Units numbered 1 through 19, all labs in the 20 through 80 range were designed with three rooms labeled A, B, and C, and a central, shared testing space. In theory, it was to promote cooperation between scientists of different projects when you could go ask for help from guys at your clearance level just across the hall, or watch your friends work on different projects for inspiration. So, to find a lab room labeled D within that range struck him as odd. "Maybe the central testing room is labeled D? I can't remember anyone ever calling it that," he thought. "Maybe it's a new thing. I bet the project never even got off the ground, so there's nothing to read. Couldn't hurt to check, though." Checking the lab number one last time, he logged out of the machine and hopped up from his desk, eager to get out of the chilly room. He quietly slipped out of the room, shutting the door behind him, and took off down the hall at a jogging pace.

Passing through the occasional groups of engineers chatting in the hallway, Edward hiked around the station's outer belt of laboratories, arriving at Lab 69 within just a few minutes. Holding up his keycard he kept clipped to his jacket, he slipped it into the slot in the card-reader by the door. With a muted electronic chirp, the small touchscreen panel prompted him with a request for a password. Punching in his password, however, caused the panel to flash red, signaling that the passcode was incorrect.

"Huh… Maybe one of the Council members set a custom password on this one," he thought. "Maybe if I give Anuj a call, he could get me the passcode…" On one hand, he knew that was a bad idea. Projects were cancelled for a reason. The job they handed him only entailed filing away the papers he was given, not to go digging for things already deleted, if they even existed. Anuj Narayana was his long-time defender in the Council, but he was first and foremost a Council member, so he would likely report him if this was as serious as he thought it could be. And if the Council caught him snooping around on projects that weren't meant to see the light of day, he could find himself in some seriously deep shit faster than he could even respond. On the other hand, though, was the burning curiosity of a scientist, the determination of a soldier, and the know-how of an engineer.

He began running the possibilities through his head. One option would be to hit up the armory. He had contacts, good friends there that could likely smuggle out an EMP grenade or two, which would easily disable the electronic door lock. That only left the mechanical lock, which would require some homemade tools to get into if he didn't want to cut through the lock with a power saw. Not really an option for a public space, where anyone in the surrounding labs would likely hear him. That also assumes they didn't install a special EMP-proof variant of the electronic lock used for the high-security labs, which visually looks no different than the normal ones, so that option didn't appeal to him. The second option would be to dig through the archives for details on the computer chip inside. No matter how insulated electronics were, they always emitted a frequency that could be picked up and read, if you could filter out the excess noise. If he knew more about the computer inside that stored the password, he could likely modify his keycard with a small chip and receiver that, when inserted into the depths of the machine, could pick up a sample of the noise and try to read it for the binary code that leaked out as electronic noise. Or, he could build a probe on his card that could jack some connections on the chip itself to read what it was doing…

…or maybe it was as simple as trying a few educated passwords. The project code-name, Shadow, he figured, was as good a place as any to start. The question is, what kind of encryption would they use? The Sovereignty engineers, they're a bright bunch. The cult formed from the smartest engineers and scientists who wanted to escape Terran rule, so it was a given fact that the IQ of the average Vanu soldier stood head and shoulders above his peers in the TR, perhaps an entire body over the New Conglomerate pinheads. It either has to be something so incredibly difficult that they couldn't figure it out without serious concerted effort, which could be detected and broken up, or something so inconceivably stupid that they would naturally overly-complicate the solution and never get it.

He tried shifting the letters of "Shadow" to their numerical value in the alphabet, only to get a red screen. Adding zeroes in front of any single digit number, still a red screen. Even an attempt at shifting the letters in his credentials ID to their numerical value in both forms resulted in flashing red screens.

Frustrated, Edward pulled his phone out of his pocket. He opened up the message Anuj Narayana had sent him, wondering if there were any clues. "One of those VS-5 credentials, they could have been him…" he thought, scanning the message. As he finished the message, his eyes came to rest on Narayana's closing phrase and ID number. Looking it over, an off-topic thought hit him. "The number I have for Nuj isn't a private line, it's the Council receptionist for non-combat phone calls, so why the hell would he say I have his private number? unless… excluding the VS at the beginning, our ID's are the exact length of an old-school phone number, if you used the old keypad lettering to exchange the letters for numbers."

Then, the thought hit him. He pocketed his phone and began typing, resulting in the number 742369; "Shadow", translated in keypad lettering. With a muted chirp, the screen flashed green, and the locks undid themselves with a series of clicks that allowed the two halves of the door to slide apart. "Go fucking figure," he thought as he withdrew his keycard and stepped into the room, expecting the lights to come on by themselves as they did in all other labs. Even after a few seconds, however, they had yet to flicker into life. As the doors slid shut, he reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone once more, using the screen to find the light switch on the inside of the doorframe. The lights flickered on, bathing the room in light.

The room before him was a mess. Only the rack of weapons in the far corner of the room stood organized; the rest of the room was coated in blank scraps of paper, like someone had dumped several reams of the stuff into a wood chipper. On the desk in the center of the room sat a single desktop computer, surrounded by neat stacks of books and written papers, but what most worried him was what looked like blood hardened onto the backrest of the white swivel chair tucked into the desk. He quietly crept into the room, his hair all over his body standing on end all the way to the computer. The computer was still logged into someone's account, with a document displayed on the screen.

Scrolling to the top of the document, he began to read. The further he read, the farther down his heart sank into his stomach. In disbelief, he stood up and stepped over to the west-side room, what would have been labelled 69A.

Sure enough, bodies. Many, many bodies.

Edward had to hold his mouth to keep from puking at the gut-wrenching smell of corpses starting to decay. He forced himself into the room, looking over the faces and the names. Another wave of vomiting came forth, this time too strong to hold back. He stepped over to the garbage can by the door and unloaded his stomach before forcing himself to return, pulling the bodies aside one by one. Soon, he found exactly what he was looking for: himself.

"No fucking way," he said, his hands clammy and trembling as he pulled up the ID card hanging from the corpse's jacket. Number for number, it matched his own. Even the photo, down to the most minute detail. "Sweet holy god, the bastards did it. WE did it."

Edward stepped out of the room, sliding down to the ground against the closed door as he thought things over. What they did, he knew, was synthetic memory editing. After the project was terminated, he had been shot, and his memories altered before being rebuilt in the Reconstruction Tubes. Wiping memories was only one half of the equation, by far the easier of the two. The other half? Over in 69B, according to the report on the computer he had read. The document had said that they had taken DNA from several soldiers and engineers to create an ideal body. High IQ capacity, physically well-built bodies for combat, the works. Nothing too special, he knew. That was just one of the options his Reconstruction Tubes provided, if you weren't choosing to re-use an existing set of DNA. The purpose of the project, what they had finally cracked, was the ability to successfully synthesize memories and implant it into a brain in a way that it could make sense of. It allowed someone to take perfect training, combat experience, and combine it with a cut-and-paste body that could be readily prepared as a truly disposable soldier.

The issue, though, was that the process wasn't perfect. The project was written as "close to failure" because they couldn't produce a series of memories that were permanent – they never made it to long-term memory. As they lost their memories, the test subjects were devolving to babies in an adult body, or worse, somewhere in between, like violent cavemen. There were duplicates of some bodies in the room, further along in decomposing than the rest. Failures that had to be put down, no doubt.

Edward forced himself to his feet. He needed to get photos, upload everything to the master server in 67C, especially the documents on the computer, and get this archived. Pulling up his phone, he raised the device and used its built-in camera to take a photo of the corpses in 69A. Taking a deep breath to calm himself, he braced for the worst as he walked over to the door labeled 69B.

Inside, the room was immaculate, save for a single garbage can by the door that was overflowing with combat MRE packets. An operating table was set up in the center of the room with body restraints in place, accompanied by a wide variety of white or silver medical equipment and white mobile cabinets on either side of the room. Even the body locked into the table seemed pristine, like it was sculpted into place and painted by an artist more divinely inspired than Henry Briggs himself after receiving the first vision of the Vanu some two hundred and sixty years ago. The young lady, likely in her early twenties, was dressed in nothing but a patient's tunic where she lay, with a long IV tube connected to her right arm at the wrist as it dripped a clear liquid into her bloodstream. Stuffing his phone in his pocket, Edward rushed over to her side, placing two fingers at her throat. To his relief, he still felt a pulse. "Shit, is this one of the psycho ones?" he thought, glancing up to read the label on the massive jug where it hung on its stand, feeding liquid into her veins. He already knew what it as without reading, nothing more than a simple slow-drip concentrated narcotic that had kept her in a forced coma for god knows how long.

Without thinking, he reached down and pulled the needle out of her arm, only to start cursing himself out for stupidly doing so without bandages on hand as blood began to well up out of the hole. Scavenging briefly through the cabinets yielded the gauze he needed, which he quickly applied to where the needle had been inserted. He could feel her heart rate slowly approaching normality as he worked. His job done, he took a seat on the end of the table, repeatedly running his hands through his hair for several minutes on end as he thought over the consequences of what he had just done. "God, I'm in deep. Why the hell did I pull the damn IV! If some medic has to come in here and give her another MRE, he could be mauled if I don't put her down! But unless they plan to keep her alive in captivity forever, they'll put her down when she goes feral, too… Fuck me," he muttered, rubbing his face.

Suddenly, he felt a tap on his shoulder that sent lightning down his spine. Leaping off of the table, he whipped about, his phone in hand and ready to throw at a moment's notice. To his surprise, the young lady was sitting up on the table, silently staring at him without the slightest emotion. Stowing his phone, he cautiously approached, paralyzed with the fear that she could very well leap up to attack him at any moment. "Can you understand me?" he asked.

The girl nodded, looking around the room in thought before returning her gaze to him.

"Can you speak?" he asked

To this, she didn't respond, only glaring at him accusingly, as if to say "of course I can, you twat, and I don't need words to, either."

"... alright, fine, don't answer that one," Edward said. "Do you know your clearance ID, your name, anything at all about why you're here?"

The girl shook her head. "Oh goddamn it, she's completely off the radar," he thought, nodding in response. In his mind, there was only one way out of this mess that might let him stay alive, maybe even a free man. "Alright, stay right here, I need to go make a phone call," he said as he backed away, slipping through the door. He pulled out his phone once more, hastily pulling up his contacts to call one of the many emergency numbers saved in speed-dial. The phone had hardly rang before someone on the other side picked up. "Hey, Joey, it's Ed," he said, rubbing his forehead with his off-hand. "I need to ask you a favor. If I get you the photos, can you build me some paperwork to forge an ID?"