They slowly chewed on the selection of fruits that Tads had conjured up to replace the normal oatmeal – even with the sun barely peeking over the horizon, the temperature was shooting up rapidly, and nobody wanted a warming bowl of oatmeal in the face of a scorching day in the desert. Hunter had the roll-out screen laid out in the back of the tilt-wing, being fed from his deck, trying to give them a big map they could all cluster around, with Aswon, Shimazu, Kai and Tads each holding down one corner of the screen with the edge of their foot, stopping it from curling backup.
"Assuming that the last spot we have is them, then they look to be heading west, almost as if they're going to Riyadh?" Aswon waved a laser pointer over to the side of the screen, and Hunter obligingly laid out a few range rings to show the number of hops required to get there. "They'd probably get to Khurais or maybe Sa'ad, and then to the city in the next day."
"If they are heading to the city, it's the first time since leaving Muscat – that makes sense if it's their final destination, I suppose, but otherwise it's a change of modus operandi." Shimazu offered. "I mean, if you look at the size of Sa'ad, that's way bigger than anywhere else they've been. So far they've wanted to stick to the tiny villages and waystations. Even Khurais is bigger than they'd normally stop at."
The rest of the team squinted at the map and nodded in agreement – it was hard to fault his logic, based on the information they had. The map was maddeningly vague – the small settlements generally only showed as a few grey blobs, that blurred as soon as they zoomed in.
"Hunter – any chance of better maps?"
"Sorry, Kai – that's not easy. The desert isn't well surveyed generally outside of the major municipal areas like Riyad and Dubai, and the decent maps of the area are all locked away in corporate datastores – not generally available on the matrix to the average user. If I was using a Renraku terminal, datalink, account and authentication codes, I could probably log onto Renraku MapPlus and get some better imagery – but they'd probably notice when we started pulling high resolution maps of the area down and it might trigger some alerts and tip someone off. The other thing is to put in a call to someone like Julius – but think back to what happened last time where we ended up doing some wetwork for him, because his behaviour tipped off his supervisor to something funny going on and he had to dig himself out of the hole."
"I just don't understand it! Why can't we just get decent maps?"
"You know the answer, Kai. From what I understand there used to be maps – good maps – just available for free. People could log onto the matrix – well, the Interwebs as it was called back then – and just use any program they wanted to access a map of the world free of charge. Zoom in and out, pan around to different places. Even zoom right down to street level and look in shop windows and stuff, check out the colour of a house or see what kind of car was parked in a street. But when the Crash hit, that was all wiped out – the whole lot, all the back end images and software to run it was all on secure hosts, massive clusters of servers that took up whole buildings of tech. Remember, there were no decks back then or anything, and most of it was still big circuit-based stuff. And the virus just went to town on their security protocols, and ripped through their defences. Trashed it, the whole lot. And when the corps recovered and rebuilt the comms links into the matrix, they decided that they owned the information, and it wasn't free no more. You want some info, you'd better have a proper corporate ID and a valid subscription, or be prepared to pay for it."
"Well, it still sucks."
"Yes, it does. But you can fix it – give me about two, two and a half million Nuyen, and I'll get myself a top of the line deck and suite of cutting edge programs and I can dance through the neon highway like Shimazu swings his sword, and slice you any data you want. Until then, shuddup." Kai grumbled, but everyone ignored him and concentrated on the map.
"Tads, would you be happy to do a quick search of these places. I'm not sure that they're going there, but you're by far the fastest way to check."
"I can, Aswon, but I still don't think it's the best idea. Not after a week. We got really lucky with the grieving people at the grave – emotion that strong isn't that common, and much less than that and I'll miss it. But I'll go and have a look."
She relaxed and flew out of her body, checking out the two locations indicated. Back in the tilt-wing, the team continued to try and plot lines on the maps, drawing possible vectors and wondering what the other team's final destination might be. The main problem they faced when trying to work this out was that with every possible flight, the amount of variability in location was compounded with every further journey, vastly increasing the ground that was covered.
They waited. The body of the shaman lay comatose, unmoving – while next to her Shimazu waited with sword ready, watching over her in astral space. Any entity that did manage to batter through the wards and gain access to the interior of the tilt-wing would have to get past him and his sword before it could possess her slumbering form. The longer they waited, the more the tension rose, as they wondered what was taking her so long – could she have been attacked, waylaid somewhere along the route? Perhaps she was locked in combat with some spirit or para-critter even now.
As the minutes crawled past, the tension rose – she was the only member of the team that could project into the astral plane entirely, divorcing body and soul. Shimazu, Aswon and Kai could look at the astral realm, but their essence was tied irrevocably to their body, bound as one. With effort, they could peer across the border between physical and astral, like a submarine raising a periscope – but they could never entirely cross that border, leaving the water behind and walking on the land.
Eventually her body stirred, just over two hours after she'd left. She opened her eyes and stretched, then coughed and floundered for a moment as her brain suddenly caught up with the heat and dry atmosphere – the aircraft interior having turned into a small oven with the two hours of direct sunlight. Aswon passed over a cup of water and she drank greedily, letting the water swill around her mouth before swallowing noisily.
"Thanks… why are you all looking at me like that?"
"You were gone for quite a while. Long enough for us to be worried…" Aswon chided her gently.
"Ahh, sorry. I went over to the two places to the west first – Khurais and Sa'ad. Both big – lots bigger than all the other places, and very busy. The roads have a lot of traffic on them, and I had a good look around but couldn't see any strong emotional spots. I spent a little while looking around, but I don't think there was anything to see. So I moved on from there, and flew north. Sihmah was tough – I mean, to find. Not what was there. Because what was there was pretty much nothing – I think there's two houses and a herd of goats, and that's it. I flew past it about four times before I stopped in the right place and could see it between some large dunes and rocks. But nothing there either. So I figured if it'd gone that far I might as well check those bunch of villages in the arc to the north. Nothing obvious there, either – they were easier to find, and most of them fit the profile exactly – but no graves or burial sites I could see."
"So we've lost the trail, then? Oh great!" Kai threw his hands into the air and sat back in his chair in a huff, moving swiftly enough that his head struck the bulkhead behind him with a loud rap. "FRAK!"
"Hey, steady down, will you!"
"Maybe Tads just missed something…"
"The matrix is a pile of crap out here, don't expect anything from me!"
"I don't see what we're going to do now…"
Their voices overlapped, raising in volume as they tried to make their point, the heat of the desert sending already short tempers towards boiling point.
"Excuse me? Hey. HEY! SHUT UP!" Tads raised her voice to a shout and the air around her shimmered as the spirits guarding her distorted the air behind her. "Thank you. So, I couldn't see any signs of death or funerals, sure. And we know that outside the big cities, not a lot is on the matrix – so we have to do this the old-fashioned way. We go back to the last known spot, and we go talk to someone. It's not that hard!"
"We're going to go through a lot of fuel if we start cruising around every small village, aren't we, Marius?"
"Yes. Especially if we are making repeated vertical landings."
"Sure, some, but not that much… if we start at one end of a chain and work along – we're probably going to cover two hundred klicks really quickly to go out a day's travel, then work across the arc… so it might not be that bad…" Hunter sketched a quick diagram on the map, showing the team travelling from a known locus and then zig-zagging only through the possible landing sites at the end of the standard travel distance. His deck considered the flight plan for a moment then spat out a figure – between two hundred and fifty and three hundred and fifty kilometres, depending on how many stops they had to make. "Look, we'd be doing two hundred and thirty-five if we knew exactly where we were going, so it's not that bad."
"So what are you saying, Tads? We go back to the start? All the way to Muscat?"
"No Kai. But maybe Al-Batha. It's not that far, and we can talk to someone about the grave, and confirm that it's definitely the right thing – and not something like a child knocked down by a truck or some other senseless accident."
"How long to get there, Marius?"
"About twenty to thirty minutes at the most."
"Oh, that's not so bad, then. Why don't we do that, and see what happens?"
"Looking for a landing spot, then. We'll want somewhere a little way out of town, which means walking in at least some distance – so get your water bottles filled and shuck your armour. And you'll probably need to take Marius with you to translate as well – I don't think they'll like me round there." Hunter gave a lopsided grin, his features twisting. The local view on metahumans wasn't good to begin with – taking someone as 'beauty-challenged' as Hunter was more than likely going to cause more problems than it was worth.
They flew south from Keith's, heading towards some rocky outcroppings and defiles that lay to the west of Al-Batha, where they could set themselves down and be out of sight of the settlement and the massive complex that lay to the south-east. Marius set them down about a kilometre west of the village, with the spirits under Tads' control hiding the dust-storm kicked up by the rotors. Once they'd powered down the engines, Kai, Marius, Shimazu and Tads headed in towards town, while Aswon and Hunter went scouting to the north – looking to get some eyes-on intelligence of the highway junction there.
The journey was thankfully fairly easy, though still more than hot enough even this early in the year. As they reached the village, they could see local residents moving around – tending to small gardens and cleaning their houses, attention on their children or chatting as they hung out washing. Understandably they drew a few strange looks – but nobody seemed to take exception to their presence. They found the grave-site that Tads had identified, and from that learned the family name of the recently buried individual, and then started to ask around until they were directed to the house where the woman had lived.
Shimazu and Tads waited to one side, keeping a watch out, while Marius and Kai knocked at the door. The man who opened it looked weary, with eyes bloodshot and red-lined. Kai took a deep breath and schooled his face and body-language, speaking in Azerbaijani and spun a story to the man, giving him a fictitious name and explaining why he was here, then looking to Marius.
"Peace be unto you, and unto you, Peace. My superior asks for blessings for you and your house, and wishes to express his sorrow at your recent loss. He is a special inspector for the Caliphate Intelligence Service, and normally works in foreign lands – so has asked me to translate. We believe that some foreign infidels have travelled through here recently, committing heinous crimes against the faithful. May we ask for details on this occurrence, so we can visit justice upon them as it is commanded?" Marius gestured to Kai as several points who nodded sagely and wisely, though he had no idea what Marius was saying, and continued to exude an aura of quiet authority and competence. Marius meanwhile struggled to keep his language appropriate, scraping his knowledge of vocabulary and culture to meld together a sense of power and compassion.
The man listened, though – and whether it was the skill of translation and the portrayal of Kai in his role, or the lack of sleep and grief that tipped the balance was hard to say. He did appear to believe the pair though, and fighting to hold back his emotions described the events of the fateful night, a week ago. His wife had been out in the garden, just tidying up some plants and making sure the water-catching system was set up to funnel the meagre dew and condensate of the cooling night air down into the roots of the plants, while he had been relaxing in his chair. He'd heard a noise, and assumed that she'd just knocked over something while she was moving around – and had thought nothing of it.
Emotion swelled on his face as he recounted doing nothing, letting precious minutes slip by until he'd finally pushed himself up and out of his armchair and gone to see what was keeping her – and found her lying at the edge of the vegetable garden, sliced open from her left shoulder to her right hip with a single savage overhand blow. Shock had taken her, and she'd quickly bled out, no more than a few metres from her house, and it was clear to both of them that he felt he was to blame for her death – though from the description, Kai was pretty sure that nothing less than quick treatment in a Class I trauma centre would have prevented her death. He nodded in understanding though as Marius continued to translate the man's story, laying a hand on the man's shoulder and speaking to him sincerely, then waiting as Marius consoled him in Arabic, informing him that many blessings and prayers would be uttered for his ex-wife, and that they would stop at nothing to bring her killer to justice.
Marius continued to question the man, learning that they had seen an unusual vehicle around the town earlier that evening – a red and blue van marked up with the livery of 'Abu Dhabi Import & Export' – but unusually it was out in the rocky areas above town, rather than down on the road. When questioned, the man gestured up into the rocky outcroppings to the west – almost on a direct bearing to the tilt-wing in fact. He'd thought that was unusual, especially as he'd seen them heading that way from the north, assuming that they'd been to one of the large service stations that lay along the highway there.
Marius continued to gently question the man, while Shimazu relayed the new information to Hunter and Aswon. They had headed to the north, climbing up into the small rocky hillside until they could look down on the large junction where Highway 10 from Riyadh to the west met the north/south Highway 95 that ran parallel to the coast. As they looked down they could see fairly heavy traffic along the road, mostly goods vehicles, travelling along both highways. North of the main junction were two large service areas, one on each side of the highway, with large truck parks on both sides, along with fuel stops and markets. The pair headed north, covering the kilometre and a half as quickly as they could given the heat, and closed in on the services. As well as the entrance and exit from the highway, there were numerous smaller trails and roads flattened into the desert, ranging from compacted sand or loose chippings through to barely-maintained flagged roads, all leading to the fuel stop – presumably providing a number of routes for the locals.
They had to time their crossing of the busy highway lane carefully, drawing a few horn blasts from the truckers as they whistled past at a hundred kilometres per hour, but they managed to get close to the fuel station, sheltering off to one side as they examined the area. Multiple lanes were set out on either side of the twelve fuel pumps, with a canopy raised overhead by at least four and half metres, overhanding all the pumps by several metres on each side, creating a large patch of shade for the trucks to be under. A few cameras were dotted around the service area, and much like those in Muscat they were older and fairly basic, though well-preserved in the dry desert climate.
They moved round to the rear of the service station and found a quiet area to hunker down in, and Hunter unpacked his deck, quickly logging into the local hotspot and starting to probe the security. Aswon kept watched while Hunter squatted against the wall, eyes rolled back in his head as he did battle with the authentication on the security system and raided the datastore, quickly downloading the footage from the cameras for the evening of the 9th, compressing the files and ripping them down over the limited Wi-Fi bandwidth before the security systems detected his presence and raised the alarm. Less than a hundred and twenty seconds later, he reached up and pulled out the cable from his datajack.
"Got the files, let's get out of here. Not sure I haven't set anything off."
"Ok, let's go then." Aswon strode away, his long legs covering the ground swiftly while his head swivelled from side to side as he looked for threats. "If they were going to refuel, then this place actually looks pretty good. It's really busy, very easy to get lost in the crowd – and the camera positions are really bad. The fuel stops in this corner are barely covered, and are probably right at the top end for range."
"Well, I've get several hours of footage – we should be able to set up some colour filters and scrub through quickly, and see what we can find, once we're back at the bird."
They made it back at roughly the same time as the rest of the team, and Hunter settled down with his deck to review the footage, listening to Marius as he gave a description of the vehicle they were looking for. Tads and Aswon meanwhile went for a prowl around the tilt-wing, wondering if the sheltered conditions might have retained some part of the truck's passing – unlikely as it was a week ago and their own landing had probably stirred things up, but it was possible…
"Ok, now that we've seen the place eyes on, it does look like it's probably our guys. The actual town is much smaller than I thought it was from the map – the huge truck park makes it look bigger. But the number of people isn't that high, in terms of residents. And if they were parked up here…" Kai shrugged. "And from the description of the attack, it fits perfectly."
"Look at this." Hunter sent a still frame out to the larger screen, and Kai, Shimazu and Marius all leaned over to examine it carefully. A large truck, red and blue, with the markings as described pulled into the fuel area, arriving via one of the tamped-down sandy paths they'd spotted earlier – coming from the direction of Al-Batha. The time stamp on the video matched the general time of the attack, and they watched as the vehicle jumped across the ground, frame by frame to stop by the furthest fuelling equipment possible from the security cameras. One figure emerged, filling up the tank on the boxy vehicle. It looked like Dice – or at least it did if you squinted and tilted your head slightly to the side to normalise the angle. The image was blurry though, with the white-balance thrown off by the bright overhead lights of the canopy. But, based on height and general description, it did seem to match the one member of the team that they had at least a partial description of.
They were disturbed from their examination by Tads and Aswon returning, with Aswon dropping a small piece of debris onto the screen.
"No signs of tracks – all blown away or eroded unfortunately. But we did find that right at the northern end of the gulley, on the lip. Right where a truck might scrape over the rocks as it crossed the ridge line."
Hunter leant over and picked up the small metallic lump, then held it up to the light and examined it closely, twirling it over in his hands carefully before handing it over to Marius.
"Looks very much like a small section of a vehicle sill, covered with photo-voltaic image sensors and elements. Exactly the kind of thing we've got on the outside of the bird."
"I concur. And if they crossed the ridge-line at the top, it would be easy for a rock to scrape off a section of their systems there." Marius nodded in agreement, before passing over the item to Kai, who accepted it and looked slightly confused as to what he was expected to do with it.
"So, it sounds like they were definitely here then, and they killed someone, went and got fuel and then frakked off somewhere. Any idea where?"
"The footage is blurry as all hell, but it looked like they actually headed towards Highway 10, heading west, Kai."
"On the highway? That's a break in operating pattern for them, if it is them."
"Ahh, but look to the west, Kai." Aswon grabbed the controls on the map and zoomed out, showing another highway that ran across the desert two and a half kilometres away. "If they went off-road, they'd have to cross that highway side-on – and that would look dodgy as all hell. If they took the highway for a few klicks, got past that second road, and then dropped their lights and veered off to the side, they can slide off into the desert without crossing anyone's headlights or being particularly seen. Much less suspicious."
"So where does that leave us?"
"Well, we're pretty sure they were here, and we've confirmed their vehicle does have a camo-paintjob, that they refuelled here and probably have plenty of range, and that generally they're still sticking to quiet areas. So from here, if we look in the general direction they were heading – then that does lead us onto the village of Hawiyah – which is two hundred and twenty nine kilometres away, north-west-west. And that seems spot on profile."
"Ok, then lets get in the air and go see what happened there!" Kai started to strap in and the rest of the team joined him, sealing the doors and getting ready for take-off. Five minutes later, they were in the air and thundering across the desert, concealed from prying eyes by the spirit wrapped around them and deflecting the eager sensor sweeps of the land-trains and trucks on the highway with their radar-absorbent coating on the hull. In less than thirty minutes they were setting down in Hawiyah – or at least at the small collections of hovels in the general area that maps said should be a 'village'. Mostly it appeared to be a fork in a very dubious quality road, leading off to some industrial complexes to the north and west, glittering metal labyrinths of drills and gas storage tanks, frakking equipment and control rooms that plundered the depths of the desert for the natural resources that lay far beneath the shifting sands. Here though, there were small square buildings, made of hardened sun-baked mud huts, coloured a dull oche and with fences made of petrified wood and ancient wire, corralling in a small herd of goats.
With the tilt-wing down in a small hollow between shifting sand-dunes, the team spread out – Kai, Shimazu and Marius headed towards the huts to see if they could find someone, while Aswon headed to the top of the dunes with his rifle, ready to provide overwatch and to do some recon. Tads and Hunter stayed with the aircraft, ready to provide backup if required, but otherwise staying out of sight.
"I've got info for you, Marius – make sure you keep covered up. I've got eyes on the facility to the west, big gas extraction plant – run by Saudi Gas Exploration Inc, a wholly owned subsidiary of Sader Krupp. Double fence, warning signs – the whole gig. Definitely an extra-territorial facility."
"Acknowledged, Aswon, thank you. I will attempt to remain concealed." Marius pulled up the shemagh around his neck a little more, concealing his face more fully – at least out in the desert it didn't look too much out of place.
They found a wizened old man sitting next to his hut, resting on a three legged stool set against the wall, allowing him to sit in the meagre shade, while he worked with a pile of dried grasses and plant material, running it through ancient hand tools and crafting some kind of flax or fibre from the material. He looked up with a start as they appeared around the side of the hut, scrabbling for a battered knife that was lying by his side.
Kai swung into action, giving him a small bow and a friendly smile, and weaving the same tale he'd already used, gesturing around the team and pointing to the huts, then waited patiently while Marius translated. The pilot had the speech ready now, and having chatted with Hunter a little on the journey over, they'd managed to tighten up on the grammar a little, making it flow better. The shepherd appeared to accept their assertation anyway – nodding and then started to babble away, pointing around the corner of his own hut at the second run-down hovel a few metres away, then wildly gesturing in the air and pointing at the road.
"He says the other man who lived here, a goat-herder like him, was set upon by a demon from the sands, a few days ago. By my reckoning he is talking about the tenth, so one day after Al-Batha - so that fits with what we know. He says a red demon attacked him while he tended to the goats late one night, slicing at him with sharp claws – it cut him open from his left hip down the back of both legs and to his right ankle, before disappearing into the night, claiming one of his herd. According to the man here, he tried to help him, tended to his wounds, but he died from his injuries, fading away over the next day, day and a half. He dragged the body over behind the house and buried it under the sand, then looked after his herd, not knowing what else he could do."
"He doesn't look happy, but he doesn't look upset either." Shimazu whispered into his comms. "Though if he's just doubled the size of his herd, that might be why."
"He says he does not have a commlink, and only really speaks to the other man that lived here, and the people from the gas plant who came to buy fresh milk sometimes, bartering for things like knives and tools."
"What about vehicles, or signs of other outsiders?" Kai asked. Marius dutifully translated, and queried the man for a few minutes before reporting back.
"Yes, there was a vehicle – a large box van sitting out on one of the hard-pack roads. A brown UPS courier truck. From the general description, it fits the size of the known vehicle."
"UPS truck you say? They've used that one before, haven't they?" Kai thought back, but couldn't recall the specifics, but Hunter was listening on channel and supplied the information required.
"Yes, on the 6th, back in Nahdah, the village in the west of Oman, just before the old border. They used a brown UPS truck there too."
"I wonder if they're starting to rotate though their library – maybe there's a pattern we can recognise or use against them." Tads called out the com.
"If they are, then getting a physical description of what people saw will be much more useful – it will definitely help corroborate our intelligence." Marius noted.
"Yup. So – what happened to Mr Dead Shepherd's stuff. I'm just wondering if he had anything really personal on him, if Shimazu can do his aura-reading trick on it, determine anything about him? Or specifically the person that attacked him."
"Let me ask." Marius turned and addressed the shepherd, speaking for a minute then getting a very short and dismissive reply. Marius spoke again, but then the shepherd just shrugged and looked down at the ground, muttering under his breath.
"He's looking very suspicious, Marius – what's he saying?" Shimazu said quietly. He moved his feet a little, attracting the man's attention and then let his hand drop to the sword hilt very casually, resting it there.
"He says he had known the man all of his life, and his wife was long dead and the children went to Riyadh years ago. There used to be more in the village, but people drifted away, especially after the drillers came and used the best land they had for crops and grazing. But he is no thief – he just took the things for safe keeping, to make sure bandits did not steal them in the night. He did not covert them, or take them from jealousy, only for protection."
"Of course he did. Not breaking any local religious laws or anything." Aswon snorted.
"Sir, we believe you." Kai looked at him directly, using his hand to gently pull up his chin and establish eye contact. "But it is very important that we see his things. We need to catch this demon or devil, and stop it killing again." He concentrated on looking sincere and yet still forgiving, nodding his head as he held out his hand to receive whatever items the man might have taken. Marius translated for him, firing out Arabic in a smooth and rolling delivery, repeating the last sentence twice for emphasis. The man muttered, and then reached into a pocket and pulled out a huge goat tooth, threaded onto a piece of dried leather thong that looked stained and worn. A pair of close set holes had been drilled through the tooth, turning the large molar into a rudimentary whistle. The shepherd handed it over, muttering as he did so.
"This was something the other guy made for himself, and he wore it for over a decade. I do not know about being a treasured possession, but if he used it to herd his flock, it was probably very important to him – will that work, Shimazu?" Shimazu nodded to Marius and held out his hand, letting Kai pass over the whistle to him. "I will tell him we only need it for a few minutes to do some tests on it." Whilst Marius spoke to the shepherd, Kai and Shimazu moved back around to the second hut, sitting down in a similar position to where they'd first found the surviving shepherd. Crouched against the wall, Shimazu let the whistle rest in his right palm, moving his left down over the top to hold it in place, then slowed his breathing and focussed, opening his mind to the astral realm and feeling for the memories and astral threads wound through it.
Kai watched as Shimazu's eyes closed and his breathing slowed, the large man balanced on the balls of his feet and with his forearms resting on his knees, focussed on the item held in his huge muscular hands. His eyes twitched inside closed eyelids as he felt flashes of inspiration and glimpses of memories flood through from the item, his head twisting from side to side as he relived the experiences associated with the whistle.
The eyes flew open abruptly as the trance ended, and Shimazu drew in a long shuddering breath.
"Oh frak…"
