Approximately 48 hours later, Maun was bound to a steel chair riveted to the floor with his hands cuffed behind his back in a room tucked away in a very secure part of an Oppidum administrative building. Though, Maun had to admit that it wasn't that secure.

He'd walked through the front door at the end of office hours with a procured custodian outfit on. The badge he had hadn't even had a name or face on it. When questioned about it two floors up in the building he'd simply told the suited office worker that the new badges didn't have anything on them. It was all biometric. The worker just shrugged and kept walking. Easy.

It was at the suites level, a couple of dozen floors up that the decor went from standard office fare to some ridiculous attempt at classical Roman architecture and design. Maun didn't know much about materials but he was pretty sure there wasn't any quartz to be found on Arg-08, if it was even real. Maun hoped it was for the simple joy he'd get in destroying it all.

Here was where he needed to get caught. Anywhere lower and he'd just get tossed out and maybe handed to the police, but up where the Castrum worked, they had to have a little talk with you first. Maun slipped into a darkened room off a main corridor. He still needed to apply his patch. As he pulled the paper off the adhesive side, a shadow darkened the door way he'd slipped into. Maun was so focused on getting the paper off that the shadow out of the corner of his eye startled him and caused him to drop the patch. He watched in slow motion as it flipped over and over landing like an unfortunate piece of buttered bread.

"FUCK!' Maun hissed under his breath.

Whatever had caused his doorway to darken was nowhere to be seen and Maun crept forward to assess the fate of the activator. Just as he'd feared, it was stuck to the marbled floor. As delicately as possible, Maun pried the edges of the patch up until it all came up in one piece. He sighed with relief. If all else failed he could at least just hold the patch in place until it triggered. Maun attached it to the underside of his right forearm where it luckily stuck.

When Maun stepped out of the doorway, he was great with a stun baton to the face.

Several minutes later, when Maun groggily opened his eyes and recognized the cold clasp of the cuffs on his wrists and the table before him, he smiled. He was exactly where he needed to be.

"What the fuck is he smiling for?" came a voice from across the table. A very short man in a set of extremely ill fitting merc armour stood across the table to the right of the only door into the room.

"Dunno," came a voice from Maun's left. On the other side of the door stood the largest woman Maun had ever seen. She had to be over seven feet tall. The juxtaposition of the height difference between the two goons caused Maun to belt out a short snort of laughter.

Short and stodgy growled something obscene and shouted at Maun, "the fuck is so funny in your position?"

"Maybe he's laughing at your toddler depot armour set," said the big lady.

"Shut the fuck up Jumbo!" the small man shouted in turn at his partner.

The woman turned a hard eye, and in fact her only eye, Maun now saw, at the smaller man. "I told you not to call me that."

The shorter of the two didn't hold her gaze for long but rather shifted his gaze over to Maun. "Quit fucking smiling. You don't have shit to smile about. We know who you are and why you're here and once Mr. Grelt has a word with you, I'm going to personally make sure you tell us exactly which schematics you sent back to your people."

The Core has seeded disinformation about the reason for Maun's visit weeks ago. The Castrum clearly thought they'd gotten ahead of things. It took all of Maun's self control to reign in his smile. Grelt would be here for sure, and they didn't have any idea what was coming.

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"And how long do I get to enjoy your company?" Maun asked the small man.

The man frowned at Maun, "how the fuck should I know? Mr. Grelt has his audit to finish and despite how important you think you are, you're insignificant compared to his work. He'll be here when he gets here."

Maun didn't mind waiting. In fact, it would give him time to figure out how to deal with his current predicament. Not the incarceration itself, but how they'd bound him. Unfortunately his wrists had been bound together back to back, leaving his underarms, and therefore the activator patch, facing outward. Maun needed to maneuver his arms in such a way that he could reach the patch to depress it once Grelt arrived. He wouldn't see his years of single mindedness go to waste just because of bad luck.

"Quit squirming over there," the man said to Maun, "you're not getting out of those."

Maun grimaced as he attempted to turn his right arm in the too tight cuff. It was going to hurt to get into the right position. But what was a little pain in the face of martyrdom? "My arm itches," Maun said simply.

"You should have fucking scratched it before you broke into Castrum property." Said the man opposite Maun, "You dumb shits can't be happy with anything and have to go poking around where you don't belong."

Maun opened his mouth, unable to suppress the retort when the door banged open.

Cornis Grelt was a psychersurgeon's wet dream. He was tall, though not as tall as the goon to his right, but his height itself wasn't what was shocking. Centaurs were in fashion with the elites, and Grelt had gone full tilt. Grelt's four horse legs and rear shone in polished chrome; the footsteps of his hooves leaving faint hoofprints of red. Some off-gassing effect he'd had installed. The top half wasn't much better. While his torso and all that was attached above the waist seemed human enough, his skin was milky porcelain - clearly some replacement synthetic. His face looked to be carved from marble, an ancient bust of some grand philosopher of yore. The effect was only spoiled by his eyes. He'd had his them replaced and the dim gold glow of the visiomod circuitry was all Maud could see.

"Now Wallace, handcuffs? That's absolutely no way to treat a guest," Grelt chided the smaller of his guards. "Let him loose. I only want to have a civil discussion with our emissary from the Core."

The short man, Wallace, grunted and waddled over to the back of Maun's chair, unlatching the cuffs. Maun flexed his hands before placing them on his lap under the table before him. He couldn't believe his luck. He slid his left hand over the patch. It was nearly time and Maun shivered with anticipation. He stared into Grelt's glowing eyes. He'd look the bastard square in the face when he eradicated him from the face of the planet.

"Maun Senderson, it is an absolute honour to meet you finally. Your reputation proceeds you, and while this certainly isn't the first time you've taken tours of Oppidum properties, it is the first time, I believe, you've been caught?" He posed the last as a question. "Which gives me the honour of finally asking of you, what is it that the Oppidum can do for you? For the Core?"

Maun took his fingers off patch. Was this man seriously asking him this? Was this monster really inquiring as to what the Core wanted? Maun felt his blood go hot, but not from any incendiary agent. "You want to know what the Core wants? You want to know what the Oppidum can do for the Core?"

Grelt only smiled wider.

"I'll tell you, what we want, you miserable sack of shit," Maun growled through clenched teeth. There'd be time for annihilation soon enough, but first he would speak directly to the Castrum through Grelt. He would let them know who they were up against. A warning shot, before the crippling blow. "On every world mankind has stepped foot on, the Castrum has taken over every inch of natural land for their Odeon cities and Teatro mega domes, beautiful and well kept and out of reach from all that aren't you."

Maun gripped the edge of the table, now trembling with barely concealed rage. "You dare ask what the Core wants when we're given subterranean shit holes with fallow, lightless land. When those of us that do make it to the surface are stuffed into Castrum carnal houses or breeding yards to make genetically modified freaks." He turned his glare on the huge woman. She only lifted an eyebrow.

"I'll tell you what the Oppidum can do for the Core. The Oppidum can drown in its own fetid waste. The Oppidum can choke on its own excess. The Oppidum can burn!" He punctuated this last statement with a fist slammed into the table top.

It was only then that he noticed Grelt's eyes were no longer on him, but rather following the dark brown patch drifting down to the table.

There was a moment of curious silence as all stared at the patch.

"Huh," was all the big woman said before Maun watched as she drew a pistol and shot him in the head.