The moon was crescent now. So not optimal for a goodly nighttime skulk.
She raised a fist to the hidden orb that grinned back at her.
You are merely a sliver of your full potential, old man!
Fortunately, the skyline of downtown Asunción blazed iridescent and lively in the near distance.
Quite close to her, a pack of coyotes strode like silver ghosts in and out of the spaces staggered with junk between a set of garbage bins.
They glanced back at her, wearily. Asking her, are you supposed to be here?
Moving from shadow to shadow, exploiting the volumes of darkness created in the antagonism of the lit-up skyline in the distance and the unlit abandoned buildings nearby, you are more like us than you are like them.
Even as she was aware the honors given to her by the canine tricksters were merely her own vain musings, she bowed her head to the alpha bitch who stared back at her, and Tasìa gave her thanks.
She glanced at the garage that stood on the other side of the asphalt crossway from her.
"Now my noble beasts, I must take my leave."
The road she walked across was parallel and to the south of the street she had approached the motel from earlier that day.
She came better prepared this time. With another trip to the Quick Mart Catalog Booth, she was able to acquire a pair of extra dense rubber-healed tennis shoes, a pair of climbing gloves, and a set of night amp goggles.
The amped-up light evened out the sharp skyline glare and the starkly black shadows. She could comfortably see the nooks and crannies of the brick wall as she drew closer.
Once she fixed upon the means her ascent up the wall would take, Tasìa dashed up towards the building, and then darted up the wall.
As she reclined on the garage rooftop for a moment of rest she heard a familiar swirling buzz.
She knew the creature from whence it came all too well from a childhood where its puncture wounds and stinging bites helped build her ineffable character.
The little thief let out an exacerbated sigh of annoyance.
"Ah, shit!"
Tasìa rasped low and quiet.
Sure, Asunción was relatively free of nanosphere contagion but the city had its own damn problems.
Lanceros.
The devil hornets were rarely deadly but the venom would cause its victims to experience an inflamed joint-based lethargy for days on end.
She could not afford to be out of commission for so long. Too many people depended on her having her shit together, both mentally and physically, to risk that.
She crawled slowly to the middle of the rooftop to get a better idea of where they were coming from.
Three of the devil hornets encircled one another as they hovered just a few feet above her.
Given the chaotic nature of hornets, there was always a chance that the revved-up actions of a few of the insects could attract the predations of the entire nest.
She smiled gleefully when an allusion to one of her favorite novels occurred to her. She would be like the girl who kicked one.
No! No! No! Cool that exuberance. No daring-do today, l'il lady.
That she was finally on the trail to find her Aunt Tatiana made Tasìa feel that she needed to be more cautious in her actions.
No going in guns a blazing.
The hornets were not shit-stirred angry. No reason to rile them. Just slide under their notice and find a perch to spy on the Americans.
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Leave the evil little bastards alone.
Three more hornets now appeared from behind her. They encircled one another in the same pattern as the first group.
She pulled and prodded her way for another two feet when a third group of three appeared to her left. Once more, they displayed the same behavioral pattern as the previously deployed hornets.
Deployed?
Tasìa froze in place. This unusual occurrence spooked her. She had never seen hornets behave in such a way. As if they were guided.
Like drones.
Her movement seemed to draw them out, but she wasn't as yet certain if it was merely coincidence that when she crawled forward they tended to show up.
Tasìa glanced around the rooftop with her head sweeping from side to side at a very deliberative slow speed.
She noticed two long ribbed cages with safety net inserts on opposite ends of the rooftop. Oddly formed vents slanted towards the center of the roof.
In front of the cage that she scrutinized, an LED control panel light throbbed in mid-shift. The center of the display panel shaded green while its outer edges glowed orange.
It appeared that the latter would soon dominate the green.
If the cages were the source of the hornet nests then there also had to be a means somewhere nearby, either on the roof or in the garage below, to close the cage vents.
Perhaps even a smoke control guage to make the devil hornets go night-night.
But where was it?
Tasìa craned her neck; she squinted her eyes as she peeked all around.
Many protrusive objects covered the roof surface. The largest of these objects was a small shack with layered rows of screen panels embedded in its walls.
Given the protrusion of the double sets of pipes bound together for in-flow and out-flow delivery, Tasìa assumed the little shack contained an air compressor.
She surveyed the rest of the rooftop surface.
Displayed all about her were duct vents, water drainage troughs, HVAC systems, a green-painted metallic carapace cover for what was likely, judging from the smell, a large diesel generator, and other objects that she was currently in no position to identify.
At least until after she found a means to stand upright again without the risk of being bitten and stung.
She started to feel a good deal of eyestrain due to the nearness of the many objects surrounding her.
Tasìa carefully took her goggles off.
Eyeing the hornets before returning to her task, she wondered why the insects were not responding to any of her movements as she jerked her head around in survey.
Tasìa mulled the notion around in her mind as she adjusted the focus meter on the night amp goggles to better fit a parameter set for near-sightedness.
With her thumbs stretching the rubber straps, Tasìa flipped the night amp goggles back over her eyes. The middle distance of her field of sight became much more visually acute.
My breathing only rises when I am crawling. That is what those little bastards are attuned to.
Tasìa filed this insight away. She would have to test the notion when she got the chance.
After a few seconds, her eyes grew comfortable; she could now do a proper search.
By the inset curves that held a ladder in place on the motel side of the roof, Tasìa spotted an LED panel. Though larger, it matched the same make as the two panels that sat in front of the hornet cages.
Surely, the three were installed together as a set.
She found her proof. The words Master Control and Numerical Bypass were inlaid on the panel by the ladder.
Whoever serviced the roof would need it to be placed exactly where it sat before they took a step on to its surface.
Crap. Tasìa cursed. The panel beneath the words 'Numerical Bypass' was there for numerical input.
Like a PIN, the code was four digits long.
It was possible that she had the means to breach its underlying software on her person. She grabbed the neoPalm PAM from her fanny pack and flicked on the app for wireless server detection.
Numbers scrolled before her eyes and the identity of nearby servers and connectors self indexed into a tidy list.
To her infernal dismay, the rooftop master control LED never appeared.
Tasìa scowled. She must have overlooked something. At a glance, she got an answer and felt like a dumbass for not noticing the obvious set-up instantly on her first sight.
The LED panel possessed no wireless means of control over the internal security system.
Instead, rubberized cables protruded from a tin box underneath the master control LED and from there they fed to the two hornet cages.
The method was primitive, of course, common even before the first moon landing, but highly effective, still. It could not be breached without taking the LED panel physically apart.
But what was here that needed protection?
It was nothing more than a garage for auto repair now in disuse, right?
She glanced back to the screen as something begged for her attention.
On the neoPalm screen, the incoming data started to form an unusual pattern. The cyclical ping was strangely atypical. The oscillation for it was a magnitude higher than the norm in its frequency.
Was the signal purposefully fed back onto the device where it would then be amplified!
The source was only within a few yards distance from where she crouched.
Tasìa glanced up and squinched.
It's that? Whatever the hell that thing is.
She assumed it was the protective carapace for a large generator. Clearly, that was not its purpose.
Tasìa manually over rid the wireless auto-detection and she wrote a small script to ping for a limited set of attempts and while doing so call up the public registry information for the odd device that sat uncomfortably near her.
She hit execute, and her instruction set was overridden and completely ignored. The impossibly high rate of oscillation set off, again.
From the random visual noise of the data flowing on her screen a hypnotic pattern emerged that grabbed at her eyes.
Inside the metal carapace, a sizzling sound began to take shape.
As Tasìa forced her eyes from the screen to see what was occurring, a lightning bolt zapped from the carapace to her neoPalm.
The personal assistant flew out of her hands. A shocking jolt cascaded up her arms, and the sudden brightness blinded her.
The night amp goggles made the latter condition much worse as her very being was consumed with an all-encompassing white noise.
Only the hum of agitated hornets made it through her paralyzed senses.