"You're Grim?" Sinclair asked, astonished.
Felicité snarled.
"Bitch!"
Sinclair answered back, "terrorist!"
Felicité riled up, squirmed to lean forward with her teeth bared out. There was much bruising and scrapes on her pale skin at the points of limb contact with the snakes.
She had not gone down easily.
"You are the reason the fascist caught me!"
"Your snooping and disruption of my security is why my AI got loose in the first place. I gladly lent my support to catch you."
Felicité squinted and her lips perked together before she hocked a loogie at the Victorinox's main camera. The snot stuck to the lens.
"Real fucking mature, Grim. But then what else should I expect from an anarchist?"
As she commanded the lens to fold in and then fold back out several times to wipe off the spit, a notion occurred to her, "Were you working with Heloïste on White Palace?"
It appeared to Sinclair that her nemesis who she once only knew as Grim was making a concerted effort to mask the pain she was in and grin back at her smugly.
"Oh, please. She had a sniffer tailed to your servers just waiting for your defenses to drop. I discovered it there, myself. You didn't find it because you are incompetent."
Sinclair chortled derisively, but I found you, but she kept that thought to herself. She had weightier matters to discuss.
"You are an anarchist. How could you not be enticed by White Palace?"
Felicité's face squinched up as she cringed.
"I see what you are getting at. Don't even bother with that noise. I don't believe in any of that shit."
Sinclair was taken back. Just what was Felicité's ambition in all of this if not to obtain power through controlling the Egliona Entity for diabolical designs?
Afterall, that is what it meant to be an anarchist in 2067. The world over, most were adherents to the repurposed work of Moses Harman.
Metautilitarians, they called themselves, whatever the hell that meant.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
"Then how did you get involved with trying to take over the entity in the first place? Don't tell me anonymous contractors. That is not how you work."
Felicité sulked. She did not like the implications.
"I would never work for Demona Heloïste; you know who she is married to, right?
"At least, you would not do so willingly, correct?"
Felicité's nude body slacked in the sporic snake links. Whatever led her to her current predicament wore down her psyche to near the breaking point.
Sinclair considered what her own next move should be.
She realized there was still exploration that needed to be accomplished in the server rooms before Chicco's mob crew returned, but confronting Felicité, now that she had a name and face for Grim, was something that she had been longing to accomplish for the passed two years.
There was even a kernel of anger in Sinclair. She imagined running the Victorinox drill bit right through the middle of the terrorist's skull, but that would not solve anything.
Whatever damage Felicité could do to the Encapsulation Project had already been done. The hacker would be much more valuable tied down on a inquisitor's gurney, and forced to answer hard questions.
Felicité needed to be taken alive.
She just then noticed Felicité's eyes squinting together staring past the Victorinox Multi-tool Hover.
Sinclair turned the camera around on its pivot. Staring back at the drone with her smoothly beautiful ruby scales gracefully bobbing up and down a long sepentine neck, the dragon mother Mitra's eyes glistened in a glowing white. She opened up a wide gape between her jaws and swallowed the Victorinox whole.
Sinclair stared down at the table, not quite believing it happened again.
"Well, shit."
The virtual display collapsed, and the small flat screen was reduced to white noise. Sinclair did not think the hover drone was damaged; it was more likely the case that the skin of the Dragon was radio wave resistant.
Chicco, his cousin VJ, and outfitted members of VJ's Squad started pouring through the door in a manner that suggested they were used to walking and moving in sync together.
She greeted with a grin and waving arms.
"Chicco! You're here just in time. You got anything around here that can boost a frequency significantly? Maybe a 500 watt charger?"
"What happened," he asked. "Did your little friend get swallowed up again? Shit, for real, really?"
"Yeah, Sinclair sighed, "it was the dragon this time."
She noticed the squad glancing at one another, and she acknowledged them with a nod.
"That's right gentleman I'm not bullshitting you. There's a dragon mother named Mitra in there. You will want to see the file code I have in my index so you can check it out for yourself."
One of the Sala boys, a few inches taller than the others, coughed to get her attention. He wore red-lensed Aviator glasses, and a mustache dark and bushy under an impressive frown. He also distinguished himself with a velvet leather Aviator jacket that bore a Red Baron Fokker emblem on a patch sewn to the left shoulder sleeve.
The other squad members standing just behind him wore gray leather jackets of identical make that came down to mid thigh. Likely, the jackets were well proofed against a large array of offensive mediums.
But, this one gentleman must be Marco. Chicco had spoken of him before; he had the tendency to distinguish himself. He was once a soldier in the Salvage Army until he made a nuisance of himself by running a bookie operation that cut into the profits and territory of the officer crew that did the same.
After two years of a distinguished career as a soldier, he spent his remaining two years locked up in prison. He came out a bit bitter about it, but also highly respected by other members of the Sala family.
"Ma'am," he began, "how do you fight a fucking dragon?"