Aetheral Space

"I expected more resistance," said Muzazi, stepping over the body of an unconscious security officer. Well, Dragan assumed the man was unconscious -- it had been a pretty hard hit with the pipe, after all, and he doubted that Muzazi was in much of a mood to hold back.

"The restraint of cowards is the greatest boon the righteous can obtain," replied Patel, walking right behind him. The man spoke like he was constantly expecting to be quoted.

Dragan didn't say anything -- he just kept watching the groups rear as they finally made their way into the control room. He knew better than anyone how effective it was to attack from behind, so he wasn't about to let that happen to him.

The coast was clear. The fate of the few officers they'd run into on their way here seemed to have served to convince the rest that this was more than they could handle.

They'd have called for backup, then -- they were working on yet another timer.

He turned around, stepping into the control room. Just like the hallways, the room had been abandoned -- in a hurry, judging from the spilt coffee and scattered papers. Just like Dragan had hoped, the majority of the computer terminals were still logged in; he stepped over to one and tapped the screen a few times to ensure it wouldn't go into lock mode.

"What is our next step, my friend?" asked Reyansh, collapsing into one of the available seats.

The adrenaline of escape had been driving him for a little while, but it was painfully obvious that he was in no real shape for combat. With the amount of torture he'd been put through, he'd probably be unable to move once the excitement of the situation wore off.

Once that happened, he'd have to take extra care not to piss off Muzazi -- there'd be nobody to defend him from the Special Officer's wrath.

Dragan's gaze flicked over to the man in question -- and then immediately returned to the screen once he realized that Muzazi was staring at him. He'd said that he wouldn't let Dragan out of his sight, and he apparently meant it.

"My friend?" Reyansh repeated, panting. "Our… our next step, if you would?"

"Oh, uh, right," said Dragan, jerking back to life. "I need to look into the systems -- see if there's any evidence of what the Sponsor of War is planning."

Muzazi furrowed his brow. "Who?"

Dragan waved a vague hand as he explained. "He's one of the, uh, people in charge of this planet. Secretly, I guess. They're the money -- and he's planning to do something big, soon -- probably in the next couple of hours."

"And you know this how?"

"He told me. Well, he didn't tell me exactly -- he told me something else but I was able to figure out he was lying."

"Mm-hmm."

Muzazi's tone pretty much spelled out that he thought Dragan was full of shit. In any other situation, that would probably be true, but this was one of the rare occasions when he was telling nothing but the truth. Muzazi had been overly trusting before, but now it seemed he'd swung to the other end of the scale -- he wouldn't believe a single word Dragan said.

"That doesn't matter," Dragan went on, trying to power through it. "The point is that something is about to happen here on Taldan, and nobody's gonna want to be around for it. If there are any clues here that'll tell us what this thing that's gonna happen is, we kinda need them. Get me?"

Muzazi didn't say anything, didn't move to stop him, but Dragan couldn't help but notice the Special Officer's pipe was ready to be swung at a moment's notice.

That was probably the best he could hope for.

Dragan turned back to the console, began typing into the search function with the on-screen keyboard.

"You're hacking the system?" Muzazi asked from behind him, voice still full of caution.

This old stereotype again. Dragan narrowly resisted the urge to roll his eyes. "No," he said, typing as he talked. "I wouldn't know how to hack systems. I'm just searching for a specific prisoner."

"You seem to know your way around this system." There was accusation in Muzazi's voice, although Dragan had no idea what he was actually being accused of.

He turned away from the console for a moment, giving the Special Officer a baffled look. "Yeah -- yeah. I'm typing in the name of the person I'm looking for. The system's a keyboard -- I know my way around a keyboard, yeah. I know how to type letters. Don't you?"

Muzazi narrowed his eyes. "It's suspicious."

"In what way is it suspicious?"

Muzazi didn't reply to that -- and after a few awkward seconds, Dragan turned back to the console. The search had been completed: only one matching result for the name Ambran Roz. The Umbrant they'd recovered at the niain -- the niain that had kicked this whole mess off.

"Patel?" Dragan called out. "You still with us?"

There was a mumbled groan from the corner. Not unconscious then, clearly, but his fighting potential had diminished to almost zero in record time. So he couldn't be used.

Dragan's eyes slid back, almost reluctantly, to look at Muzazi. "There's a prisoner we need in Cell 207," he mumbled, almost sheepishly.

"Go get them, then."

"There might be guards, you know?" Dragan shrugged weakly. "That's kinda… you know?"

It was almost impressive how pathetic he was being, and the look on Muzazi's face reflected that. "You think I'm some kind of dog to do your dirty work?" said Muzazi, the man whose job description was being a dog who did other people's dirty work.

Dragan smiled a sad, lopsided smile. "If I get killed on the way there, I guess you can't take me back to the Supremacy? That kinda sucks, but I guess if that's what you really want…"

Muzazi stared into Dragan's eyes for a moment, the frustration visibly building. He clicked his tongue, and then -- he broke away, marching to the complex entrance, where Dragan had first walked into this prison.

For a moment, Dragan's heart leapt, thinking that the Special Officer was abandoning them -- then, he realized what was really going on. Muzazi was emitting one of those thrusters from his palm, white flame jetting out of his skin, and was using it to weld the door shut.

"You have no way to leave until I return," he snapped. "Do you understand?"

Dragan's meekness vanished in record time. "But of course," he said brightly, returning to the console. Hopefully, this place had a connection to Taldan's internet -- he wanted to look into Ambran Roz a little more now that he had the chance.

Muzazi charged off down one of the hallways, pipe scraping on the floor behind him. Dragan smirked as he went; the Special Officer wasn't as canny as he liked to think.

Ruth felt small.

That wasn't always so bad; making yourself small, hiding in the undergrowth when someone was looking for you was a good way to remain hidden -- a good way to remain safe. It was a survival strategy, one that worked more often than not. That was the kind of small you had a choice in, though.

The way she felt now? Curled up into a ball, feeling as if she was being compressed from all sides, being crushed into something tiny and weak? That wasn't something she was for.

She'd been lying on the bed they'd provided her for the last few hours, doing her best to ignore the doubts and anxieties running through her head -- badly. She couldn't help but replay all the times she'd fucked up since they landed on this damn planet.

Running away like a child. Not stopping Dragan from being thrown out of the car. Getting mad at Skipper.

Letting the Citizen get away.

That last one was the worst, but on its own she could have dealt with that -- it was that on top of everything else that was burning at her like acid. The image of herself she'd built up in her head had crumbled away like the facade it had always been. She wasn't a fighter. She wasn't brave. She was useless. Useless.

There was a knock on the metal door. The guards, probably.

"Blaine," the distorted voice came. "Get out here. You're needed."

She didn't recognize the voice. One of the guards, then, definitely. Slowly, limply, she climbed out of the bed and marched towards the door like some kind of zombie, arms swinging loosely at her sides. This was all she was good for, in the end. Trying to follow orders without fucking it all up.

She reached the door. It slid open.

Danger.

Her body moved.

Ruth blinked. The barrel of a plasma pistol was pointed right at her face -- the guard had been standing on the other side of the door, and had pointed it right at her the moment it had opened. It shook in the air -- for some reason, the guard hadn't fired. A second later, Ruth realized why.

The claws of her gauntlet had pierced through his helmet, five needles running right through the man's temple. He still stood, a gurgling sound still came from his mouth, but Ruth knew that he was already dead in the way that mattered. Pulling the trigger wasn't a decision he could make anymore.

Her body had reacted before her conscious mind had even realized what was happening. Wait -- what was happening? Ruth let the gauntlet dissipate into red Aether and the guards body dropped to the ground, blood already oozing through the holes in his helmet.

This was one of the security officers, wasn't it? Why had he tried to kill her? They'd failed on their last mission, but not badly enough for this, right? What was going on?!

She heard muffled voices from within the guards helmet -- the sound of his communicator, leaking out through the holes.

"Clarke," it was saying, stern voice coming through loud and clear. "Confirm. Is Blaine terminated? We believe del Sed is on the loose, and we've lost Hadrien. Confirm Blaine's status immediately."

Huh? Bruno and Serena were on the loose? They'd lost Dragan? Ruth felt dizzy -- it was as if she'd been thrown into an entirely different world than the one she'd been in yesterday, like she'd skipped years of time and wound up in a sequence of events she didn't understand.

Her ears twitched -- she could hear heavy boots coming down the hallway. Plenty of them. Well, she guessed there was one thing she did understand.

The Skeletal Set materialised around her in an aurora of glowing red Aether.

She understood how to fight.

Rare had thought this assignment would be the opportunity of a lifetime -- but the Dawnhouse really wasn't all it was cracked up to be.

It had sounded good enough. Watch after the guests of a party at the very seat of civilization, mingle with the rich and powerful? Hell yeah. He could make some real in-roads, land himself a cushy gig as a private bodyguard, maybe. Sure, Taldan was home, but he'd take an extra zero on his salary over a familiar skyline any day.

He wasn't getting much in the way of mingling.

The function rooms of the Dawnhouse were apparently pretty fancy, from what he'd been told. Huge rooms filled with people, Taldan's best and brightest breaking bread and making merry. The maintenance tunnels… well, those were another story entirely.

It wasn't that Rare had to duck to get around, but that was only just. He could feel his helmet constantly scraping at the ceiling over his head, and he was a pretty compact guy. It was just this constant feeling of being constrained. If anything did happen, Rare didn't know if he'd even be able to pull out his plasmabow properly.

He licked his lips nervously as that ugly thought crawled back up. If anything did happen? Something had happened on Taldan, quite a few times now. The deaths of the security officers at that disaster of a niain, then the massacre at Anna Sait… it wasn't exactly the safest time to work for S4 right now -- which was another reason he was pretty eager for a new assignment.

Just bear it, Rare-it, Rare told himself, turning around the corner as he continued his patrol. He was pretty much done with the check of this floor, so he just needed to take the lift further down. It was funny: the cramped elevator would probably give him more room than these damn tunnels.

He reached the elevator doors, closed, and tapped the button on the wall. The reassuring hum of machinery filled the space, and he could hear the lift ascending to his position.

It's just a couple of hours, he reassured himself. Just don't do anything stupid, and you'll be fine.

As the doors opened, Rare's next breath caught in his throat.

The inside of the elevator was painted red with gore, blood and guts slowly slipping down the walls and oozing onto the floor. What was left of a stomach flopped down from the ceiling and landed with a wet splat.

There was a creature in there, the culprit without a doubt, a heavy and huge beast composed from what looked like glowing orange glass. The pile of limbs and ruined torsos -- armour torn apart -- beneath the creature shifted as it adjusted it's footing, turned its whole body to regard Rare. He looked into its eyes and saw nothing there. It wasn't just that this thing was merciless -- there was no real intelligence there to have mercy.

The hippo blinked. The hippo charged.

It wasn't as hard to bring up the plasmabow as Rare had feared -- not that it did him much good.

Dragan furrowed his brow as he scanned through the profile of Ambran Roz he'd found online. It didn't make sense.

If the journalist had run into some kind of information about the Citizen -- a hint as to his identity or his plans -- Dragan would have expected him to work in the kind of sphere that would put him in contact with that information. Crime reporting, maybe, or something along those lines. But that wasn't what Roz was at all.

He was a technical reporter -- providing updates as to new pieces of equipment to be used in nendon gas mining. The closest thing his career had ever gotten to excitement was reporting on a two-day worker's strike.

How the hell would someone like this have picked up information about the Citizen?

The doors to the right hallway opened -- Muzazi had returned. He walked in, face grim, something slung over his shoulder. He raised an eyebrow as he saw Dragan hunched over the console.

"You're still here," he said, approaching.

"You sound surprised."

"That's because I am. I expected you to at least attempt an escape."

Dragan shrugged. "Guess you don't know me as well as you'd like." He nodded to Muzazi's burden. "What's that?"

Muzazi frowned. "An issue."

He threw the object down on the ground. The corpse of Ambran Roz landed with a heavy thump, limbs splayed out and mouth hanging open. His dead eyes were as wide as the plasma-hole between them. Judging from the stink, he'd been dead a while.

The words Roz had said at the niain, when they'd grabbed him, bubbled up to the surface of Dragan's mind.

"Help! Help! Someone! I'm being killed!"

How right he'd been. If he'd been dead for a while, that would mean they'd killed him shortly after he'd first arrived here. There wouldn't have been time for an interrogation, then -- quite the opposite. He was being silenced.

So the Sponsor of War had been the one who wanted Roz dead, then. Had the Citizen assumed Roz had learnt something about him, then, and operated based on that assumption?

“Hadrien," said Muzazi, his face grave -- but he wasn't looking at the body anymore. He was looking at the screen of the console.

Dragan looked down -- the page he'd been looking at was gone, replaced by a small red square on a white background. Asset not found.

"The hell?" he muttered, backing out into the main page off the news station's employee records. The red square was there too, as if the entire record system had just been erased: Asset not found.

He tried the news company's homepage: Asset not found.

He tried Brighteye Taldan, the biggest news corporation on the planet: Asset not found.

He tried the standard search engine -- this was the default for every user connecting to Taldan's network. If nothing else, at least this would be intact. The page loaded: Asset not found.

Dragan looked up from the console, an awful formless panic tightening its grip around his heart -- and as he did, he saw that the surveillance feeds lining the walls were being replaced, one by one, by that familiar red square.

Asset not found.

"What's happening?" mumbled Patel from his chair.

"I'm not sure," Dragan replied, but a theory was coming together in his mind even as he said that. "It's as if… someone's erasing everything, every -- every piece of information stored on Taldan's network."

Muzazi leaned into the screen, face illuminated by the white and red image. "Why would they do that?”

Something was going to happen on Taldan, very soon. The Sponsor of War would be responsible for it. The Sponsor of War had wanted Roz dead. Roz had been an expert on nendon gas, on the mining equipment. The Sponsor of War knew exactly what range this disastrous event would cover.

The Sponsor of War had offered to get Dragan off Taldan entirely.

"It's to get rid of any evidence," Dragan whispered. "He's going to destroy the planet."