The rebel hideout in Ataris’s banking district was a single office space, around sixty square meters, with metal walls, fake plants, ventilation ducts, and a row of thick mirrored windows that looked out over the marketplace and the milling crowd below. Among a few other resistance fighters who were reading newspapers or keeping themselves awake with coffee, Lex spotted someone who seemed both unfamiliar and strangely familiar. A face like one from a long-forgotten dream.
Earl Tardino sat back in a worn office chair, his legs crossed on the table. With an open folder in his lap and a pen in his hand, he stared intently at a large monitor, as if analyzing critical data. At first, Lex couldn’t believe it was really the spaceship technician from the ST SAMSON sitting there in the corner.
"Earl!" he called out.
Tardino looked up from the monitor, and the other rebels immediately stopped what they were doing at the sound of Lex’s voice. None of them knew him personally, but one by one, they rose from their seats, paused their coffee breaks or card games, and began clapping, the applause of each person building into a loud ovation that echoed through the Crimson Dawn’s hideout. Lex was taken aback by the attention, feeling a wave of discomfort rising within him; all these men and women seemed to know of his deeds in Luvanda, though he himself felt almost like an outsider to them.
"You look different from the last time we met," Tardino remarked.
"Yeah, it’s been a rough few years."
"Years can do a lot to a person," he replied, looking Lex over from head to toe, taking in his worn-down appearance. The sneakers were completely beat-up; the right sole was already peeling away, exposing a socked toe. Even the sock had a hole where his toenail had worn through. His pants were stiff with grime. In the oversized winter jacket, he looked far too thin, his face gaunt, his long hair tied back in a greasy ponytail. The glasses were taped at the hinges, the lenses scratched. He smelled as though he’d crawled out of a dumpster, which only added to his miserable appearance. It was as if hardship itself had tried its hand as an artist, creating in Lex a portrait of hard times and a testament to the limits of human endurance.
"But I’m still the same person I was back then," he said.
"Your eyes tell me something different. I see you still wear the old welder’s goggles."
The boy looked the former spaceship technician squarely in the eyes, fingering the scratched-up goggles hanging from a frayed elastic strap around his neck. "Yeah," he said. "Don’t plan on ever taking them off."
Tardino nudged a pendulum on his desk with his pen, watching it sway back and forth for a moment. Then, he said, there was no point in dwelling on one’s life path, since neither the past could be undone nor the future foreseen.
"And what’s that supposed to mean for me?"
"Veela told me a lot about you back then. You talked to her about your friends on the prison moon who were rebels too—Morisa and…"
"…Tayus. The goggles belonged to him."
"Yes, Tayus. You told her you were applying to be a spaceship technician, just like you planned on the SAMSON. But that was never going to happen. It never could. Do you know why?"
Lex looked at him thoughtfully, then shook his head.
"You could never become a spaceship technician, because you’ve been one of us all along. You just ran from that realization for a long time. But not anymore. I can see that in your eyes. If Veela was right about one thing," he continued, "it’s that you can’t steer your own fate. Sometimes, though, fate leads you through many harsh trials so that you can discover who you are, what purpose you were meant for. And once you understand that, you find fulfillment in dedicating yourself to that task. Every other effort would just be a detour, wasted time, lost effort, squandered potential. Do you understand, more or less, what I’m saying?"
Lex didn’t answer.
He thought Tardino’s words sounded almost exactly like those of the hermit in exile.
Nothing happens by chance.
Then he noticed a framed portrait on the wall behind the spaceship technician, large enough to suggest that the man in the picture was someone important, someone the resistance revered—or perhaps just someone Earl Tardino looked up to. Lex took a step past him, standing before the large portrait, which was adorned with an ornate gold frame. But it showed a man who seemed the least likely to care about precious metals. The ragged figure looked as disheveled as Lex himself, his eyes sharp but his expression wooden, jaded, and a little bewildered, as if he wasn’t sure why anyone was taking a photo of him. After looking at it for a while, the odd snapshot almost seemed like a police mugshot for a criminal record.
"Who’s that?"
Tardino stepped up beside him, crossing his arms and studying the picture, not as if he needed to remember who it was, but more as if he was reminiscing about the things the man had done, the deeds that defined who he was and how people would remember him.
"That’s the anti-hero we all want to be. He’s the savior of the poor, though he was once the poorest worker of them all. That is…"
"…Cal Rook?"
"Yes," Tardino said with a nod. "That’s Cal Rook. He gave the world’s poorest what they’d never been allowed to have: hope. He had nothing but his own life, which he dedicated to fighting the world’s injustices."
"His name is linked to a popular drug in Vega Prime."
"Vanta-B, yes. He invented it."
"What happened to him?"
"Nobody knows."
Lex stared at the picture, thinking. "You happen to know someone with the initials C and R? Wild black hair, tall and lean? He once sold me a Vanta-B. And he told me how to get in touch with you. I keep running into him."
"Keep running into him, you say?"
"Yes. What does it mean?"
"I don’t know," Tardino replied, though it sounded like a lie, or as if he was holding back part of the truth. He glanced at the framed portrait one more time, then returned to his chair and nudged the Newton’s cradle on his desk—not that it was necessary, as it hadn’t lost any of its momentum.
"What did you learn in Luvanda, Lex?"
"That the world doesn’t care about you. That’s what I learned. All that matters is doing what’s right and paying the price for it."
Tardino nodded. "Maybe you don’t want to hear it, but that’s exactly what Veela wanted to teach you. That’s why she wanted you to go to Luvanda. You needed to see how the gears of the world interlock. To truly become one of us, you had to let go of your dreams and illusions. I was just like you once," he said, "and I had to learn the same lessons when I was your age. Veela did too. We each had to, in our own way, but they were the same lessons. Before I joined Crimson Dawn, I was full of illusions myself. Not anymore. Now I know exactly what I’m fighting for—and what I’m fighting against." He leaned back, looking at the boy with something almost like fatherly pride. "Were you trained with a weapon in Luvanda?"
Lex nodded.
Tardino pursed his lips, casting his gaze around the hideout before he spoke again. "What you see here is the calm before the storm. We’re taking one last chance to enjoy a simple life before we make history." He stood and stepped over to a filing cabinet beside a tower of stacked chairs. From one of the drawers, he took out a small device about the size of a hand, which on closer look was a portable holo-projector. Grabbing another chair, he returned to his spot, placed the device on the desk, and offered Lex the chair.
As he took a seat next to the technician, Lex noticed a newspaper clipping lying on the desk. It was from around the time he’d left the continent to head for Luvanda. The headline reported that Wolf Glider Inc., the company he’d once worked for, had gone completely bankrupt after a stock crash. He couldn’t quickly figure out what had caused the plunge in stock prices—he didn’t really know what stocks were anyway. He only found it strange that his former employer had gone under, even though the massive glider factory in Keldaraan had once churned out the most popular models at assembly-line speed. How could a company so huge just vanish like that?
"Even before you knew who Veela was, she was already stealing secret information from the TC," Tardino said.
Lex tore his gaze from the old news clipping and looked up at him. "What kind of information?"
"What do you think?"
He shrugged. "Hopefully something that hurts the company."
Tardino laughed. "Hurts the company?" he said. "When Veela risks her life to get her hands on sensitive information, she tends to think a little bigger than just harming a corporation. Did she ever tell you her ultimate goal? She dreamed of freeing the people on the prison moons. Your people." Tardino pressed a button, turning on the projector, and pushed it toward the boy.
A hologram of a well-dressed woman appeared, looking him over with an open gaze. She was about the size of his hand. Brown eyes, shoulder-length hair worn loose. She had frameless glasses, a black pantsuit, and fine shoes with a low heel. The first thing he noticed was her posture, which wavered unsteadily between dignified and stiff, as if she were still getting used to her own body.
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
"It’s good to see you again, Lex Marrow," she said.
Lex recoiled from the projector, frozen in place. That voice, he thought. It was unmistakably the voice of the spaceship AI.
"Eerie, is that you? You’re… alive?"
"Yes, I am," said the hologram before him, adding, "It’s good to see who you’ve become. And as I can see, you’re now a bit more like me—part machine, and probably much more than you ever imagined."
The boy looked down at his artificial hand, clenching it into a fist. He suddenly thought about how far he was from the person he’d imagined himself to be back on the SAMSON, the person he’d always wanted to become.
"We often wondered what might have happened to you. After you set off for Luvanda, we heard nothing, and we thought we might never hear from you again. Can you imagine how relieved I was when you reached out a few days ago?"
Lex hesitated. "I was messaging you in the Deepnet? CR gave me your address?"
"I now manage the entire organization on Cetos V."
The boy glanced at Tardino, who confirmed the AI’s words with a firm nod. For Lex, he’d already experienced too much to be surprised now that an artificial intelligence was running Crimson Dawn.
"Lex Marrow, you smuggled invaluable resources into Luvanda. You gave the people there hope, a chance for a future."
"I started a war," he replied.
The ex-technician turned off the device, and the hologram dissolved into thin air.
"I wasn’t done yet…"
Tardino patted Lex on the shoulder, signaling him to follow, and they walked over to the tinted window. Leaning forward, the spaceship technician looked upward, pressing a finger against the glass. "If you look all the way to the end of the street canyon, you’ll see a glowing hologram in the sky. It’s just blocked by air traffic, but in a moment you’ll be able to read what it says."
Lex eagerly pushed his glasses back up his nose.
"Just wait a moment."
He squinted, focusing hard.
"Can you read what it says?"
Still peering into the distance, Lex slowly nodded. "It says TCC," he said, finally pulling his gaze away from the tiny hologram far off. "I once looked at that tower through a telescope," he added. "The first day I got to Vega Prime."
"That’s the TC’s communications hub," Tardino explained. "Vega Prime’s famous broadcast tower. You can’t miss it. It’s the tallest structure in this whole mega-city, if you don’t count the space elevator. Even taller than the Thandros Tower. And from here, it’s only a few kilometers away."
Lex nodded. "So, why are you showing me this?"
"Because from up there, they broadcast the First News, day after day, hour by hour. Every piece of news hits every single screen across all of Vega Prime, live. From there, they control the Infonet too. They decide which information makes it online and which doesn’t. No one can just publish whatever they want. The only thing the people of Vega Prime can do is send each other messages, which are constantly monitored by government programs. Freedom of speech? Not in this glittering megacity. But we absolutely need it if we’re going to bring the truth about what’s happening on your homeworld to the public. More than that—we need a wide reach."
The boy hesitated. "We’re planning to… take over the broadcast tower?" he asked, skeptical.
"If we do that, we can upload the data Veela got for us directly into the central system and broadcast it to the whole world. No one will be able to look away from the TC’s crimes anymore. There will be uprisings among the people. The World Union will have to fear civil war. The prisoner-workers will finally be free if the corporation loses its power."
Lex studied him thoughtfully, trying to pinpoint the most important question among the flood of thoughts racing through his mind. In the end, he wondered if he’d even get an answer if he asked it.
"If the TC is forced by public pressure to repeal the law on inherited debt and abandon the prison colonies on the Kronos moons," Tardino continued, "then humanity will regain a huge part of its freedom. And the most despicable and ruthless corporation in the New World will finally lose a substantial portion of its power."
Lex pondered this. For a while, he gazed out of the snow-covered window, watching the vendors in front of their shops, observing the people passing by, soaking in the bustling activity. Were they really on the brink of such a major change? Was it truly possible to free the people on the prison moons, his own folk?
"But that broadcast tower must be pretty well-guarded," he said.
"Yea, it’s more like a fortress. I’ll be honest with you: many of us won’t make it through this mission. But some will. The TC still hasn’t grasped just how many of us there really are. They underestimate their enemy, and that’s what will bring them down in the end. We’ll unite every last one of our forces for the biggest operation in our history. We’ll stage diversion tactics in other areas, set up street barricades to cut off their reinforcements, and launch a full-on assault on the tower from all directions. Ground and air."
"Air?"
Tardino returned to his desk, signaling for Lex to come over. Lex followed and sat down beside him, listening intently like a school kid waiting for his grades.
"We stole some of the fastest gliders from the decommissioned Wolf Glider factory and reprogrammed them so we can fly them freely."
The boy chewed his lower lip, looking deeply pensive. "Then what are we waiting for?"
At that moment, the projector flickered on by itself. E.E.R.I.E. appeared before him once more and said, "The data to be uploaded to the infonet or broadcast on television is subject to strict control. Only a handful of government officers in the upper echelons of the corporation decide what can and cannot be published. The authorization process is conducted via a hand scanner in the office level of the broadcast tower, where the First News employees work."
"You’re not planning on kidnapping one of these officers, are you?" Lex asked.
"That wouldn’t work," Tardino replied. "As far as we know, there are very few of them. If one of them went missing, they’d simply erase his biometric data from the system, making him completely useless to us. And our plan would immediately be blown. They’d tighten security at the TCC, and our mission would be over."
E.E.R.I.E. rejoined, "The server storing the biometric data of these decision-makers is located in a highly secure facility far from the TCC. We—"
Tardino shot the AI a sharp look. "Six months ago, we planted Veela there undercover as an employee so she could upload our biometric prints into the central server. This gives us the authorization we need to leak the classified documents from within the broadcast tower."
"Six months ago?" Lex asked, his heartbeat quickening by the second. "And did she make it?"
"We don’t know."
The uneasy feeling gripped him and wouldn’t let go. "Why don’t you know?"
"Because Veela never returned from her mission."
He stood up from his chair. "That was six months ago," he said, his pulse pounding, his face as angry as he felt inside. "Why hasn’t anyone gone looking for her?"
"We don’t need to look for her, because we know roughly where she is. But to get there, we need a lot of… resources. And we had to gather them first." He looked up at the boy standing over him and gave him a glance as if to say, Sit back down. But Lex remained standing.
"I’ll be leaving the day after tomorrow," Tardino said, "and I’ll find out why she hasn’t returned."
"I'll go."
"You’re almost a head shorter than I am. We had to make special gear for the mission, and it’s tailored to me."
Lex clenched his jaw, fists tight, not blinking once. "Then it’ll just be a little big on me," he said. "It’s not a space suit or anything, is it?"
"No, but," the technician paused for a moment, "I know how you feel about her. If you go, I’m afraid your feelings for her could jeopardize the whole mission. I think it’s better if I handle this."
"I’m going," Lex said. "I’m going to save her, just like she saved me. Just thinking about her is what kept me going in Luvanda. Her face is what guided me out of the jungle. She gave me hope when I was sealing cans for Snackbite in the refugee sector. Every day from morning until night. I would’ve jumped from one of those container towers if I hadn’t believed I’d see her again. Don’t you think you owe me this, after everything I’ve done for you? After everything I’ve been through because of you? She means a lot more to me than she does to you. I’ll bring her back."
Tardino didn’t seem particularly pleased with his determination, yet he also didn’t seem inclined to deny his request.
Could he finally get something from the Crimson Dawn that he actually wanted?
"Listen, Lex," Tardino said. "The people there mustn’t know who we are. Who Veela really is. Before she left, we agreed on a code. If she’s still alive and you find her, you can only ask her one question. Got that? You can’t say a single word beyond that. Just the one question. Do you understand? Can you do that?"
"Tell me the question."
"Is Jax worth his price?"
"Is Jax worth his price?"
"Exactly. You absolutely can’t say anything else. Don’t strike up a conversation or try to rehash the past with her. Can you manage that?"
"What’s that even supposed to mean—if Jax is worth his price?"
"If Veela says yes, it means she’s completed her mission and everything’s fine. If she says, ‘Hopefully,’ then we’ll know we still need to wait a little longer. But if she says no, we’ll know she’s in trouble. Just that one question, Lex. Can you handle it?"
"And if she says no?"
"Then you come back, and we’ll figure out how to bring her back from there. Got it?"
"Promise. I’ll say only that," Lex said, though he hardly understood anymore. The whole situation was spiraling beyond his grasp. To make matters worse, E.E.R.I.E. added, "And whatever you do, Lex Marrow, under no circumstances should you smile."
"Not smile? Why not?"
"Because where you’re going, your teeth will give you away. And if they see through you, if they find out you’re not one of them, they’ll do their best to lock you away forever. And if we lose you, then everything we’ve ever fought for will have been in vain."
Tardino quickly shut off the holoprojector.
"So be it. You’re the one who’ll be searching for Veela. You’ll need to accept the mission on your PDA, though, so we know who’s handling it. Plus, the posted reward will transfer over to you."
"My reward? I don’t want a reward, I... just want to know that she's alright."
"Of course, noble knight. Now activate the holo on your PDA."
Lex raised his bent arm to chest level, as if checking the time, while the holo—visible only to him—flickered at eye level. Under the Missions tab, he saw the quest log, which was still empty. Suddenly, a new mission popped up, shared by Earl Tardino:
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(!) A FRIEND IN NEED: VEELA (LEADER OF CRIMSON DAWN)
Find Veela and discover why she hasn’t returned from her mission.
* Disguise yourself as a high-society citizen (0/1)
* Use the Orbital Lift and confront Veela (0/1)
* Return to the Rebel Hideout without blowing your cover (0/1)
DESCRIPTION
Soldiers of the Crimson Dawn!
Veela’s unexpected disappearance is a grave concern. The success of our organization depends greatly on her return. We need a courageous hero, one who can not only look death in the eye but can also keep his composure while mingling in high society (yikes!).
If you find Veela, ask her the secret question (given separately for security purposes) and bring any new information back to the Crimson Dawn headquarters. And do not get caught!
REWARD
XP: 4,275
350 Credits
[Night Rider’s Leather Jacket]
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Lex tapped on the blue-framed item, opening the stats of this leather jacket.
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Night Rider’s Leather Jacket
Rarity: Rare
+225 Armor
+12 Agility
+9 Stamina
+4 Strength
Effects:
* Nanofabric Protection: Reduces damage from projectiles and blade attacks.
* Reinforced Design: Hardened elbow guards and shoulder pads for impact resilience.
* Vital Monitoring: Tracks vital signs in real-time, triggering a Reflex Boost Stim when activated (2-minute cooldown).
* Bloodflow Optimization: Pilot-grade air compression enhances circulation in high-risk situations.
Feel like a true outlaw, even without a motorcycle license!
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Lex looked through the holographic quest text at Tardino, his expression questioning.
"The Orbital Lift? What the hell is Veela doing in the orbit of Cetos V?"
Tardino chuckled, sounding a bit mocking. "You’ll be traveling to great heights to mingle with the elite. You have no idea how high up the crème de la crème of our society truly are. Quite literally, Lex."