There are two types of ONI operations, the ones that failed thanks to some unbelievably glaring errors, and those that we haven't found out to have failed yet.
-Anonymous ONI operative
Screaming Mimi, Uptown
Nua Manila
Far Isle
1954 Military Standard Time
23 September 2488
"What's good, sampit?"
Nell Ortega looked up from her drink, taking the offered envelope. She slid it under the table and counted the stack of pesos by touch. There was more than enough in there to keep the alat off her tail for another week. Small change compared to what the crank that the organization put on the streets brought in. She slid two of the bills off the top and handed them back to the man.
"For services rendered," she said with a smirk. "Were there any problems?"
"Not on my part," Ollie Quezon said, flicking open his pocket knife and using it to chip the brownish-red crust from his fingers. "How's the family?"
"Maria's got me on a low-carbohydrate diet again. Something she read in a maga-"
The world exploded, glass and wood shattering as bullets tore through them. The patrons of the bar dove for cover, most too late as they too were perforated. To Ortega there was no sound thanks to the overwhelming volume of gunfire. Shattered glass cut into her exposed arms as she lay flat on the floor. Rounds zipped just overhead, marked by tracers that glanced off harder surfaces, the still-burning illuminating elements breaking off the rounds and falling to the floor to sear pits in the varnished wood.
A man dropped, his chest exploding in puffs of vaporizing viscera. A woman fell, her head partially collapsed by a round to her eye socket. Gem-colored liquors splashed onto the ground and hissed as heated fragments fell upon it. The storm of tracers lit up the room even as it shattered the lights. Ortega could feel Quezon on top of her, shielding her from the worst of the fire as he shoved her to the ground.
Just as quickly as the fire started, it stopped. There was no gradual tapering off like when how Nua Manila bangers found out their weapons' magazines were not bottomless. It was as if someone had flipped a switch and the gunfire just stopped. Not giving up the opportunity, Ortega stood, shouldering Quezon out of the way as she drew the gleaming block of steel called the Misriah M6A. It was a cop gun to be sure, but it was cheap and durable.
"Nell, get down!" Quezon called, scrambling to extract his own pistol.
The door had been all but blasted off its hinges by the gunfire. She kicked the remnants of the door out of the way and stepped out onto the street with her pistol raised. A pair of late-model Genets were peeling away from the scene, headed in different directions. There was something odd about them, but she could barely make out anything in the darkness. She heard Quezon come up from behind her, breathing heavily.
"Sampit, what the hell was that?" he asked, looking around. "The alat are coming. We don't have time for their shit."
"Looks like we'll have plenty of time," Ortega said. The police Genets with their flashing lights were already cordoning off the ends of the block. "Your piece is registered, right?"
It had taken roughly an hour to get good lighting back in the Screaming Mimi. Inspector Paolo Kolchak would have preferred if the lights had been dialed down a bit though. He stepped out of the department-issue Genet and looked around.
The Screaming Mimi was known neutral ground for the gangs of Nua Manila. They needed those sorts of places to avoid having the city turn into an abattoir writ large. Whoever had done this had obviously not cared about any of that. What was left of the facade was a bullet-scarred mess. He called up the preliminary report on his chatter as he walked past the knot of Gardai manning the barricades. Reports of automatic weapons fired in the neighborhood, several dead and wounded carted off to the local hospital for storage or treatment respectively. It was one of the benefits of Far Isle being under the sole governance of one national government, making the sharing of information easier, at least in theory.
But that hadn't prepared him for the bodies. Not really. There were a dozen crime scene technicians going over the scene with a pair of ARGUS drones. They collected samples and took still and video captures of the bodies for holographic compilation later. White-suited, their smocks seemed to glow with the lighting that had been brought on-scene. Wraiths might have been a better description of how they looked, hovering over the bodies.
It wasn't his first time viewing bodies. Anyone on the force who was a garda or higher had likely seen their fill of bodies in under two weeks on the job. What struck him was the sheer number of them. Most homicides in Nua Manila tended to be back alley or penthouse deals, with at most two corpses if it was some sort of murder-suicide arrangement. But this was different. There had to be some sort of record that this broke. Two dozen bodies lay where they fell, some barely touched with a few holes while others were barely recognizable with what was left of their clothes soaked in blood and mixed with bullet-shredded flesh.
Almost all of them sported banger tats, the intricate tattoos that denoted membership in one of Nua Manila's many gangs and "organized families" as they liked to be called. It was a shame, that there weren't more of them laid out dead on the floor, that was.
"Where's the better half, Inspector?" Siobhan Hoekstra asked, kneeling over one of the bodies that was lying against an interior wall. "He was kinda growing on me."
"He's probably half-asleep right now, listening to that Neo-Greco gangster rap shit and down with that mud flea fever," Kolchak groused as he pulled on fresh nitrile gloves. "So what's up with this guy?"
"He's got Carnales tats and four-millimeter entry and exit wounds," Hoekstra said, pulling the body around so he could have a look. "That vic over there," the medical examiner said, pointing to another one. "VKs. She's got larger caliber wounds. Looks like go-mag to me, but I'll need to examine this a bit closer at the lab."
Kolchak scratched his chin. "Four-millimeter? Shit, my uncle's rifle uses those. Good varmint round."
"Works good on people too," Tomas Guillou said, offering him a small evidence bag as he walked up. "We're still digging these out of the walls." There were a dozen objects no thicker than a fingernail and only a few centimeters long. "Copper-jacketed with what ARGUS says is a tungsten core. Nasty stuff."
Hoekstra looked up at the chief technician. "Tungsten's not really civilian-grade, is it? I thought only the military used that stuff."
Kolchak frowned and typed out a quick request through the police portion of the government data cloud to check in with the local UNSC garrison to see if anyone checked out the munitions stockpiles lately. He almost forgot to pocket his chatter when he saw the wall.
Whoever the shooters were, they had done a thorough job on the place. The wallpaper had been shredded and still smoldered in places. But what struck him was the sheer saturation of the place. The shooters had worked over the place methodically, judging from the blood spray and the spacing of the holes. It had definitely been automatic fire that had done this. He walked closer to examine the walls. They had swept the room at roughly waist-height, probably to maximize casualties. Then the shooters seemed to have cut the floor into discrete areas that received their thorough attention. The brutal practicality of it chilled him.
"Do we have any witnesses?" he asked the room at large.
"They're all outside," Inspector Neil Balich said, walking up with a tray of coffee. "Where's Junior?"
"Sick as a dog, you know that," Kolchak said. "Hell of a mess. What're you doing here?"
"I was in the neighborhood," Balich said, the corner of his mouth twitch upwards. "Hard not to hear the gunfire."
Balich was just like everyone else in the police force, not paid enough. He, like pretty much everyone else with any common sense, had been supplementing their incomes with a bit of cash on the side from the organized families of Nua Manila. Between a truly anemic paycheck and the rampant company store policies that the big corporations on Far Isle ran, taking money from the gangsters was the only option for many of them to keep their families' houses lit and with running water and food.
"Anyone we know out there or on the slabs?" Kolchak asked.
"Well, Manny Two-Fingers isn't rolling around anymore, Carrie Rodriguez got both lungs popped, oh, and Ortega's about to get a ride to the local station with Razor Quezon," Balich said as he counted off on his free hand. "Oleg Sharpe got a bullet to the head, along with his boyfriend Avalos. Hey, Ortega's with the Brotherhood, right?"
"Yep." Kolchak took one of the coffees and started for the exit, glass crunching under his shoes. "Guess who gets to deal with their bullshit later?"
"Well, you know how it is," Balich said with a smirk. "Just remember when the bangers got their chrome hand cannons pointing at you, try to imagine them naked."
He nodded. "Yeah, yeah. Put the word out that nobody speaks to Ortega except for me. I want to know who the hell was stupid enough to try to start some shit with the families."
Walking back outside, he spotted Ortega easily and headed over. She was being checked over by a medical technician with her hands flex-cuffed with a buckmesh restraint. A garda kept an eye on her, an evidence bag with an M6 in his hand, her M6 most likely. Kolchak sat down next to her on the curb and offered her the coffee.
"Bean Ortega," he said by way of greeting. "Anything I can get you?"
"My pistol would be nice," she said, handing back the cup after a sip. "It's registered and everything. Brand new, too."
He looked up at the officer, who handed him the bag with a moment's hesitation. Breaking the seal, Kolchak extracted the silvery pistol and racked it twice to make sure it was clear. Sniffing the barrel and ejector port before toggling the slide release, he offered it to her.
"We keep an eye on things. Hasn't been fired, and it isn't wet, so I figure we can be reasonable-like about this," Kolchak said.
"In case you didn't notice, alat, my hands aren't exactly free," she replied with a quirked eyebrow before he returned the pistol to its bag.
"So, what happened?"
"Your guess is as good as mine, alat," Ortega said. "Just having a drink, and then some fucker unloaded on the bar."
"You know if anyone pissed anyone else off enough to shoot up the Mimi?" he asked. "And before you say anything, let me remind you that business is doing pretty well right now, barring, well, this. You don't need to say anything if you don't want to, but if we have to investigate, the Commissioner's going to need to make it look legit. That means SWAT crashing around and slotting anyone with a gun. You and I both don't want this, right?"
"VKs were edging in on our ground, that's for sure," Ortega said after a moment's consideration. "But we weren't on shooting terms. Not yet, at least."
"Well, we found Ronnie and Carlo inside. If you're at war, I don't think they got the memo."
"Then I'm out of ideas, alat. You have any..." she trailed off, staring at one of the Genets. Her eyes unfocused for a moment. "I don't have any ideas. Can I go?"
"Just a quick processing at the precinct," Kolchak said, pretending not to notice the lapse as he stood up. "Try to remember your statement."
"It's got the benefit of being true," Ortega said as he walked away.
Nua Manila City Morgue, Downtown
Nua Manila
0823 Military Standard Time
"You okay there, Inspector?"
Kolchak waved dismissively. "I'm fine, stims are kicking in is all. So what's the word on the bodies?"
Hoekstra looked at him for a moment before calling up fresh screens on the glass holoboard closest to her. The city morgue's examination room was bare gleaming tile that reflected the light from the ceiling-mounted illumination strips a little too well. They also lit up the row of tables that now populated the room in addition to the one they were standing in front of.
"Vic in this case is your standard banger. Timothy Mutter. Male, late twenties, liver and kidneys are cirrhotic and scarred, consistent with heavy use of alcohol and tiletamine, or at least that's what we can tell from what's left of them. Multiple GSWs to the lower thoracic cavity." She picked one image and blew it up on the board for Kolchak to see. "Here's the MRI we did at the scene. Wound channels and recovered slugs confirm the two calibers used, four-millimeter and twelve-point-seven."
Kolchak whistled, rubbing his goatee. The man almost looked asleep under the orange glow of the sterile field generator. Almost. His face had peeled back slightly around a pair of gunshot wounds, which revealed a part of his cheekbone. Stripped of his clothes and cleaned up, his torso was peppered with small cuts from shrapnel, but that was not the main attraction.
"Multiple GSWs to the lower thoracic cavity" was a polite way of saying "Almost sawed in half at the belly button." Hoekstra or one of the other examiners had extracted the organs which were sitting in tubs next to the body. That had left the corpse looking somewhat deflated, his pale skin waxen and resembling a macabre tarp pitched on what was left of his ribcage. Hoekstra turned to look up at one of the camera bubbles.
"Anything you would like to add, Horatio?"
"Doctor Hoekstra, the wounds are extremely close together, not matching the typical profile of sustained automatic fire. Microscopic tattooing indicates close-range shooting," the even tone of the morgue AI came across as a detached observer, worryingly so. There was something about how dumb AIs interacted with him that worried Kolchak.
"Where did crime scene find this one?" he asked, walking over another board and calling up the holograph. "Looks about right. Horatio, how would you characterize the shooting?"
"Inspector Kolchak, the trajectories indicate a focused aim uncharacteristic of traditional gangland shootings. The ballistic trauma profile fits aimed bursts or extremely rapid semi-automatic fire, suggesting a trained background or access to semi-automatic firearms. The rounds recovered are sufficiently common that this may have been a territorial dispute with a new group."
Kolchak nodded and pulled out his chatter. "Right, Horatio, coordinate with Calleigh or another one of your AI buddies. I want a work-up on possible new players in Nua Manila based on recent arrivals from the smaller cities. Prioritize on any citizens with prior military service. Upload results to my workspace as soon as you're finished."
"Order confirmed, Inspector Kolchak."
"And now I'm going back to the precinct and reading the murderboard until this all makes sense," he said, taking a dramatic bow. His chatter buzzed, and he took a look at the caller's identification before accepting the call. "Hey, kiddo, sorry about last night, I got called in on some business. Is your mother okay?"
"Say hello to the wife and kids for me," Hoekstra called as he walked off.
City Hall, Midtown
Nua Manila
0941 Military Standard Time
Nothing quite like an early morning press conference to reinforce a habitual dislike of the press. Mayor Giorgio Heyer sat back in his chair, sinking into the plush leather. The first drink of the day, an imported Harvest whiskey, sat on his desk in front of him. The mayor's office was a grand affair with gilt and marble everywhere, patterned on some old Earth style of conspicuous consumption. He took a sip of the smoky liquor and sighed.
"Okay, get the Commissioner in here."
Commissioner Aldric Lester was a big man, a decades-old veteran of the force. Somewhere along the way he had picked up a taste for politics and had wormed his way into three mayors' cabinets. He was good at his job though. He understood that crime could not be eradicated, merely contained. But if push came to shove, Lester had enough swing to authorize deploying the Garda de la Paz in force on the streets to "enforce the peace." He knew it, and everyone he worked with knew it.
But thanks to him, Heyer controlled the city like a fiefdom. It was small consolation for the world-state that existed on Far Isle. They were far away from Earth for the colonists to want their own individual nations on the planet, but also far enough for the Colonial Administration Authority to require a much economic form of regulation. So rather than allowing formal divisions among the diverse settlers, they had mandated a singular authority of a president and a planetary senate. It made sense in a twisted way, but it also made it that much easier to enjoy the fruits of his labor to the top of the city. Bureaucratic gridlock was a wonderful way of ensuring that nobody tried to stop you from wetting your beak with some hard-earned rewards.
"Aldric, give me some good news, and fix yourself a drink," Heyer said before bringing his glass up for another drink and then pressing a switch to call up the holoboards built into the table surface. "Is there anything that you can find out about these shooters?"
"Nothing so far," Lester said. He pointedly stepped past the bar and continued speaking. "Although I'm currently assembling a task force to deal with it."
"And there's nothing I can possibly use for the update in two hours?"
"Not nothing, Your Honor," Lester said after a moment. He unlocked his chatter and streamed a copy of the incident data to the mayor's private cloud from the morgue servers. Immediately, several terabytes of raw images and barely collated holography began to stream across the previously-transparent boards. "It is still being processed by the AI. But whoever it is, it's pretty clear they're not playing sides with this."
"So a new gang? Great." The mayor dismissed the images and finished his drink. "Have your boys round up a few locals and ask them some questions. Politely. I need something to tell the governor if he asks during tomorrow's meet and greet."
Lester smiled thinly. "They're already on it."
Millennium Motor Court, Uptown
Nua Manila
1041 Military Standard Time
"Who the hell even cruises for hookers in the morning?"
Vergis sketched a shrug, gritting her teeth as she exerted more pressure. She could feel the nails trying to push through her gloves, but she maintained her grip. These things were won through persistence and a ready supply of air. She had both. The street walker that she was working on had neither.
Strangulation was a simple enough task, but the trouble arose when you needed to make a specific point of it. She could have simply applied any number of holds to cut off the circulation of blood to the brain, or just used a rope and be done with it. But those methods were unsubtle. Which left her on a motel bed wearing a medical technician's smock with thick rubber gloves that came up just past her elbows. The thrashing woman beneath her hands had not even entered the equation.
"You want to give it a go?" she asked as the struggling died down. "I wish the boss'd try doing some of this crap himself."
Hunt laughed as he opened the bottle of liquor. "I think he's done his fair share. And I can't, remember? The marks need to be made by a single person." He inhaled the fruity scent of the spirit and sighed as he poured the contents of a vial into the newly-opened bottle and swirled it around. "It's a damn shame we don't have any more of this. Feels like a waste doing this."
"Well, get ready," Vergis said, ignoring him. "I can feel it just about to- Ah, there we go," she said as the arms that had been clawing at her fell away. "Her trachea just gave out. Come on, let's get her watered."
Hunt walked over and gently poured some of the liquor into the already-open mouth. Getting a good measure in, the two of them levered the body up and tilted the head back for a few seconds before returning it to its original position.
"Okay, now what?" Hunt asked with a sigh. "I hate these jobs. Too much hurrying up and waiting."
"What, this is your first rodeo?" Vergis asked, an eyebrow raised. "Get the stimulator kit."
"One stimulator kit coming up," Hunt said as he reached into the duffel next to him. "And yeah, this is the first time I've been on an op that needed a Waingro to be done."
"Creeped out or something?" Vergis asked. She took the offered kit and started to attach the electrodes to the corpse. "It's okay. First one I did, I puked a little. As long as you don't throw up on the body, nobody really cares."
"It's not that," Hunt said. "What do you think the boss is doing?" he asked, abruptly changing the topic.
"We'll probably hear it from here if he screws it up."
ONI Safehouse, Midtown
Nua Manila
1052 Military Standard Time
"And that's the second to last of them," Severn said, stifling a yawn as she replaced the caps on the detonators. "Thanks, chief," she said, accepting the mug of coffee. "Can we get some better ear protection? I saw this great place on the local web."
"Maybe later," Rasheed said. He turned to the holo-pedestal. "Griffin, anything?"
The AI's avatar flashed into existence with a broad smile. "Financial measures are running to specification, sir. The results are being packeted and sent to the accounts we set up last night. I must say we are quite a profitable internet gambling site. Several, in fact."
Rasheed smiled as he peeled open a cube of C-12 to hand off to Severn. It was interesting to watch the biofoam-like "cut" being worked into the explosive. The small cube seemed to balloon into a large brick by the time the bomb maker was done. That was then lowered into a polymer-wrapped jacket of mixed ingredients, all sure to liven any emergency room's day. Wells were punched with a wooden dowel to avoid any unpleasantness from metallic objects coming too close to the stuff without need. The entire package was then sealed with a dab of epoxy before being set aside.
"Okay, when Hunt and Vergis get back, I want you guys to start sorting them out for delivery. I have a meeting to get to," he said, pulling on a jacket.
Rourke's Social Club, Uptown
Nua Manila
1703 Military Standard Time
The dull booming of the bass made the back of Ortega's teeth rattle. She sat back and brought the shisha pipe to her lips while admiring the writhing forms on the main stage. Another calming hit of the loa washed away the cares of the world for a few seconds. Her tolerance had long since built up that it no longer had the buzz it used to. That was the trouble with the loa sometimes, no staying power. But at least she could still think clearly. The cool vapors of the drug permeated her lungs, tasting of burnt metal and strawberries as she exhaled.
"So, what did you see, Nell?" Roman Orjuela asked, sipping his glass of milk.
"It wasn't the VKs, or the Rollers," she said after a moment. "Manny Two-Fingers was there, same with Cassandra."
"My sympathies, my child," Orjuela said, reaching over to pat her hand. "I know you had your difficulties."
"She chose her road, and I chose mine," Ortega said, speaking around the momentary lump in her throat. "But I don't think it was any of the Uptown or Midtown families. Or even the Discipline. This was too clean, boss."
Roman Orjuela had all but adopted her off the streets of Nua Manila. The head of the Carnales, he dominated the social club with his mere presence. He rolled the stub of his cigar between his callused fingers as he considered the information.
"What do you mean it was too clean?"
"It was like the entire thing was rigged, sir," she said. "By the time those assholes drove off, the police were just arriving on the scene." Ortega paused for a moment, considering something.
"What is it?" Orjuela asked, picking up her reluctance. "What was it about the shooting?"
"The cars, boss," she said after taking another hit. "They were Genets. Alat Genets."
o
Author's Rant: Yep, much darker fare than what I normally do. For anyone who doesn't recognize the slang and italicized terminology, ask someone who does. It all makes sense when you realize that I'm portraying Far Isle as a predominantly Irish-Filipino planet. Any particular distinctions you make from that, well, they might be true. Check the story on SpaceBattles since FFnet apparently doesn't like how I formatted AI-to-AI conversations, so I've made the choice to remove that segment for publishing here. Comments/critiques/cries of horror fuel the writing machine, so feel free to leave a comment.
And for a moment to actually rant about stuff... I really don't like Glasslands. I originally started out as a fan of Traviss with Hard Contact and Triple Zero, where the clones were clones, the Separatists were Separatists, and the Mandalorians were sidecast. But I've gradually grown disillusioned by the crap that she keeps putting out and calling "literature." Besides the flagrant errors in the tech presented in Glasslands, as well as beyond the utter fuck-up of a timeline, Traviss basically decided to go full-on soap-boxing about her views. Sure, my Armywank in Halo is fairly blatant, but I don't go about screaming at the top of my lungs in every other paragraph that "The UNSC Army is the best and only hope of humanity in Halo!" (And if I do, I sincerely apologize.) At each and every turn, characterization that had been established over several books is tossed right out the window. The fact that Parangosky had authorized the mass and possibly industrialized conscription of children (Let's do some math. 300 SPARTAN-IIIs per graduating company, which does not include the washouts. Three graduating companies with one more in the works. What does that equal? At bare minimum 1200 children conscripted) is basically dismissed in favor of condemning Halsey for conscripting seventy-five. And then there is the matter of the flash-cloning, which was similarly tossed out the window despite the process being notably established as expensive as fuck, highly-regulated, and requiring the authorization from the higher-ups in ONI before getting cleared. But no, not according to Traviss! Hell, then there's the matter of Mendez suddenly developing a conscience after being responsible for the training of some 1275 children into brainwashed super soldiers. His pit of shit is deeper than Halsey's, and he doesn't have a damn stepladder to use, just like her. And that's not even getting into the actual plot and happenings of the story.
Which brings me to explaining something for people still wondering what the guy with the weird guy-on-a-unicorn avatar is rambling on about: If you favor moral certainties, clear-cut heroes, and good triumphing over evil, "An Easy Road" is not for you. Traviss tried to make a black ops team out of Kilo-Five and wound up with a band of identically-minded identically-voiced characters who might as well all be named "Karen Traviss" for all the effort it's been given. The NAVSPEC team here is...significantly different. They will lie to, cheat, steal from, and outright commit mass murder upon the people of Far Isle. Why? Because it's what it takes to accomplish their mission. Because this is for the betterment of the people of the planet. Because for them, they see it as the lesser of a great number of evils. I leave it up to you to decide whether or not they're right or wrong.