Wednesday 16/2/2061, Location: 30.21104, 47.76738, Time 17:00

"I can see both villages ahead, barely. No real lights, just getting a faint heat signature from the buildings. Which are we wanting to stop at?"

"Can you show me the feeds and map?" Aswon asked. Marius and Hunter shunted the data back to the screens in the rear and Aswon took a moment to digest the information. "I think the northernmost one. They've been heading northwards for several days now, and it makes sense to me to try and get as far as they can in the day, especially if both villages are just as small and remote as each other."

"That makes sense – and I agree. Take us down to…" Kai peered at the screen, squinting his eyes to make out the English translation under the Arabic. "…down to Ar Rafaiya, and set us down on the edge of the village please." Marius grunted an acknowledgement and they felt the aircraft bank slightly as he steered northwards, aiming for the small collection of hovels and animal pens. Two minutes later they were descending smoothly, once more enveloped in a sandstorm thrown up by the engines before Marius could power down and settle them into the early evening darkness.

Hunter stayed back on the aircraft, keeping an eye on the sensors and their perimeter, while the rest of the team secreted their various weapons and headed into the settlement – which didn't exactly take long. The huts were rough and ready, fairly small, and similar in construction to what they'd encountered before. They likely consisted of a single large room with a bed in one corner and a primitive stove in the other, along with rough and ready furniture. Only the most well-developed would have an inside toilet in a separate area, the others making do with an outside latrine dug to the rear of the building.

Marius called out loudly, waiting for a response, and a few heads popped out of their doorways in surprise at the disturbance – looking pensive and wary as the strangers appeared in their vicinity. Kai coughed sharply, then called out when he saw two or three faces watching him, once more reciting their cover story, which had slowly developed a few embellishments and extra details of their supposed quarry and their efforts at pursuit. It had the advantage of being an edited version of the truth, so his delivery was solid and their body language was entirely correct. As he reached natural pause points, Marius translated his words, gesturing at the team at appropriate points.

Whey they had finished their introductions, one of the faces emerged from the shadows of the doorway, calling over to him and beckoning the team towards him. Marius translated the words the man said, the contents not surprising anyone.

"He says that three days ago his son heard a noise near the animal pens, grabbed a stick and went out to check on the livestock. He screamed a few minutes later, and they all ran out to find out what was going on. They found the boy lying on the floor in agony, with a deep cut to his right leg, all down the back of the limb. They did not see any people around, and pulled the boy back inside, to examine the wound. He had been struck by - "

"A long bladed weapon, from overhead, with significant power," they all chorused, watching Marius nod.

"The only difference this time is that there is a single cut, and it appears to be in a flowing shape – not a straight line. Like a letter S apparently."

"Let's get a look at him then." Kai prompted, then waited while Marius translated. The man initially seemed to refuse them entry, and Marius had to speak to him for nearly a minute before he waved for them to enter his hovel, and once more their noses wrinkled as they smelt the familiar tang of a wound that was festering. The boy lay face down on the rough and ready bed, and when they pulled back the sheet gave a little cry as wound was plucked at, dried blood impregnated in the sheet pulling off the skin and tugging at the wound. Kai apologised but checked the wound, looking at the very gentle curve. While it was technically in a shape that could be described like an S, it was less than a handspan wide but stretched from buttock to ankle.

"A turn of the wrist as the blow was struck, here and then reversed again here." Shimazu mimed the slash in slow motion, showing how the blade would have carved through the flesh.

"He's not long for this world unless we get that wound cleaned up, I think – not by the smell of it anyway." Aswon wrinkled his nose a little and gestured at the wound and the surrounding flesh, blistered and cracked, with swelling visible even in the dim light of their single torch. "I'm not sure his dad is going to let us take him, though – he seems a lot more suspicious than the last guy."

"Yes, he is not keen on our presence, and he is wanting to know who we are. I managed to talk fast enough and restate our story several times to put him off for now, but he appears to be very distrustful." Marius nodded in his direction and gave a small closed mouth smile that was at odds with his words.

"How about if several of us 'argue' for chasing after the criminals, trying to persuade you we need to go and leave the boy behind, with Marius doing some translations – but then you 'over-rule' us and tell us we need to be more charitable and compassionate. Maybe if he thinks he might not get treatment at all, when you say you want to help he'll be more likely to take it?" Aswon suggested. He looked over at Shimazu, who thought for a moment then gave a slow nod.

"It might work – if he thinks he's going to miss out on something free or beneficial, it could swing his opinion and work against his suspicions."

"Hey, you guys, heads up – there's a car heading towards the village. It's a couple of clicks away, but travelling on the dirt road from the east, towards that big town we over-flew. From the shape and stuff on top, I'm pretty sure it's a police car. No blue lights or siren, but it's heading straight for you. E.T.A. is about three minutes." Hunter watched the sensor feed carefully, trying to make more sense out of the ghostly image picked up by the night-vision sensors. Marius quickly fired up his link and accessed the bird's sensors, then nodded in confirmation.

"Marius, tell him that he's doing fine work looking after the boy, and that a police unit will be here soon to help him and give medical aid. Blessings of Allah on the house and all that – but we need to get out of here now. They're going to ask far too many questions we don't want to discuss. Oh – but ask him about the vehicle – not if there was one, but what direction it went."

"Red and blue Abu Dhabi truck, heading north-east – in the direction he pointed earlier." Marius confirmed a minute later after a rushed conversation while the rest of the team filed out, moving around the back of the house to interpose the buildings between themselves and the approaching police car.

"Well, they're sticking to their rotation then at least – got to love predictable idiots… the filth are just entering the area now…" Hunter called, somewhat redundantly. The team paused at the back of the building while the brilliant white lights of the headlights shone upon the front, leaving them sheltering in an intense patch of shade. Tads looked around and then dropped into the astral, calling upon the flock of spirits and giving them a quick command.

"We should be safe – we're covered. Let's get back to the aircraft quickly." She spoke quietly, but then started to walk swiftly, leading them back towards the landing site. The others followed along, wincing slightly as they emerged into the lit area, but the concealing spirits prevented anyone from seeing them, and they could hear the discussion between the police officers and the local which probably drew their attention away from the area outside.

Once they were back aboard, Marius powered up quickly and took off, trusting that Tads and her more powerful main spirit would conceal them from any onlookers, and transitioning to horizontal flight as quickly as he could, heading north-east to at least take them in roughly the correct direction. In the back Tads was glued to the optical sensor, checking behind them for any signs of pursuit or activity, while the others waited by the doors and the racked guns, just in case. Within a few minutes, they were well clear of the village though, with no sign of alarm being raised, and they relaxed. Hunter had already pulled up the map and marked the village on it as a confirmed spot and then drawn the minimum and maximum distance markers on it, covering a huge swath of land.

"They've never seemed to hide their course or deviate much during each day's travel – and I can't see them suddenly changing now without some external reason. So I reckon all of the area to the west we can ignore, and just concentrate on the area to the north east, and maybe thirty degrees either side…" Aswon gestured at the map, and smiled, revealing his massive incisors as Hunter obligingly coloured in one area of the map and focussed on the remaining wedge shaped area. His smile faded as he took in the number of villages and settlements in the area though. As they moved out of the desert into Iraq, the ground became much more hospitable, and there were tiny villages and hamlets everywhere. "Can you zoom out a bit, please, Hunter? Thanks. Hmm…" He considered the map a little, then asked Hunter to zoom out more. "They're not going to Tehran, are they? The direction seems about right…"

"Whichever way they go, they'll be having to take a route over this small range of mountains – and there's only a few passes that are going to be easily navigable. That might simplify things." Half a dozen spots flashed on the maps as Hunter identified gaps between the peaks. That cut the number of nearby settlements down significantly, but there were still more than a dozen possible places to investigate.

"Can you put up a couple of rough lines, and mark out a guess route from here to Tehran? And see how many days that would take?"

"It'll be a bit of guesswork, Aswon, but sure." The lines started to appear on the map, flexing back and forth to fit in the known travel distances they'd observed to fit in with settlements on the map. Dozens of possible combinations all appeared, quickly swelling to hundreds of viable routes that *could* have been taken – but they all converged to Tehran after three solid days of travel.

"So, if we've got this right – IF, and it's a big if, they are going to Tehran, then they're getting there tonight… about now possibly?" Aswon queried, double checking the route maps and projected travel of the other team. "Kai – I wonder if you want to call your friend, Anahita, was it? See if she's aware of anything going down in town?"

"I could give her a call I suppose, but it's still a bit of a longshot. And it's a big place… I mean, I suppose we could take another leap of faith and just fly up there. It's not going to take us long, is it, Marius?"

"Between one and two hours. We avoid all the terrain they had to deal with, and the border crossings should be no problem."

"Hmm… if we're going that way, should we do the thing we're supposed to do for Aden? I mean, if he finds out we were in the area and didn't follow up, he might get pissed with us – and that's a bad thing."

"We need the device, though – it's not arrived yet" Hunter reminded him.

"Ahh, ok – never mind then."

"Well, if we do go up there, I could go and look for them, I suppose – if I took the spirits with me?"

"The city is likely to have a whole bunch of really nasty areas, mass graveyards, shattersites, pollution – I wouldn't recommend it, personally. All kinds of spirits and malevolent astral beings likely to be knocking about. I'd say you'd lose the spirits, and you may run into problems as well. Seems too risky, personally. Kai – would Anahita know if there's a market on, or anything big going on in town? She knew about the smuggler meeting last time, maybe she'll know something."

"I'll send her a message in a minute. If they are going there, can we predict where they'll be at all?"

"Yes and no." The screens blanked, then showed a map of Tehran – or at least a map of how it had been before it had been devastated. Crude lines appeared on a number of the main roads, coming out from the city centre like a spider web. "If we assume that a lot of the minor roads were blocked by collapsing buildings, sink-holes, fires, explosions or stuff like that – we can look at only the main multi-lane highways. They're pretty hard to block off entirely due to the size – and there's only a few. If they're approaching from the south, then there's only really four good ways into the city – and we can probably search along the road fairly quickly looking for traffic. It's not like they have a rush-hour anymore, now is it?" He flashed up the areas between the main routes though. "But – if there are clear paths through here, known to the locals, or already scouted out – then this plan goes down the shitter. Then they could be anywhere!"

"Another question to ask is – if we do find them, are we just going to kill them? Do we want their vehicle or any of their gear?" He looked around the back of the tilt-wing with a raised eyebrow. "Because if we're not after their stuff, then it seems to me than an aerial attack might be the way forward. We stitch them with fire from one side door gun and the tail-ramp, maybe with fire support from the vector-thrust drone as well on the other side, catch them in a cross fire and just rip them to bits. If Germaine isn't after the painting, and just wants an example making of them, then that seems to the simplest solution…"

The craft fell relatively quiet for a moment as they all considered that, only the sounds of the engines and the roar of the slipstream rushing past them, and after the number of hours they'd spent flying over the last few months, they'd become almost inured to those sounds now.

"I reckon if we show Germaine the footage of the attack, even if the painting was destroyed, she'd be happy with that. Especially if she had a good copy to leak out onto Shadowland along with a warning about betraying your fixer…" They could almost hear the grin on his face as he said that. "But, we gotta find 'em first. Could be going to Tehran – or they could be heading towards the cities of Qom or Arak, too – they're both on the same bearing and general line of advance. Could be either of them is their home city or the drop-off point."

"Is now a good time to call Anahita, then?" Aswon prodded again, and got an exasperated look from Kai.

"What is it with calling her to ask questions? I'd rather wait until we know what's going on before I bother her with the odd question."

"Hey, look, she's your friend. But you've seen what these people do. She's an art smuggler. They could be heading for her, even as we speak. Do you want to find out later that they used her to shift the painting onwards and then as soon as the deal was done, left her headless corpse in some pile of rubble somewhere when their psychotic ninja went to work with her blades?"

"They wouldn't hurt her if they needed to move the item on though, would they?" Kai's voice had a questioning edge to it though at the end of the sentence, as he considered some of the attacks they'd witnessed over the last two days. "I mean, they'd have to be crazy…" He listened to his own words and his face fell a little, and he reached for his commlink, avoiding Aswon's 'I told you so' expression.

In the pilot's seat up front Marius gave a little twitch as an electronic signal tickled a corner of his brain. He made sure they were flying straight and level, engaged the auto-pilot and then accepted the sat-link call. His cybernetic systems kept the call private, and he chatted away for a few minutes before he broke out of his trance.

"Hunter – I have just had Nadia on the phone. She says a package arrived for you today. Are you expecting anything?"

"Me? Nope. Don't think so anyway…"

"So it should be treated with suspicion? Is it possibly a bomb or other explosive device? Or something hostile?"

"I dunno. Maybe?"

"Hunter – is it the device for Aden? Wasn't that ordered by you?"

"Oh – yeah. That's due. I think it had my name on, so maybe?"

"I will check." It went quiet for a moment as Marius spoke with Nadia. "She is checking for a waybill or packing slip. Carefully." Another minute passed. "She says there is an international customs clearance label, indicating it came from the UCAS."

"Ok, that does sound more likely, then."

"Very well. I will tell her to put it to one side, somewhere safe."

"Marius – she can always put it in the trailer, in my lodge. That should keep it out of the way of people, and the baby, if there is something unpleasant in there – and it's also safe from magical tracking then."

"Agreed. Good idea, Tads." He switched back to his internal systems and advised Nadia of what to do with the package, then spent several minutes chatting with her, asking about the baby and how she was doing, catching up with life, before letting her know that he hoped their current mission was nearly complete, and they were slowly making their way back in the general direction of the ranch – and may be back soon. With nothing else to do that demanded his attention, he stayed chatting with her while they flew on through the night, heading northwards towards the first town on their flightpath – Arak.

"If they are going to one of these three places, it's a pretty massive change to their MO, unless it is their final destination. Everywhere else, they've kept to somewhere as small as possible and got out quickly."

"Agreed, Hunter. It might be they've got no choice on the route they're taking, and they're going to stick to the outskirts – but I get the feeling they're heading home. The question is which one?"

"Qom is the new capital – there's bound to be some shadow activity there, and it's a big enough place to get lost in. But I think most runners are going to be concentrated in Tehran. Sure it's rough, and violent – but that's not normally a problem. There is no corp presence, and no police though, so it's probably the safest place in Iran – at least for us!"

"We're assuming of course that they have the painting still – they might have gotten rid of it at one of the stops along the way, and just been out on a murdering rampage for kicks after that. I don't think that's likely – but it's something we should be prepared for."

"Thankfully, as Hunter pointed out earlier – I think Germaine views the painting as a bonus now, and it's more about making an example of the team and their actions that's important to her. The painting would confirm their ID, but if we find a vehicle with any of the disguises we've seen so far, that's also going to be pretty solid." He stopped talking as Kai's commlink buzzed, and watched with interest as Kai put in his earpiece and answered the call. After a moment he asked the person to hold, then patched it through to the rest of the team.

"Go ahead, Anahita, you're on the team link now."

"Oh, ok. Hi everyone. So Kai – about your message. I asked a few people, very discreetly, and put the word out quietly. And it turns out that there is a known player in town, arrived earlier today. An art dealer from abroad is in town, and rumour is that he's here on a buying trip." Aswon waved, muting his commlink for a moment and then calling out physically, raising his voice over the background noise.

"Kai – if you like her as much as I think you do, warn her again what a dangerous bunch of frakkers these people are!" Kai nodded to him, and then resumed the conversation while Aswon jumped back onto the link.

"Anahita – like I said in the message, these people are dangerous – very dangerous. They've been on a killing spree for the last week and a bit, and have left a trail of bodies for over a thousand kilometres. Be VERY careful who you talk to and make sure you can trust them!"

"Null sweat, Kai. I know how to be discreet. Question is do you want more information on them? And if so, how much Nuyen do you want to throw at the job?"

"Yes, I think we do – providing you can do it safely. In terms of amount – I think we can afford a few thousand at least." He heard a snort from the other side.

"Oh, ok – I was thinking of a few hundred, enough for a decent meal for a few folks, maybe some booze or smokes or something. If you've got a budget like that, no problem. I can spread some favours about and some spending money, and see what I can find out."

"These people are dangerous and irritating enough that I feel we can justify this kind of expenditure. So yes, a few thousand for info and quiet advice is no problem."

"Right, I'll get on it, get back to you soon. Make sure you have your cred-stick ready, chummer!"

She hung up and they flew on, with Marius calling to alert them a few minutes later as they approached Arak. They checked the sensor feeds and optical viewer, seeing the glistening city laid out below them. It lay nestled in the foothills of mountains to the south, and had a large lake to the north east, constraining the city somewhat. Near the lake, on the flat plains was a commercial airfield with a small intra-country transport coming in on final, and Marius turned west, moving around the city to keep his distance. All the passes from the mountain ranges appeared to run down into the city, and large highways radiated out to the rest of the country – it looked like the town had grown up around ancient caravan routes and continued to grow as technology had marched onwards. Lights were everywhere, and the city had plenty of cars driving around within it.

"That doesn't look like a good sport for them – even bigger than the last town we bypassed. Unless this is their base, I think they'll have bypassed this for sure. And looking at the map, Qom is going to be like this but more. Way bigger, it's where the capital moved to after Aden made his demonstration at Tehran."

"I have the beginnings of an idea – if we can get some details from Anahita, or if she's directly involved – maybe we can talk to the art dealer that's buying, and let him know about the trail of blood attached to the painting. Offer them a deal – we let the purchase go through, uninterrupted, but they clue us in when they're done and the other team is walking away. They get what they want, and we get to take out the team without collateral damage."

"It's an idea – would limit the impact on anyone else, and they'd have to have pretty strong principles not to sell them out. And if they're willing to get into Tehran and deal with this bunch of frakkers, I'm not sure they have many of those." Kai nodded in agreement at Aswon. "It's certainly worth keeping as an option – maybe our primary option."

"I am flying on from Arak. It does not appear that anyone here believes the foe have stopped here."

"Copy that Marius. Time to Tehran? Because if they're not here, they're not going to be at Qom either. Everything is pointing to Tehran now – we just have to catch up to them!"

"Thirty -eight minutes to the city border, Kai. But I suggest we stop short of the city and do recon – rather than get spotted going in, or buzzing around the city. We should also refuel – by the time we get to the city, we will have flown just over fifteen hundred kilometres from the last refuel. I would not wish to get engaged in a fight or pursuit with only twenty-five percent fuel load."

"Ok, good point. Hunter – can you find us somewhere to stop outside the city. In fact, can you look for fuel stops – particularly those that will cater to runners and smugglers. Maybe if we land close to one of those, a few of us can go scouting and see if we can get footage or intel and see if the team has been spotted."

"Agreed."

"You want to be careful with that though, Kai. Hunter was able to get onto the network at the fuel stop and grab the footage from the cameras there with relatively low risk. If we're talking about a stop near Tehran and run by or for people like us, their security is going to be a lot tougher."

"Fair enough, Aswon – we'll play it by ear then." He stopped as his phone buzzed, then piped it through to the group.

"Hi Anahita, what do you have for us?"

"The art dealer is a German by the name of 'Herr Gustav Liebhermoster'. Got a reputation as a serious dealer, both in terms of his price range and how he operates. I'll try and dig out a little more for you, but thought you'd want the name as soon as possible."

"Ok, thanks. We'll get our decker right on that!"

"Yeah yeah, as soon as I've finished plotting a route into Tehran, finding the fuel stops and looking for any info. THEN I'll look into it…"

"I'm hoping there's something on the shadow-web about him." Kai said, but Hunter was so busy he didn't even notice the deliberate misnaming as he continued his searches. Soon enough he found some details for the fuel stops and had passed them over to Marius, then he jacked in and jumped onto Shadowland via the sat-uplink, and started to nose around for Herr Liebhermoster. "What I have heard is mostly rumour and third hand – he's a proper mercenary guy, everything has a price, and he doesn't care how much blood is on an artefact that comes into his possession…"

"Well, there goes my plan then – he's not going to care how it came to him, or see any value in handing over the other team. I think that'll be too risky for Anahita, or anyone else that we come across either. Maybe we can run the name past Germaine, see if she's got anything?"

"We could – but there's also a risk that this guy might be her arch nemesis or a massive rival in the art world – let's NOT mention his name to her just yet, just in case there is something there. Or only if Hunter can't dig something up."

They passed Qom, closing in on Tehran rapidly, Marius bringing them in low to avoid any surveillance systems. He'd been passed the location of the four most likely fuel stops that were close to the main routes into the city when Hunter had finished crunching the numbers – they covered an arc around the city that measured nearly sixty kilometres in length from end-to-end.

"Tads – I do not know if this is helpful – but Hunter has all the fuel stops identified. They are a considerable distance outside the ruins of the city – maybe they will be safe for a reconnaissance mission?" He shunted the data back to her screen, and she studied the data carefully.

"Looks possible – as soon as you land to refuel, I'll go look. I'll take all the spirits as backup, so that should be relatively low risk – Aswon and Shimazu can at least spot astral threats here and the ward should keep you pretty safe."

They landed at 19:15, outside the ruins of Tehran, a block away from a fuel station that operated on a back road near a cluster of warehouses, parallel to a main road. Unless you knew it was there, you'd drive right past it which for most businesses would be a recipe for disaster – but it apparently suited the business owner here. Tads checked her map again and flew out to the stop, manifesting on the top of a building and glancing over the roof to check out the area. The building attached to the fuel depot was warded moderately well – she could probably get in if she needed to, but it would be risky. But, for the moment, she concentrated on covering the outer area, looking for either the target vehicle or any of the suspects, or any signs of their passing. After a minute or two with no luck she faded back into the astral and zipped over to the second stop, repeating her search there, before moving onto stops three and four. By the time she made it back to the tilt-wing, the rest of the team had refuelled – almost emptying the barrels in the back but topping off the internal tanks and giving them plenty of range for extended operations.

"Just to remind everyone – if they're sticking with their pattern, they'll be disguised as a rusty white large transport, the Al-Halal Chicken company." Hunter announced.

"I find it hard to believe we are returning to a place we swore never to revisit."

"Come on, Marius – if we did that, we'd never go anywhere twice!" Kai said with a big grin on his face. "Where's your sense of adventure!"

"Back at the ranch."

"Pfft. Well – now we're this close, can we run some recon down the roads?"

"That's not a bad idea," Aswon interjected. "If they are coming in here tonight they have limited options, and they probably want to stick to roads at least partly clear – which means they should be visible. They can go 'off-road' through the ruins, but it probably slows them down too much and adds to the risk of being spotted due to noise and dislodging debris."

"Will our sensors pick them up now, Marius?"

"I would need direct line of sight, Kai. The vector thrust is more of an attack bird, and has limited sensors – so the best chance of spotting them is if I am piloting it directly, which means we are here on the ground. Otherwise it will be too easy for the drone to miss them… And of course if we are looking down on them, we will see only the top of their vehicle. While it will be easier to spot a vehicle at all, it will be more difficult to get a positive ID on it." He paused for a moment, then asked – "Tads, can you make the drone invisible, or provide some kind of concealment to it. To reduce the chance of it being counter-spotted?"

"We can – but don't forget that it will be much harder to spot on the physical plane, but it will glow like a beacon on the astral. If their mage or physical adept, if they have one, looks up – it will be like trying to hide the moon in the sky…"

"I think at this point it's more likely to get spotted by an evil spirit or creature from the city than from the other team. It's unlikely they'll be looking out and up like that…" Aswon responded.

They discussed the pros and cons for a minute, before deciding the risk was worth it, and as soon as the drone was out and prepared for launch she cast two spells upon it – the first to render it invisible and the second to muffle and disguise the sounds it made. Marius took off, with only the sigh of the wind and a faint ripple in the air betraying the physical location of his attack drone, and lofted quickly into the air and started to fly at high speed down the first highway, looking for traffic.

He was transitioning from the end of the second major boulevard leading into the city to the third when he spotted something interesting and slowed the drone, bringing it to a fuel-guzzling hover high above the ruined city. It wasn't a large transport – Al-Halal or otherwise that he could see – but what was cruising up the road was a large, black, armoured limousine, a stretched model with several rows of seats in the back. It was struggling a little on the broken and pot-holed highway, but the driver appeared to be heading for a large ruined building. Marius gave it a once over and saw the familiar signs of a hospital – including a rickety looking helipad perched atop one of the buildings.

A quick circuit revealed the hospital building to be in at least partial ruins, with no visible power and most of the windows broken or destroyed. The limo had entered the hospital grounds and was threading its way towards a huge canopy – it appeared to be the receiving bay where ambulances would bring emergency cases in the distant past – but now it represented excellent top cover. He'd have to drop distressingly close to ground level to see clearly underneath it, and that was too risky. Instead he marked the position on his map and started to back up a little, putting the drone into a loose orbit around the building, before jumping out to talk to the team.

"I have spotted an unusual vehicle – a large armoured limo, approaching what appears to be a derelict hospital. It is a very atypical car for the area, and I wonder if this contains our art dealer. Tads – can you survey the area? I have marked the location on the map."

"Eeek! That's right in the city, in the middle of all the bad stuff. I don't think so – I'm not likely to pick up much, and there's going to be all kinds of stuff there trying to eat me."

"How far away are we from this building?" Kai asked.

"About twenty-five kilometres. We can be there in a few minutes."

"If it's a hospital, does it have a helipad thingy we could land at?"

"It does – but I am not sure if we can trust it. The building is falling to bits, and I have no idea what weight it was rated for when it was properly maintained – so I would not trust it at all."

"You could hover over it and allow people to disembark, if you're not happy to land on it." Aswon suggested. Marius grunted in agreement, but still didn't seem keen on the idea.

"However, there is a park nearby – or at least there is on the map. Roughly three hundred and fifty metres wide and over a kilometre long – there should be somewhere to land there. That is less than one kilometre from the hospital – short enough to travel, far enough to be discreet.

"Ugh – remember what happened last time we landed in a park in Tehran! Tentacles and huge maws and things. It's not the same park is it? No lake?"

"There is a lake, but no, it is not the same park. And we can land well clear of the water. Just do not go near it." Marius didn't sound concerned – but then he'd be remaining aboard the tilt-wing, not landing in a park that had been growing randomly for the last thirty years with all manner of strange creatures living in it.

"Wait one," Marius called, as his drone alarm sounded, frantically flashing an alert in the corner of his vision. He checked the sensors and ran back through the footage briefly – then spotted a rusty white transport with the "Al-Halal Chicken Corporation" logo driving up the entrance road to the hospital and disappear under the canopy. "They are here! Target vehicle has just arrived at the hospital." A few mental commands started the engines up, before he jumped into the drone and told it to return to base at high speed. Seconds later he was back in his body and running through the take-off sequence, getting the bird ready for flight.

"So, are we just going to rock up to the meet and kill EVERYONE, then?" Aswon asked. "I mean, we're after the team, sure, but we don't know anything about the art dealer guy yet."

"We have the door guns and sufficient anti-vehicular ammunition to do several passes with effective fire. If we can get in a position where we can see past the canopy, we can fire at ranges of four to five hundred metres, and it will be unlikely they can return effective fire at us. I can also deploy the drone in a combat situation to provide additional firepower."

"I'll need to drop the spells on your drone, Marius, if we're going into combat – or I'll not be much use for countering their mage if they have one. But we can send in the spirits to cause accidents to their vehicle and weapons, and try to slow them down a bit."

"You may be as well trying to affect the environment, Tads" Aswon suggested. "If they do have a mage, their vehicle is likely to be warded – but that canopy roof almost certainly isn't. And you can maybe get your spirits to crack the tarmac or blow stones around, or send bits of building plummeting down from above."

"Just to be clear then – it doesn't sound like anyone has a problem with this assault and going to go kill these people." Kai looked around, but didn't get anyone dissenting.

"The dossier that Germaine sent mentioned that this Dice person was ex-military – will they have drones like Marius does?" Tads enquired.

"Good call – we should check for surveillance and recon drones when we approach, just in case." Aswon checked the breech on his sniper rifle, sliding a round in carefully and moving the bolt forward and locking it in place.

"Stand by for takeoff." A second later they vaulted into the air, rising rapidly from the back lot they'd been hidden in, and heading into the city like a dark bolt, slicing through the night air while aboard the team members loaded up their weapons and prepared melee weapons, checked their armour and explosives and generally got ready to bring great pain and ruination to their enemies.

Below them the city of Tehran and the various sinless refugees, smugglers and runners got on with their business, unaware that death sliced through the night sky above them, flying towards the team they'd been tracking for the last two thousand kilometres.