My stay in Aelea was only a few days this time, much to Zia’s and my dismay. Zia says she should be out in a week or so to start her practical studies of Earth and would like to use my Settlement and Penny’s place on Bikini Atoll as bases of operation for her roaming. I tell her she’s welcome at my place any time, but I’d be a terrible tour guide.
Danielle, to my great surprise, stays behind. She takes over the rental the Dzartha arranged for her, and has a few interviews for medical research associates and a company that’s interested in purchasing her research. She seems happy at the available opportunities, but I worry about how Marcella is going to fare—she doesn’t seem stable with this much uncertainty.
“Paolo! Have you thought about whether you’re willing to move to Asphodel yet?”
“Yes Quimica, Beverly and I would like the opportunity. But what of my compatriots from the south? Who am I to train?” It’s been a common question and I can tell he’s getting frustrated with me.
This time I greet him with a smile. “A team from Astoria just picked them up. They’re being taken to Empire medical facilities for assessment and treatment and they’ll be here tomorrow.”
My Columbian friend suffers a brief expression of confusion before I see joy flood his features. “This is real? They are coming” I nod. He rushes toward me and grabs my hands, shaking them furiously. “This is such wonderful news!”
He then starts asking me rapid-fire questions about lodging, workspace availability and other training for personal development. I assure him that I have thought of the logistics and have money available for development programs. I also tell him that since the facility in Asphodel is larger and more technical, he’ll be taking most of them with him. I reinforce that with telling him to train two for my plant here, and the remaining eight can get additional training on-site with their new plant. I wish I could give him more time, but he swears that six weeks will be plenty.
I stop by Marcella’s place to check up on her, she swears she’s fine, and she declines to have dinner with me. Apparently she’s prepping for a job, but won’t tell me what it is. I wish she’d talk to me.
Resigning myself to a lonely night, I check the dispatch boards that the Sheriff’s office maintains and see a few territory disputes around the Grand Canyon, a resource misuse claim near Durango, and an ongoing gang war in Santa Fe. I send a message to the Deputy out in Colorado Springs to see if they care, saying it’s too far for it to affect them.
“Aria, what do you think, do a drive by survey of Durango before going to Santa Fe, or drop me off and you head back for a detailed search in Durango?”
“I’d prefer you not go alone into a situation described as a war.”
She gets us to the outskirts of in an hour or so, flying high so we don’t disturb too many people, and someone was kind enough to set a few buildings on fire to let me know where to investigate first. Time to suit up Kimber. I message Zia that I’m headed into a fight as Aria drops me off at the first fire. I tell her to pick a firefighting foam tank that will fit in her hold. She shows me a short list and I purchase the lot for her. A few minutes later, while I’m jogging around the streets, I see white foam fall out of the sky onto the flames.
I sigh as I see that she is preventing the fire from spreading and dampening the flames. I growl as I hear gunshots and see the shield on Aria react to deflect them. I run to the sources of the gunshots and taze and cuff two of them, while the third switches to a higher caliber weapon. A brief fight ensues as I try to dodge his shots, but I end up catching the man with a plasma shot, making him drop his weapon. I’m about to put the man out of his misery when something kicks my chest off-center, twisting me and pushing me over. The crack of a rifle follows after.
/Aria, rooftop assailant, sending a cone of likelihood based off the impact trajectory./ She chirps at me in response, cutting off her firefighting foam to search for the rifleman.
Get up Kimber, you’re just asking to get rolled up on and shot again. I scramble up and sprint behind some rubble. I hear another crack, noting that I did not get hit that time. Taking a moment to assess my environment, I see that dashing into the smoldering building is my quickest escape route in an otherwise debris riddled open lot. I jump out, engage my thrusters and fly toward the building a lot faster than I really should. I hear another crack, but this time it’s answered by the ‘burrrt burrrt’ of Aria’s chain-fed automatic weaponry.
Aria confirms the kill, so I exit the deathtrap and ask her to come by to pick up my prisoners and me, then to head to the next burning building. “Thanks for taking care of that guy, Aria.”
“This is why I think you should have a team-mate.”
“You’re my team-mate, doofus. My flying, firefighting gunner teammate.” She chirps at me in reply, though I can somehow tell that she enjoys the sentiment.
An hour and a half later, I’ve rounded up a pair of guys from each location, bind and gag them in the passenger area while trying to think of a place to interrogate them. Aria reminds me that if I pay the transfer fee to Camp Elsewhere, I could use the cargo area. Well, good thing I hired someone smarter than me to watch my ass.
I buy a steel chair and anchor it to the deck and start asking questions one person at a time.
“What gang are you with?”
“The Adobe Dominion. They will come for me.”
“They’re welcome to have you back as long as you answer a few questions. I’m not here to kill more people than I have to.”
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
He chuckles, “My people have no such limitations.”
I can’t help but scoff at his confidence. “Who are you fighting and why are you at war?”
He spits and swears at me. I kick him in the chest. I ask him again, he tells me to go fuck myself. I punch him in the face until it looks bruised and cut and then gag him again.
I then install another chair, this one facing the beaten man and bring in another guy with a similar mark on his face.
“So, your buddy here says you are from the Adobe Dominion. I want to know who you’re fighting and why you’re fighting.”
“He wouldn’t tell you, why the fuck would I?”
“Because if you don’t answer, I hurt your friend. You don’t answer again, I do the same to you. You get a preview of what’s coming for you.”
He replies with an expletive equivalent of ‘do your worst’. I start with a few gut punches, and get some more swearing, but no actual information. Why the hell won’t they tell me who they’re fighting. I summon a baseball bat and start poking it aggressively into their balls.
The man is sobbing profusely now, but I finally get “The locals.” Not a wordy answer, but he gave it to me. I wipe the blood off of his face and give him a chance to have some water and a bite of food. I do the same for the first man as he also gave me one answer.
“I’m going to go see what I can find out from the locals, then I’ll be back.”
Unsurprisingly, the locals were hard to find and were actively hiding from shady shit like a high-tech shuttle and a flying woman in body armor. It takes me a few hours, learning some new things about my interface involving assigned patrol areas. I’m prompted to assign myself as responding to the ‘call’ from dispatch, and suddenly I can see system users in the area. No details, but nearby locations.
“Santa Fe residents,” I announce through Aria, “I’m Deputy Novarro responding to a dispatch and would like to talk to some residents about recent violence.” I circle an occupied area once before someone shouts at me from on top of an old restaurant building.
“This isn’t Nevahrado, Deputy.”
“According to Reno and Colorado Springs it is.” I shrug, though he probably can’t see it. “Seems like you could use some help with the Adobe Dominion in either case.”
“You want to help us fight a gang? That’s not believable, Deputy.”
That’s understandable. ‘I just want to help’ is not something that rang true in Vegas either. “Yeah, that wouldn’t fly in Vegas either, but what I do want is to keep Users, and thus viable Territory revenue from needlessly disappearing. If I have to rearrange a few organizations to make things stable, then so be it.”
“That at least sounds like the truth. I’m coming down with some armed friends.” I give them a thumbs up and wait some more.
Five minutes later, a team of five in police riot gear comes out of the building. That is a good sign that this group would constitute ‘Locals’.
“No attack squad of thugs around the corner?” a serious-looking gym rat with a mustache asks.
“Gunship in the sky.” His squadmates look up and around, but the mouthpiece keeps staring at me, nodding after a few seconds.
“Alright, now what kind of help you offering, Novarro?”
I smirk at the name use, an acknowledgement that I’m not completely full of shit? “Destabilize the gang, mostly. I wanted to confirm that the ‘intel’ from one of the gangbangers I captured was true. If the A-D gang is really preying on and killing residents instead of a rival gang.”
“You captured some? Any chance you’d give us a turn at them?”
I shake my head, “Not this time. So, are you a rival gang or a representative of the locals?”
“We’re the Santa Fe militia. Legacy cops and some trained local business people that served. The Adobe gang rolled in about a month ago to test the waters. They’ve become surprisingly well funded since then. You saw the buildings burning?” I nod, “we did that to smoke out their cells and pick off the rats as they scurry to safety.”
“That is not a sustainable practice. How about you give me intel on the locations you didn’t burn, and I go find out who can negotiate with me.” He has no reason to trust me, but here’s hoping that they’re not trigger happy xp chasers.
“I’ll send you some locations, just remember, flushing them out doesn’t help, they’ll just re-establish a week or so later.” I nod as I get an info packet with intel on their ‘command’ cell.
I ask Aria to hover near the parking lot so I can fly up to the hold. Once aboard I sigh in relief as none of the locals decided to be idiots.
“Aria, I think this is going to be a long chase. Find us a place to set down and we’ll re-attack this in a few hours.”
“Would it not be better if I surveyed the area before hand?” She asks.
I shrug, “Maybe, but if in the odd chance one of them has the tech to see you flying around in the dark, I want to be able to descend upon them before word can travel too far.” My ship friend chirps in understanding before I recline in my pilot chair and lock the cockpit doors for a nap.
***
The Adobe Dominion was not interested in parlay at all. In every cell that Militia Man identified, they shot first, I kept shooting until I found a person that looked like they were leading the cell and captured them. I interrogated the cell leaders, who were also impressively tight lipped until I started doing group consequence questioning and brought out the two women I had captured.
Macho protectors have an idealistic need to protect women and children. The children thing I get, but being a woman, I have a lot less sympathy for female criminals. Since I had purposefully kept this move in my pocket, I’d been restraining myself from tuning up the women until now.
I work them until my near exhaustion, and they all hold out admirably, but two sobbing, pleading women were too much for Mr. Crew Cut.
“Stop it you sick fuck!” His body slumps in defeat as he continues to sneer at me. “I’ll tell you where Marco is if agree to let all of us go.”
“After I conclude business with this, ‘Marco’, I’ll be happy to relocate and free all of the people I’ve captured.” I golden scroll falls into my hand. I give it a quick once-over and show it to the man.
He nods an looks at the floor. “They’re holed up in an old power station twenty kilometers southwest of here.”
I don’t thank the man, but I treat a few of them with regen capsules and transfer the lot to a holding area where I feed and water the now dozen captives I have tied up in my ship. This is the part I feel bad about, honestly. Uncertain captivity is the worst.
I was confident in taking out a cell of under-geared gang-bangers, taking on a secure building with dozens of armed assholes is a different matter however. I order two surveillance drones, synch them with Aria and have her pilot them toward the power station while I head back to my settlement to see if I can put a team together. I send messages to Kenneck and the Health Club to see if they are interested in a hundred credits a piece for a clear and capture job.
Tova, any recommendation on what area in our HQ that would make the best holding facility?
We have a secure ward in the hospital, and actual cells installed beneath the security station.
That sounds good, make it security’s problem for a day.