There was no connection between the cab and the back of his truck, so he had to exit the rear and walk around to the front. When he opened the tail gate and slid out of the back, blinking the sleep out of his eyes, he saw Grif along with two others standing in the parking lot. Thorn had never seen them before, but he was familiar with the type: thick muscle bots who enjoyed punching things so long as they didn’t punch back.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Thorn said, groaning. “You said your boss was out of town!”
“Client,” Grif corrected. “My client is out of town. Boys, if you would, please.”
The beating wasn’t the worst he’d ever received, but it was one of the more thorough. The two grunts were professionals, used to dealing with low-leveled individuals. They pulled their punches and focused on the areas that were painful but not debilitating.
Thorn didn’t fight back. Every hit stoked his anger and helplessness, but he didn’t lose his cool. He took that rage and banked it, like he was storing up quints.
When they were done, the two grunts helped Thorn stand up and face Grif.
“Don’t hate me,” Grif purred, “That was just for business.”
She lifted his chin up with her finger until Thorn was staring her in the eyes. “This is for pleasure.”
Her hand snapped forward and slapped Thorn hard across the face.
“As far as we’re concerned, you have six days to pay, and this–” Grif sighed, as if she couldn’t believe that an enforcer as august as herself had to stoop down to Thorn’s level, “–this parking spot is no longer yours.”
The goons dumped Thorn on the ground and took off.
“What do I even pay the stupid lease for,” Thorn grumbled to himself. The lease was a System contract, and the terms wouldn’t let him cancel even if he wanted to.
Thorn tried to clean himself up a bit, wiping blood off his split lip. Grif’s “pleasure” had been hard; it was going to leave a bruise.
The sun wasn’t up yet when Thorn was back on the road.
As he climbed out of town and up to the Crows Guild outpost, the sun crept over the edge of the mountains and shined down into the city. It was a surprisingly clear day, and the view was spectacular. It was too bad that Thorn was not in the mood to appreciate it.
Gammon wasn’t on duty, manning the gate when he arrived. She was in her barracks at the outpost, though, and a quick confirmation from her had him through the gate and meeting her in the courtyard.
“Must be serious if you came all the way out here, this early in the morning,” Gammon said by way of greeting. “I was quite busy yesterday, got pulled into some stuff here at the outpost. Sorry I didn’t make it out to the diner.”
“No worries, I figured as much,” Thorn said, hopping out of the cab, Lief’s drone in hand. “Do you have time now?”
“I do, before my shift starts. So what’s going on?” Gammon asked, peering closely at the bruise on his face. “I don’t see any missing limbs, though, so it can’t be too bad yet.”
Her attempt at humor fell flat.
“Lots of stuff going on, actually,” Thorn said. “I’m being extorted by an unknown individual for daring to call the Tow-Jammers on him when he parked in my spot.”
Gammon shook her head in disapproval. Thorn didn’t bother mentioning that if all else failed, he could try and pay off the young master… but only if he had his cores. And Lief had his cores, stored in a Wayfarers Guild lockbox.
“Then one of his guys tracked me to the diner, and Cook’s ready to cut me loose if I cause him any trouble, not that I blame him for that.”
Gammon frowned more deeply at that news.
“But he gave me a week to figure that out. More urgently, our mutual friend Lief has gone incommunicado, and this parked itself on my truck last night.” Thorn held up the drone.
Whatever happened with Grif and her client, Thorn wasn’t in danger of his life; he might be in deep, but he was confident he could squirm out somehow. He wasn’t so sure about Lief at the moment. It wasn’t like him to not respond.
“Well, being extorted for calling a tow truck on someone sounds like a normal Monday for you,” Gammon said. “You get all fired up and piss the wrong people off, what do you think is going to happen?”
That they would respect other people’s property, Thorn thought. That they wouldn’t walk all over him just because they could. He didn’t share his perspective, though, since even to himself it came off as hopelessly naive.
“But this business with Lief, it concerns me more as well. Is that one of his drones?”
Thorn nodded in agreement. “I’m pretty sure it is. I came up here hoping that you know someone that could help with a hack on the drone.”
“That’s a good idea,” Gammon nodded. “And yes, I know just the person. Walk with me.”
She headed off towards the cafeteria at a brisk pace. “I just tried to message Lief myself. No answer.”
Thorn cocked his head. “So why is that?”
“I don’t think he’s blocking us, if that’s what you’re thinking,” she said. “I asked a number of mutual friends to reach out and none of them got a reply. Besides, why would he?
“Much more likely that he is under the effect of a jamming device.”
Gammon opened the door to the cafeteria and held it open for Thorn.
“Jamming device?” Thorn asked. He’d never heard of such a thing.
“You might not have seen one, not out here on the frontier. Very expensive. Mainly used in active conflict zones. Messes with the background quintessence matrix, and makes comms go to static,” Gammon explained.
“Three cups of caf,” she said to the woman behind the counter. “One black, one with two creamers and no sugar, and…”
She looked at Thorn.
“Tea for me, actually,” Thorn replied.
Gammon rolled her eyes while the barista confirmed the order.
“Lastly…” Gammon continued while waiting for their beverages. “He could be dead. Or in a dead zone, which would amount to about the same thing at his level.”
Dead zones were areas where the background energy of quintessence just didn’t exist. A vacuum, of sorts, where anything living in them quickly had the quintessence sucked out of them. It was usually fatal, and always painful.
“There are other, even more exotic possibilities, like in the middle of a wormhole on a WFG ship, but that’s not a likely scenario, even if one of Lief’s exes had him kidnapped.”
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
He had more than one ex-wife? Thorn was learning lots of new things today. He queried his System quickly.
Huh. Thorn must not have been paying as much attention as his System was to Lief’s love life.
The barista handed them their drinks. Gammon took hers, and drank a deep gulp of the steaming hot liquid, smacking her lips. Thorn grabbed the other two, tucking the drone in his hands under his armpit, and followed her out of the cafeteria.
“A dead zone is also extremely unlikely. I suppose you may not know this… It’s confidential information, technically, but very much an open secret… Anyways, the Crows Guild has an extremely lucrative contract to identify dead zones if and as they occur on this entire continent. Letting one go for too long without addressing it can have… nasty consequences. We have a big sensor grid out there; details on that, of course, are highly confidential.
“If one popped here, there’d be a big buzz. And I haven’t heard hide nor hair of one. Although…”
Gammon led Thorn across the central square of the outpost to one of the doors on the far side, leading down into the mountain.
He was very familiar with the cafeteria and a few of the warehouses, having made many deliveries. He’d also been to the recruiter’s office, when he had tried to join the guild and been rejected… That had been a rough day. A week of rough days, actually, but in the end, he’d met Gammon, and that had been the beginning of a new start for him.
They entered a door labeled “Research” and headed down a set of cool stairs lit with bright, recessed lighting.
Gammon spoke in a hushed tone. “Things at the outpost are clamped down super tight. I have been extremely busy with all manner of pointless activities, and everyone at the branch is on a soft lockdown. We are on standby to be called up for an emergency mission given only a single hour’s notice.
“Colonels,” she sighed. “Yelling ‘jump’ simply because they enjoy hearing a chorus of grunts singing ‘how high?’”
Gammon must be referring to the VIP who’d arrived on that orbital dropship he’d seen down by the docks.
“By the way, I never thanked you for those extra sausages. The colonel loves ‘em. Ate everything in inventory, the two boxes you gave me, and then had me get him another takeout order as well. The man can sure put his food away…
“And here we are…” Gammon ushered Thorn into a cavernous chamber. Harsh fluorescent lighting hung from the ceiling. Precisely ordered tables lined the walls, covered in bits and pieces of machine tech. Flashes of light came from the center of the room, where a hunched over figure crouched at the foot of a twelve-foot-tall armored exoskeleton.
“Stop farting around and get over here, Beatrice!” Gammon yelled at the figure with the welder in the middle of the room.
“Today’s your lucky day, Thorn,” she said, cracking a toothy smile. “The only thing better than being a member of the Crows Guild is being a client!”
The flashes of arc welding from inside the armored exoskeleton stopped, and a woman stepped out from the metal framework.
Beatrice was of an indeterminate middle-age, faint wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and mouth barely visible beneath her slightly garish makeup. She was wearing spotless white coveralls with a stylized crow embroidered on the front. The sleeves of her blouse were rolled up, and as she walked over to where Gammon and Thorn stood, a thin welding attachment folded itself beneath the organic tissue of her right forearm.
She was running a top-rated System, focused on machine tech, and at a high level of bound quintessence for certain.
“Well, hello there, dearie,” Beatrice said to Thorn, a wide smile on her lips. She did a slight dip at her knees and nodded her head; not quite a bow or a curtsy, but a polite gesture of greeting.
“And good to see you too,” Beatrice said, turning to Gammon. Her voice dropped an octave and she raised her nose, somehow managing to look down on Gammon, despite being almost a foot shorter.
Thorn held out the extra cup of caf they’d brought from the cafeteria.
“Oh my, why you shouldn’t have,” Beatrice exclaimed, taking the caf with a smile. “You’re so sweet! I can tell someone raised you right. Not all of us have been blessed with a proper upbringing.”
Beatrice glanced pointedly at Gammon as she sipped her caf.
“Yes, ma’am,” Thorn said, studiously keeping a grin off his face.
Gammon rolled her eyes.
“How’s your little project going?” Gammon asked Beatrice, pointing over at the armored exoskeleton.
“It’s coming along quite marvelously, thank you very much for asking,” Beatrice said.
“That poorly? Still haven’t figured out how to resolve the resonance conflicts, have you?”
“‘Tis only a momentary problem,” Beatrice said with a sniff. “So what brings you to my lab so late at night?”
“Well, actually, it’s morning now,” Gammon replied. “And this young man needs a hack on a drone.”
“Really, now.” Beatrice clicked her tongue disapprovingly. “What would a nice young man like this want to do with such a sordid business as hacking someone else’s drone?”
“I’d explain it all, but then we’d just be sitting here listening to your inane chatter for another ten minutes,” Gammon said. “I’ve got better things to do than to watch you enjoying the sound of your own voice.”
“Well, I never!” Beatrice’s eyes widened in mock outrage, before turning and winking Thorn.
He held out the drone towards Beatrice, but she didn’t take it in her hand. Instead, in a quick blur, a suite of sensors on metallic, segmented appendages unfolded from within what had appeared to be a completely normal human arm just a moment prior. Most of the sensors clustered around the drone, but a long, prehensile wire extended up and over Thorn’s head, sniffing at his back. Thorn tried his best to remain still and only flinched slightly.
“Ah, I see what you mean,” Beatrice murmured to Gammon. “Is this on an official contract yet? Since you brought him, I assume the little puppy has the quints, but with that insufferable colonel mucking about, for all I know this is some kind of test he cooked up.”
“No contract yet.” Gammon said. “But I believe that drone is one that you yourself designed, so I thought it best to come here first, even though I know you are busy.”
“You are just too kind.” Beatrice smiled. “But of course we will still need a contract in place with this young fellow.”
Thorn willed his agreement to the contract. It was tightly worded, short and sweet. He couldn’t help wincing at the cost, but he knew that it was a pittance for this kind of work from such a highly leveled person, and from the Crows Guild no less.
It also did not escape his notice that the contract made no mention of a drone or hacking into a drone. Only an amateur would put those kinds of details into a System record.
“Well then, now that the formalities are out of the way, let’s see what we’re dealing with!” Beatrice beamed at Thorn. He handed over the drone, and Beatrice took it and walked over to one of the tables on the side of her lab.
She grabbed a small tube from a rack and scraped some of the dried blood off of the drone into it. After she added a few drops of liquid from another bottle on the table, she placed it into a centrifuge. One of the appendages extending from her left arm plugged into a connection on the centrifuge, and it began spinning.
A second appendage plugged into a port on the underside of the drone.
“Hmm. I have good news!”
“What is it?” Thorn asked.
“Even though the drone is not connected in any way to its previous user… which usually means said drone user is dead or hopped a wormhole ship… Anyways, whatever happened, the former user had time to plan. They disabled the encryption, gave the drone some final instructions, packed it full of quintessence, and then cut it loose.”
That was good news. If Lief had had time to plan, then the likelihood he was still alive went up.
“What were the instructions?” Thorn asked.
“Fly to some location in the city,” Beatrice said. “Overlaying the coordinates… it looks like an apartment building downtown; I assume yours? There are additional instructions, but the drone wasn’t able to execute them. It’s just a machine without a System link, and it couldn’t execute that level of logic.”
“Can you execute the additional instructions?” Gammon asked.
“I can if the client approves,” Beatrice replied. Gammon rolled her eyes.
“What are they?” Thorn asked. “The instructions, that is. If it’s a self-destruct command, that could be bad.”
“Smart thinker,” Beatrice said approvingly. “It has a payload, so the instructions are to simply deliver that payload.”
“Let’s do that, then,” Thorn said.
Beatrice activated a button on the table, and a shield glimmered into place over the table. It looked similar to Thorn’s pumpkin shield, but was a darker shade, almost as if the light going through it was polarized.
“Combination kinetic and energy shield,” Beatrice said in answer to the unspoken question. “Safety first!” She giggled. It was an incongruous sound, and not at all pleasant.
There was a soft click and a small, dark piece of stone fell onto the table from a chamber inside the drone. The shield dissolved and Beatrice picked up the rock. On the back side, a short message was scratched into the surface.
“Amaranth,” Beatrice read out slowly.