Episode 2.5.1
From Heroes of the Great Tree
Del and Vincent walked away from the rest of the crew towards the tradehall where spacers posted salvage, jobs and services. Del was determined to make sure the ship was in working order, and then get out. She was packed, but it would have aroused suspicions had she brought her bags with her to the port. Vincent was morose. The mission, trade the Shuttle from the Speedwell for repairs to the ship. It was a good deal to any repair shop. They might be able to get something as well. They logged into the cortex and posted their deal. Details were thin since it weren't exactly a salvage they wanted to discuss. As they finished up the planetary posting, Del saw a post addressed to her. "Now who'd be sending my a local post?" She opened it and read the contents:
Mechanic needed for the Louisiana, Firefly class. We are an independently minded crew with a ship headed to the Rim on a six planet rotation. Pay plus stake in the take. See Emeralda Hu, at 1701 Enterprise Street, Room #877.
"You already posting your resumé?" Vincent asked exasperated.
"Nossir. I don't know how this got here. Maybe someone put this Hu onto me. Still sounds interesting. " Del averred. She felt a strange compulsion. She'd always liked the fireflies, and this job just seemed right.
"I bet." Vincent groused.
Together they went into the lounge and after a few minutes found themselve negotiating a pretty good contract for repairing the Mao's Claw in exchange for the Shuttle, and no questions asked. In addition they managed to get the guy to throw in a freeze-locker with half a side of beef. Good for trading or eating if the price weren't right. They agreed and sealed the deal there.
As they had a drink to celebrate Del turned to Vincent. "Listen Vincent, I think I should see this Hu person. Its a pretty good deal, and, if you're gonna be lookin for a mechanic yourself, you ain't gonna want o be competing for the wage." Vincent seemed resolute. "I won't let you go see her alone. You never know who might of sent that message. Maybe it was ..." "Who Vincent? Who exactly has anything against me?" Del retorted. "I'm going, and I am going alone." Vincent could tell that she was serious, so he relented. There shared a brief, somewhat awkward kiss, and then she got up and left. He gave a look around as though scoping out the bar, then he darted out of the lounge shadowing Del on her journey.
An hour or so later, she was in the mostly industrial area of Nova Lumina, with her tail a block away. Del was lost in her own thoughts and didn't seem to notice him. She found her way into the commercial warehouse, its glass doors papered over with year old newsprint.
Vincent waited a moment and followed her in. He touched the door and felt something on his shoulder. Glancing over he sees a blue gloved hand. He took a moment to formulate a suitable quip, a moment too long. A sharp pain hits spread from his spine through his limbs and he collapses from the stun stick.
Del knocks on the door and it opens for her. Inside, a striking woman with short blond hair sits demurely in a heavy armed chair in the center of a nearly empty office suite. Cables run across the ceiling to a single cortex screen perched on a suitcase. The woman bids her to enter and motions to a simple wooden chair across from her.
This is a strange place for a meeting, Del thinks to herself, but she's been in stranger.
There was something very discomforting about the set up, and the woman. She didn't look like a Ship Captain, she didn't look right. Maybe it was the blue gloves she wore. They resembled somethings between surgical gloves and cleaning ones. The woman seemed pleasant enough, so Del gave her a minute to make her point. There was no else here, and she appeared unarmed.
"I will say," the woman began fairly familiarly." I wasn't expecting you." Del didn't know how to respond. "You disappeared under the radar, care to explain?" The woman spoke matter-of-factly.
"Well, it seems a might odd you not expecting me and all, since you're the one that sent the post." Del looks around the room again. The setting was strangely unnerving. "And under the radar seems a bit extreme to me. I mean, I wasn't trying to be found, mind you, but I wasn't exactly hiding out neither." Del replied.
[Del's gut tells her that this is not good]
The woman stares at Del with a scrutinizing gaze. Then she glances back at her cortex screen (the screen is set to prevent indirect observation) then looks at Del again as if looking for something particular. Finally, she reads a series of words.
"Cirrus. Socrates. Particle. Decibel. Hurricane. Dolphin. Tulip."
Then she looks at Del again, expectantly.
Del paused briefly, taking a few seconds to try and commit the 7 random words to memory. "I wouldn't bother. Those have no meaning for me anymore."
Of course they had no meaning - Del had no clue what the words were. Password? Some sort of code she was supposed to figure out? But it seemed pretty obvious that this woman was expecting something out of Del and her best chance for getting out of this alive were to try and fool the woman into thinking that Del was whoever Del was supposed to be, but that something had changed or gone wrong. The whole thing felt bad in her gut. Whoever this woman worked for, they were obviously well informed if they knew to leave her a message on what was a semi-random planet that she might never come back to. The longer Del could fool this woman with the blue gloves, the more information she'd be able to gather and the better prepared she'd be when she escaped. Hopefully, once she was out of here, she'd be able to decipher that code and figure out more.
She mentally prepared herself to make a bolt for it.
The woman turns to you and with a fairly pleasant demeanor, though one that does little to put you at ease speaks.
"You are not the first to buck conditioning. It was experimental, and experiments do not always succeed, our job would be unnecessary if they did." She frowns slightly. "It is fortunate that you came in, but you'll understand my confusion. If the words mean nothing to you, why did you come in?"
"Curiosity killed the cat, they say." Del worked on staying calm. Experiment? Conditioning? That couldn't be good. "Like I said, I wasn't making an effort to hide out. No harm in talking, right?" She wasn't sure how much longer she could keep this up, but this could be related to her missing memories and she wasn't going to run until she absolutely had to.
The woman seems to come to some sort of resolution, then says in a clear calm voice. "We're going to need to ask you some questions... Del is it?"
But before you can respond, the door opens and a man dressed in a similar business apparel as the woman, and also sporting blue gloves comes into the room backward dragging the limp form of Vincent with him. "Found him nosing around outside."
The woman starts to move. The man is occupied with Vincent's body, the woman is not currently armed, but she is reaching for something.
"Gorram." Del says in a monotone voice. There was no way that she could leave Vincent behind. So there was only one option. She leaps across the deck, attempting to grapple whatever the woman is reaching for. Hopefully it's a gun.
Del leaps across the room and grabbing the wrist of the woman, twists it hard causing the startled woman to release the object. Del rolls to the floor gracefully and sweeps up the device in her hand. It is not a gun, at least not like any gun Del has seen before. It is a piece of NewTech about the size of small spanner with a couple of buttons on it.
The male dropped Vincent like a sack of potatoes (that'll leave a mark) and drawing a stun stick, quickly turned to threaten her, but he stopped short of striking her and held off, as if at bay from the rod.
The woman, recovering her poise also kept a safe distance from Del and looked a little nervous.
The male spoke quietly "Can she even use that thing?" The woman whispered back "I.. don't think so... and we should be safe anyway." The male spoke again. "Are you sure?" "No," she replied.
Del started to feel a little more in control of the situation when the woman finally seemed to steel herself. "You'd just end up hurting yourself... Del....hand it over and this will go much more smoothly."
"You ain't been nothing but wrong so far. If you think I ain't going to be able to use this, I reckon you're going to be wrong again." She, of course, had no idea what it was she was holding, but they were treating it like a weapon, so she would too. She then motions to the man. "I suggest strongly that you drop that stun stick and kick it gently over to me. Things might get ugly otherwise."
The two look at each other, then back at Del, for a moment Del thinks that they are whispering something, but their mouths are not moving, they nod once simultaneously. Then the woman speaks.
"Del.... if you can use that weapon, that means you know that you would kill this... man here. Surely you don't want that on your conscience? Just hand it over and let's deal with this peacefully."
As she speaks the man closes his eyes (which flutter slightly as he does so). You feel a strange sensation of mild nausea (like vomiting into your mouth, only into your brain).
She'd never kill Vincent but their only hope was that they didn't know that. Vincent's life depended on her pulling this bluff off. Keeping her voice completely calm, she said, "I've been responsible for more deaths in the last couple of months than you probably have in your entire life." She thought about those poor souls starving to death in the black. That much was true for sure. "So why don't you let me worry about my conscience and you kick that gorram stun stick over here, don la ma?"
The woman looks nervously at the man whose eyes are still fluttering. "I can't get a good read on her." He says in a frustrated voice. "I think she might be bluffing..."
The woman give a look of irritation at her companion, then reaches over to the man and pulls his stun stick out of its belt loop. She tosses the thing over to Del's feet with a look of resignation.
"Don't expect us to sit still while you try to shock us." She says coolly.
"Don't worry, if there's one thing I know, it's that the 'Verse ain't a place for expecting." Del then motions to the man and then to Vincent. "Wake him up, and I highly suggest you don't do anything stupid."
She then prepared to quickly convince Vincent to stand up and leave before he said anything that they might both regret.
The man looks to the woman who seems to be in charge, and holding his hands in the air slowly, he reaches into his jacket pocket producing what a appears to be a newTech device of some kind. "Neural Stimulator" he says as though asking for permission.
With Del's nod he applies it to Vincent's neck and there is a small hissing noise. A few moments later Vincent begins to stir to consciousness. He looks pretty out of it and rubs the back of his head where a bump the size of a golf ball has formed from when he was dumped on the floor.
"Del, you're back. I knew you couldn't stay away for long." He manages.
The woman addresses Del again. "If your plan is to run, I suggest you do it now. Maybe you hope to meet up with Lieutenant Heru?" She pauses to gauge your reaction to the name. "If you do, tell him we'd like to speak with him as well, just to clear up some loose ends." She almost smiles.
She knew who was part of the crew. No surprise there. Del guessed that they maybe bugged the Claw somehow. She got a little angry just thinking about someone messing with her baby. And like a blow to the head, she realized she was still calling the Claw 'her baby'. What the hell was she doing leaving it? She'd apologize to Nadie if she and Vincent lived to see the rest of the crew again.
She passed the stun stick to Vincent. "Honey, just don't say anything and take out the cortex, would you?"
She turned to the woman. "If I see the Lieutenant again, I'll be sure to let him know that crazypsychobitchwoman with the blue gloves says hugs and kisses." Del blows a fake kiss towards the woman and smiles. "Have a nice day, you hear?"
A wobbly Vincent jams the stun baton into the Cortex and zaps it good until its screen burns out and sparks and smoke begin to pour out of its cracks. The baton fused into the screen and discharged its entire battery. The two of them back out of the room into the empty building and make a dash for it, knocking over garbage barrels and pulling down cables dangling from the ceiling to impede any pursuit. In seconds they are on the street, but in this relatively low traffic area they worry that they will be easily spotted. Once they catch a glimpse of the two figures, with their sinister blue gloves leaving the building, but as they prepared to bolt, the two agents waited patiently in front of the building. They decided not to risk being spotted and ran from the scene. A few blocks away they saw a military grade shuttle with a blue sun logo flying low overhead, it was heading in the direction of the building they were in. They ducked out of sight, and heading quickly toward the central city where cover might be found.
The going was slow, Vincent needed to stop, frequently and occasionally lost his balance. There was a little blood in his hair from the injury, and the bump was just as big. Del worried it might be a concussion, she'd need to get him someplace he could lie down.
They headed into what appeared a shipping yard, ground vehicles drove in and out delivering packages. In the cover of the noise and movement they slipped into an empty bay. She pulled her jacket off and bade Vincent lie down, he didn't object. She went through his jacket looking for their ship's comm (I assume he had it, since Del wasn't planning on returning to the ship), it was missing. That meant they couldn't call the ship, and that their communications were compromised. She looked at her own things, and noticed she still had the strange rod the Hands of Blue Operatives (HoBOs) were so afraid of. It didn't have any obvious use, maybe it was some kind of broadcaster, whatever it was, she couldn't make sense of it here, and couldn't risk bringing on board the ship, in the event they could trace it. She smashed it between doors of a dumpster until it looked pretty broken and then dumped the parts inside.
Vincent was losing consciousness, and she seemed to remember that that wasn't necessarily a good thing if someone had a concussion. She spoke to him for several minutes, then figuring his was as rested as he would get she helped him up, and the too of them hobbled out toward town. They kept under cover as best they could until they reached a small dirty noodle bar. She sat Vincent up in a booth with some hot soup, and found a pay-cortex in the back. She started a wave then cancelled it, they'd probably be able to trace it either to her, or to Nadie. Either way looked bad. Glancing around the bar she found a man placing bets on the dog races at the bar while simultaneously slurping down noodles. He was greasy and his mustache has bit of onion and broth soaking it. She took a breath and said a quick prayer then tugging at her shirt to accentuate her assets she bounced up to him faking cheer.
"Excuse me Shian Shen, omygod, I totally lost my comm. Can I please borrow yours when you are done?" She bubbled as best she could.
The man knew he was being used, so he made her sit next to him, and pawed at her knees and thighs while she tried to make the call. She hoped his business meant it would be harder to trace this line. First, she tried the ship. There was a long pause while the ship's systems registered the call.
"Answer.. Answer.. " Del toned. Then as he she heard the receiver come online, she had a momentary fear the voice she'd be hearing wouldn't be one of her crew. To her relief the voice was that of Nadie Ling "Ni Hao."
