"This is a Security Lockdown. All non-essential personnel are required to remain in their homes and await formal inspection. Failure to adhere to these instructions may result in immediate termination, confiscation of their property and contractual service obligations for any known family and associates.
Have a Profitable Day, and thank you for choosing Anyo Corp."
- City Watch PA announcement
Far above the market place, Sara-as-Mirage stalked back and forth across the pipework; pacing like a caged tiger.
"They're gone. He's gone."
"Define gone." The man's voice was tinny; popped-through atmospheric interference.
"Absent, vanished; absconded. Otherwise not here."
"Last known location?"
"You're looking at it."
"Void's Teeth, Sara. This is why we tell the Lotus."
"Don't start. Look, the scan I sent you. Recognise it?"
"Of course. Ostron markings. A ward of some kind."
"Yeah, and we're on Venus. Corpus may be soulless profit junkies, but they're predictable. They keep records. Find me a crew manifest employing an Ostron mercenary. There can't be that many."
"On it. What's your plan?"
Sara's frame stopped in her tracks. She had spotted something below.
"Leave that to me."
Sara crouched low on the pipework, her Mirage tensing unconsciously even without her direct input.
At the furthest edges of the market, she could make out the Corpus sweeper teams, commencing their lockdown; the flitting pulse of drone repulsors and columns of marching crewmen, dressed in the oily, lime-green livery of the City Watch. The City Watch for this part of the city were comparatively grubby relative to their Upper Tier counterparts; their gear dented and coolant-stained, but no less ruthless.
Directly beneath her, some three blocks from the encroaching taskforce, a number of shadows flitting across the broken clearing, darting from corpse to corpse. Too small to be adults. Street-urchins, wrapped in patch-worn cloaks. Small grubby hands worked quickly; stripping the dead. Credit chits, gang rings; even gold teeth.
Most urgently, they salvaged any weapons they could find, stuffing them into makeshift sacks. Even the broken weapons were seized, bundled away with thinly disguised haste. Nothing was spared.
The cloaked figures vanished as quickly as they arrived; darting for the distant alleyways and moving in a single direction. By the time they departed, the battlefield had been picked clean.
Mirage watched them from the shadows, yellow eyes twinkling; and followed.
Telin Voss' first view of the Severance Package was of the floor grating, as it slammed into his face; the mesh imprinting his skin. His captors held him face-down on the floor; their sweaty odour overpowering. With a jolting wrench he felt HWK-44 being stripped from his suit. His pockets were emptied with brusque efficiency. Then a black canvass sack was slid over his face. Darkness swallowed him.
Telin strained to listen, doing his best to catch any salvageable detail. Any angle might give him an advantage. The slightest hope.
"Bring the Asset to the holding area." Vern's voice barked. He heard the boy kicking and grunting in protest, then another jarring frazzle of electric discharge, then silence.
More footsteps. Barked departure orders; hasty feet clanging along gantries. Take-off sirens. The deck began to thrum and wobble.
Telin was moving now. Twice his feet tripped over the shallow doorway of an internal hold. Something bumped his head; a wicked hard jolt that sliced his scalp and made him hiss. The thug escorting him chuckled, before bending him through yet another stooping doorway. Had his hands been free he might have navigated the blind journey better, but he was entirely at their bruising mercy.
With a flash of light the bag was removed. Telin was shoved bodily into a make-shift holding cell, the door squealing as it clanged shut behind him. It was little more than a storage cupboard with crude bars welded across one side of it, delineating a basic cage.
Kelpo was already sitting inside it, looking pale but alert. His hands were also bound.
"Stay here." Their guard huffed, stepping back out into the corridor and sealing the hatch behind him.
"Good suggestion." Kelpo chuckled darky. Telin smiled, bumped knuckles with him and slid into a seat beside him. Every inch of him ached.
"You intending on following it?"
Kelpo merely raised an eyebrow conspiratorially, then nodded to the ceiling above.
The decking was uneven where the cross-plates welded together: excess armour had been bolted to the hull. They were close to the edge of the ship. Kelpo knew ships, their layouts and structure. He grew up up close to the docks; how could he not? The uneven decking formed a sharp edge on one side. An oversight for what was a decidedly makeshift prison cell.
Telin followed Kelpo's glance, a dangerous grin spreading across his face.
"Good. Me neither."
Neera languished back in the transport shuttle, hands still bound.
Telin and Kelpo had been hauled away, along with the boy in the sack; the procession spear-headed by the scary young girl in the hood. When nobody went to grab Neera, she rose to follow. She didn't get very far. The lead hunter, the grizzled man the others called Vern, appeared, shoving her back onto the shuttle.
The bartender fell back into one of the restraint seats, bristling.
"Not you." Vern growled. "You stay."
The hunter stood over her, alone but for the presence of the rangy Ostron tracker and the hulking Grineer bruiser. She glared up at them as they settled around her. Vern stayed by the threshold to the shuttle, returning the favour.
"You." He scowled, "I don't know you. You weren't part of the job." Vern said. He seemed intensely irritated at this interference.
"Problem boss?" The wiry Ostron hunter asked.
The wiry man had spread himself across a row of seats on the far side of the shuttle. His feet were propped up on an adjoining chair, as he counted the heaped credit chits in the sack pooled across his lap; occasionally turning one over in his hands and examining it as it glinted in the light. Bravic was ruthless, but paid well, and on time.
"It's inefficient." Brakarr interjected with a growl. "We despise inefficiency."
The Grineer browsed a holo-display projecting from his wrist; a crudely integrated, altogether battered Corpus unit. He was already researching the next affordable upgrade for his war chassis.
"Ey Ito-da." Parson-Luk spread his hands expansively. "You say capture target. I capture target."
"Three targets, not four!"
"Enough." Vern growled quietly.
The two shut up instantly.
"You're causing problems. You're beyond the job scope. I checked the records. Neera Denning. Clean record. No bounty. A civilian."
"You think I asked to be dragged here?" Neera countered. "Take me to my friends."
Vern shook his head.
"You don't want that, Ma'am. They're dead men walking."
"You shoot up my bar, you kidnap me, then drag me to some rust bucket salv-barge. Least you can do is keep us together. Where are my friends?"
"Dead, I expect, or soon to be at any rate." Vern replied, matter-of-fact. "Your being here is a mistake."
"So let me go, then. Forget you ever saw me."
Vern shook his head.
"See, can't do that either. You were scanned the moment you came aboard our shuttle. Contracts Exchange Commission noted four certified bounties. The job was for three. Something doesn't add up."
"So just put a bullet in my skull." Neera sneered. "Call it a day."
"Keep this up and I will." Vern replied testily. "Right now I'll settle for delivering you to the Exchange myself and taking whatever reward they dish out."
Neera bit her tongue. Eventually, she took a breath.
"You don't want to do that." Neera said, voice calm now.
"Give me one reason why I shouldn't."
"Because there's something you should know." Neera said, her voice low and venomous. "Three things, actually."
She held her bound hands up, ticking off a finger at a time.
"First, don't call me 'girl'. Not once, not ever."
She sat upright in the chair, chin tilted defiantly in defiance.
"Second, you're right about my record. Only my name isn't Neera Denning. It's Neera Hosk."
Vern's brow knitted; a look of mounting confusion, verging on realisation.
"Third, there's this."
Neera overturned her arms as best she could, exposing her wrist tattoo for Vern to see.
Vern's mechanical eyes took in the tattoo; scanning its gene-print; verifying the sigil in question.
Parson-Luk had hunted with Terrenus Vern on thirty hunts over three planets. He had never once seen the man lose his cool, or flinch in the face of mortal peril. The man was a rock, unflappable.
"Well." Terrenus Vern grimaced. "Shit."
Assistant Director Kef Mehrino waited for the com line to connect.
The Mid-Tier connections were functional, but lacked the sophistication of Anyo Corp's peer to peer networks. There was no eye-tracking software, no heart rate monitor or micro-expression playback. Simple audio-visual, and even then occasionally spotty.
Kef Mehrino didn't care. Right now he just needed Kahrl Bravic to take the damn call.
The Captain's face was distracted when he appeared on the line. Behind him, men were bustling by. The Severance was evidently well underway.
"What now?" Bravic growled.
"I needed to update you. Is this a secure line?"
"I am many things, Assistant Director. Cheap is not one of them. What is it?"
"The asset we discussed previously. Retrieval has been successful?"
"Onboard the Severance and inside the Containment Cell, as instructed."
"Good. Excellent. I'll be brief then. Your ship and its crew have been cleared to dock at the transmitted coordinates."
Bravic checked them as they were piped through.
"Executive Level." Bravic whistled. His eyes narrowed. "You spoiling me for the sake of it, Mehrino; or is there something you wanna share?"
"The Asset." There was no disguising the excitement in Kef Mehrino's voice. "We have a buyer."
The boy sat in the Containment Cell, legs folded beneath him. It was a meditative pose, one he had adopted naturally; some long-ingrained muscle memory. It helped keep him calm as he absorbed his surroundings.
It was an advanced room, for such a ramshackle airship. Clean deck lines, hermetically sealed. A single energy cage bisected the room, beyond which two crewmen stood guard, exchanging the occasional grumbling comment or gruff chuckle. The piece de resistance was the sustained Nullification Field that enveloped his side of the chamber. To a normal person, it might have felt prickly, even ticklish; like the static from a balloon rubbed against the skin.
To the boy it felt like an entire sense had been removed. It was like seeing a steaming hot pie, without ever knowing what it smelled like; or to witness a flash of lighting, and never once hearing the preceding thunder. His Void Sense was gone, cruelly denied by the electrostatic field. He sat there, free of the tracker's damned sack, but feeling all the more miserable; immersed in a discomfiting electric-jelly.
Isolde stepped into the chamber. The crewmen standing post quickly snapped to attention. She looked at them, expression haughty.
"Leave us."
They scarpered, keen to be away from the Void Witch.
Isolde took in the chamber, pulling her hood back; revealing dark hair pinned back in a no-nonsense bun by a single kunai throwing knife. Too young to be beautiful yet, but the signs were there; the delicate poise, the high cheekbones. She spared him a glance and offered a fleeting smile.
"They built this for me, you know. Bravic's requirement, for having Vern and his team aboard."
The boy watched her cross the room to the edge of the field, overcome by a nagging sense of the familiar. If proximity to the unnatural pressure of the suppression field bothered her, she did not show it.
"There were other crews they could have taken; other hunting parties of renown. But Bravic is Bravic. He wanted the best."
She sat opposite him, adopting the same meditative perch on the floor.. Something about her filled the boy with an immense sense of dread.
Yet she spoke amiably enough; her tone nostalgic, her manner of speech every bit as precise as his own.
"And we were the best. We have hunted, tracked and killed just about everything there is to fight in the ashes of the Old World. Rogue war bands, scaled creatures beneath the sands of Mars; hordes of shambling Technocyte. Ladahr once laughed and said there was no creature alive we could not track or kill. But then he met you."
A tinge of regret entered her voice.
"I had warned them, Ladahr and Bycek. Said they had a limited window. Ladahr was an excellent huntsman; Bycek as sure a shot as any Corpus I've seen. But they've never fought one of us before. Had no idea of our raw killing power; even one so unfocused and confused."
Isolde studied the floor for a moment, shook her head.
"Forgive me. They were family, of a sort. The only one I've known since I awoke. I do not blame you for killing them; they were warriors, killers; same as us. But I miss them all the same."
She fell silent, eyes on the floor; lost in contemplation. Now it was the boy's turn to speak.
"We knew each other, didn't we?" he said carefully. "From before."
She nodded, sadly smiling at the familiar sound of his voice. He pressed again, his voice a rasp behind the respirator:
"Everything is broken here. The people starve; shivering in hovels. The Merchant Cults rule this planet now. There is no order, there is no justice. How did this happen? " he asked. "Who allowed this?"
Isolde met his eye directly; expression grim, eyes hard.
"We did."