The drone swiveled on its axis, righted itself as it turned around, and disappeared back the way it came. When it was finally out of view, Tasìa stood up and dusted herself off.
Pensively chewing on her lower lip, she pondered upon what she just witnessed.
She was certain of one thing. It did not involve the Vida Escondida Autonomous Authority. They were circumspect about every aspect of their operation and she highly doubted that they would use wet-work contractors for anything.
The runaway Al-Majhul would have been apprehended for further investigation if the VEAA were involved, and the drone would have been clearly marked as one of their own.
She knew who it belonged to at least at a gut level hunch. That bird with the silvery hull and delta wings mimicking an early Cold War aesthetic design belonged to Lieutenant Colonel Sol.
Whatever occurred that delayed her meeting with him, it appears Leon had called in reinforcements to deal with it. The pieces of the puzzle were coming together.
As she got her feet back on the road, after an arduous climb, balanced on the asphalt ridge line that lead back up to the ditch, she bent over and breathed in hard, several times, in and out.
What was she going to say to León Ballano when she eventually caught up with him?
She stood up and walked cautiously forward, whispering a monolog that was so bent Tasìa knew she was too meek to ever deliver it, but it felt healthy just to get it off of her chest.
"Sorry man, you need to call someone else who can deal with this shit. And who has the physique for it. I'm a sex freak, now. That is all I want to do all day, every day. To be with my man. I don't even play with my guns all that much any longer.
"I don't even desire to use them on anyone. When Annebél talked about going after Sal, all excited like, with that glint of the hunt in her eye, I was like, 'meh' to all of that, and just luxuriated in the after-glow of how my bum was tingling from the pounding it took just an hour earlier."
Tasìa expired, and caught her breath once more after the long rant. She owed it to Demona to get her shit together. It was during a love-making session in the sauna where Demona had virtually joined Tasìa and Beauregard that her stroke occurred. Demona started convulsing just as she had her head curved back just on the threshold of a climax.
Tasìa would never forget how Demona's languid smile and relaxed eyes changed in an instance to a look of stricken horror.
Both Tasìa and Beauregard glanced at one another helplessly as Demona's virtual representation shook at an inhuman speed before the image shattered into thousands of pieces that slowly faded away.
Less than an hour later, León contacted Tasìa. His commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Sol had kept his word to Tasìa weeks earlier when they met, and he passed along her new Personal Assistant address to him. León was in deep recon and he did not carry his contact communications PA with him.
However, he managed to get back to her, when he did, he informed her that Demona had slipped into a deep coma. Given Demona expected it to happen at some point in the immediate future, she left a contingency plan that depended on Tasìa assisting Leòn.
Those plans would involve Tasìa's unique set of breech-work skills to get a team into the RejuveX facility.
Before concluding the call, Leòn gave her a time and a place in Vida Escondida at exactly 72 hours he needed her to meet him.
Now, here she was.
The PalmEx vibrated against Tasìa's bum in a warning pattern. The patter set off her intuition. She didn't like the sounds coming from the near distance as she closed in on the scene of the accident.
She crouched, and read the screen.
A thumbs-up icon set beside several short, declarative sentences let her know that the device breached the Lieutenant Colonel's network security system with a visual lock set in place on the cameras of a media drone whose registry was over a decade out of date.
Untraceable back to your Control, are you, my spook amigos.
The media relayed the scene from above the freeway. The camera swiveled over a scattering of bodies, broken and laid-out haphazard in an elongated crescent path from one side of a two-lane highway, across a toppled cement medium to the other two-lane highway behind where the tractor-trailer lay.
It wasn't alone.
Crashed against it was a long slender hauler vehicle - similar in its odd design to the Al-Majhul scooter the drone had chased. Black smoke curled up from it.
The vehicle lay on its back, broken up into four segments with each notched into the 18-wheelers undergirds. Gray billows of steam rose from the farthest one as rotors still chugged in motion.
The bodies were Al-Majhul. The media drone surveying lingered on their corpses. Data scrolled down the display she relayed to her Katy Lieds V-specs. Analysis for the data set determined the corpses to have been riveted to pieces with .523 round administered indentions.
Either a helio-gunship or a very heavy, cruiser class drone did it. She heard no rumble up ahead that could match either description. Did that back up her guess work that Lieutenant Colonel Sol's forces were merely the clean-up crew called in by Leòn after the highway incident?
Still glancing at the feed, she reached the overpass bridge, clicked the device off, and put it in her back pocket. She eased down behind a caution bumper to minimize her risk of being seen.
Several drones, mostly lightly armed quad and tricopters, floated above the scene of the accident. Circling around the perimeter of the wreckage were the twin-delta winged drones shaped like jets from the time of yore. She spotted the drone from whose feed she stole. It bore a worn-to-bare logo from a newscaster that gave its last broadcast nearly twenty years before.
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She turned her eyes back towards the delta wings drones. They would have naturally been her main hurdle going forward but their flight path made her reconsider that to be the case.
She had a nifty app on the PalmEx; she could point it at a vehicle and get a readout of its console numbers.
With the security already breached she decided to take a crack at it. Tasìa pinged it, and as she suspected for the twin-delta drones figure-eight glide patterns used to conserve fuel that they were both near empty and would be heading back to their base camp soon.
One passed by her position, followed by another. Tasìa dipped her head out from cover and studied the wreckage below her. She instantly caught sight of something the drones were missing, a Al-Majhul, dressed in soldier fatigues instead of their standard merchant gray leathers. He was pushing himself into the 18-wheeler wreckage to hide. He dragged a mangled leg that bounced upward at an unnatural angle behind him.
She wanted to get a close-up view of the creature but Tasìa's pistol scope was left back in the fanny pack. She did the next best thing and switched on the PalmEx, turned it to camera mode, centered on the Al-Majhul soldier, and flipped the camera magnification to ×8.
Tasìa grinned.
"Nice little gash you got there," she whispered.
The leg was held together by a few remaining tendons. Around the upper thigh the soldier applied a Bleed Eater - an intelligence enhanced tourniquet that regulated the flow of blood around a damaged limb. The device was common in military grade medkits. As bad as the injury was, he didn't risk dying from it.
How the Al-Majhul soldier managed to allude the drones, set off Tasìa's curiosity. She saw no advanced cameotic mechanisms on his harness. However, he possessed an impressive assembly of firepower. His left arm was braced with a 50-Split dual barrel carbine.
It fired 50 caliber rounds from its main, sighted barrel. The rounds loaded for it were orange tipped ones that exploded on impact while a small needle core drove deep and incinerated into a lingering toxic brew that multiplied the magnitude of its hazardous effect if multiple shots proved to be successful.
It was designed to clear out insulated cabins in both vehicles and bunkers. It was equally effective in the open air if low pressure atmospheric conditions typical in urban warfare were available.
In long out dated international treaties the chemical dissolvent was banned for combat purposes. It was a highly nasty round that could make short work of a squadron of men.
That was not all the 50-split carbine was capable of accomplishing. Affixed on the bottom side was a drone thrower. Essentially aerial mines with a guidance factor.
The weapon made him highly dangerous to Lt. Colonel Sol's men.
If he spotted a target, he could simply laser-tag his enemy, move back into cover, fire the drone straight up in the air, and then it did the rest of the work.
The Al-Majhul soldier was laying in wait. Tasìa had before her a few choices towards her best advantage. She could try to sneak up and subdue the soldier and interrogate him.
To satiate her curiosity, she had a few questions in mind to which she wanted to know what part the Al-Majhul played in the drama in her life of late. Time, however, was a more significant factor at the moment than unraveling the mysteries enveloping her world.
Tasìa decided what she needed to do. She found Lt. Colonel Sol's number in her contact list and made the call.
He answered, immediately.
"Very smart move, del Alma-Gris. The drones picked you up on camera about a minute ago."
Her eyes lit up and her brows raised as well. She had barely even moved that entire time.
"Frankly, I am as surprised as you are," he answered her silence.
"Lieutenant Colonel, glad we got that out of the way so quickly. I have an Al-Majhul in my line of sight. He is a heavily armed soldier with a 50-Split on him, just lying in wait for you to bring men down on site. With your permission, I can go ahead and take him out of action."
"Certainly, the sty-drone shows you possess a pair of throwing knives and a .380 Lady Smith revolver in your possession. What is the range to your target?"
Sty-drones, stealth drones, used both height and sky cameotics to remain allusive.
He sent her the IR outline of her weapons as they lay pressed against her skin with a winking emoji.
Not every cold-blooded killer is an uptight hardass.
She reminded herself.
"Eighty seven meters," she answered.
Sol chuckled.
"I would very much like to see the shot - could you plug me into those fancy V-specs?"
"Sure."
She gave the Lt. Colonel permission to ride and now focused her attention on the Al-Majhul soldier.
He lay perfectly still with disciplined slow breathing. It was a good trade craft for what he had in mind but unfortunately for him, it also made him an easy target for her to pick off.
She set up her line of sights to aim the revolver just behind his ear.
The Lt. Colonel whispered.
"If you happen to miss, Ms. del Alma-Gris, I'll light the fucker up with the flip of a switch, so no pressure."
Tasìa mumbled to herself silently, 'no pressure', because she wasn't going to miss. She squeezed the trigger, and with a sudden jerk, the soldier's head snapped back.
On the other end of the phone connection she heard another chuckle.
"With your permission, Lt. Colonel, I would like to liberate that 50-Split from the corpse. Somehow, none have ever made it into my collection.
"By all means."
Tasìa grinned giddily as she climbed down the overpass hill and onto the side of the highway where the hauler lay.
The Lieutenant Colonel was being highly accommodating towards her, and she felt she had a good idea as to why that was so.
"Ms. del Alma-Gris?"
Here it comes.
"Yes?"
"I understand you may be in a position to assist us further."
As she leaned over the corpse, she answered. "I'm listening ..."
"Our mutual associate, León Ballano was last seen in a vehicle under your temporary registration. I deduce you are aware of the location of the vehicle and are currently preceding there accordingly."
"Quite correct, would you like to meet me there?"
As she waited for Sol's reply, Tasìa assessed her gains. There was nice inventory of goods on the soldier that could make up for what she lost in the confiscation of the Alfa Romeo HybrClydis.
Not only did the soldier possess the 50-Split, and a field readied medkit, but his small arms was a .357 Iconoclatic.
Tasìa grinned. It was what she needed. The moonclips were in a pocket on his left leg sleeve.
Further inspection of the corpse found a bandolier of eight clips - half standard full metal jacket, half in orange tipped chemwar - with 24 rounds in .50 caliber in each, a shivcoil combat knife, a bejeweled belt buckle, an IR monocle scope, and a pouch of assorted goodies she would have to check out later.
Lt. Colonel Sol finally answered.
"Well, that's the rub, I can't meet you there. The facility belongs to a contracted party to the VEAA. I don't even dare run my drones over it to at least assess what happened to Captain Ballano until I get a grant of permission."
"I see," she began her assessment of the Lieutenant Colonels predicament. "I'm a member in good standing of their auto and amenities service program. They expressed no objection to me retrieving the vehicle and if that status should change, well, I have other means to acquire it."
"Excellent! Will you keep me informed of what you find? I fear the worst for our captain. He is entirely off grid at the moment, and I'm standing in his place with a troupe of ground pounders ready to jump."
He was prompting her to finish up.
"Roger that. I'm clearing out."
They ended the call. She had one last thing to tend to, she felt around the pockets for a wallet. Much of her personal wealth over her thieving career had been generated through picking pockets and raiding the accounts from the identification and currency cards of those whose items she picked.
She began to wonder if the Al-Majhul culture was geared towards those sort of effects or were they strictly a pre-digital barterers only when she noticed a slit on the concealed side of the belt buckle. Inside of it was a polymer strip with a glassy crystal coating inlaid. A gelded design covered one side.
Tasìa flipped it over once more before she recognized it as a holographic ID.
One hundred meters above her, came a roar from a twin set of turbines that now pointed downward. The ground pounders were rearing to get started. She slung the 50-Split on her shoulder and threw everything else into the camo pouch.
Slinging herself out from the under-girders, Tasìa rose up and hauled ass back up the hill slope.