Freel kept the Dragon right on the edge of the speed limit. He really wanted to push beyond, but there was no escaping the police motion sensors. And he really couldn’t afford to draw police attention anywhere near the Big Nest. Doing so could very well cost him his life.

So, as much as he always wanted to give the car a real ride, and as much worried as he was about the implications of all this, he made like a nice, law-abiding citizen, and flew through the air like he was merely late for work. Until he was finally out of range, and could challenge all of his frustrations into manually abusing the engine.

There were others on the way, inbound for the Big Nest just in case his hunch was right. But by some twist of fate, Freel and his crew were the closest, and would arrive first.

“You really think this might be something?” Yules asked. “Hm? Hm?”

He was nervous, tapping on his knees. Dunton was tapping the ceiling, but that was the pills, as usual.

“Everything was fine when me and Dunton stopped by yesterday,” the man continued. “Everything… it was all in order.”

The shrillness of his voice always climbed when he was nervous. And he was nervous now. It did Freel’s own nerves no good at all.

“Yesterday isn’t now, Yules,” he growled.

Ordinarily he would have been enjoying the view. Below him was the length of the Great Gorge, to the side was the mountain range, and the city was but a faint dot in the distance. Boss Jakino had decided on a pretty good solution to the issue of where to stash a huge drug manufacturing operation: Nowhere.

Floating pleasure barges had been a pretty popular fashion among those who could afford them, some decades ago. Somehow they’d come to be seen as old-fashioned. At least the really big ones. But they still endured, though some had been repurposed. For those who were still privately owned and operated, a particular tradition had endured: They never set down.

There was no mechanical reason for it, as far as Freel knew. Somehow it was just customary to never set the big, fat things down, unless two or more of the stabilisers were out at the same time.

So there was nothing at all strange about a barge just floating around, never stopping long in one place, as a half-forgotten playground for some indolent moneybeast. And so the shri that it manufactured never entered circulation at a particular place in the city. There was no place for the police to stake out, and no true pattern for them to notice.

Whatever other qualities the boss had, that was all a genuinely clever ploy. And as Freel took the Dragon around a bend in the gorge wall, he found the barge on fire.

“Oh crap…” Kreb mumbled.

The barge had four stabilisers. Three were whirring away as they should, keeping the vessel gliding along relatively smoothly, but something had happened to the fourth. What was left of it was still spinning slowly, but spewed sparks and smoke as it did so.

Far more smoke was coming out of a couple of vents and hatches in the barge itself. It was dark and thick and ugly, and Freel could really only think of one thing on board that would burn to that degree.

“Alright, boys,” he said as he steered towards the barge’s left side. “We have a fight on our hands.”

Kreb grunted. Yules slapped his own thighs and cheeks, and let out a shrill cry.

“Alright!” he said, clearly psyching himself up. “At least we get to kill him!”

Freel activated the car’s comm system.

“Guys, it’s Freel!” he shouted at the barge crew. “What is going on?? Guys?!””

The only reaction from the vessel was a sudden intensification of the smoke coming from one of the hatches, as if a fireball had just bloomed.

Freel sent out the code for the landing bay, and the big door opened. The barge was a bit uneven, but not catastrophically so. And since the bay wasn’t filled with smoke, he steered the Dragon in.

They all exited, guns in hand. The bay held a couple of other vehicles, both of which Freel was used to seeing there. However this mess had started, it hadn’t been with an assault through the bay.

An alarm was blaring. He didn’t think the Big Nest had a dedicated one for different scenarios. It was just a steady Things Are Bad noise.

“Hello?!” he shouted, as he walked to the main door. “Hello?!”

He stepped out into the hallway with his gun at the ready. He saw nothing on either side; no smoke, no people, no bodies. So he hurried to the door right across, and up a steep set of stairs.

“Hey!” he shouted upon entrance, just in case one of the crew was aiming a gun his way. Before him was the security room, and a whole lot of monitors. Seated in front of them was a man he recognised.

“Freel!”

“Mayn,” Freel said in response. “Talk to me!”

“We… we have fires!” the crew overseer said, and swirled his chair around back to the monitors.

“I can tell you have fires. WHY do you have fires?”

“I think he might have arrived inside a supply crate or something!” Mayn replied, as he frantically cycled between feeds.

Freel saw rows and rows and rows of shri tanks. Quite a few of them were on fire. He saw figures running back and forth. He saw supply rooms and a cafeteria and sleeping quarters, and a cargo hatch. He did not see the one responsible.

“I have people trying to repair the fire systems!” Mayn went on. “But… but he must have been here for a little while before we even knew about him! He sabotaged them pretty well, and he took out a couple of guys before being discovered! Now he’s… we’re just… we’re trying to hunt him down.”

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Freel saw men running around, in twos or threes. The standard crew was eighteen people; small for such a big operation, but it was heavily automated.

“Wait, stop!” he said, and pointed to a particular feed. It showed three men at the bottom of a set of stairs. Two of them started shooting at something out of sight, while the third stayed in cover in the staircase. That one had a comm attached to his wrist, and now lifted it to his face.

“We found him!” came from a speaker on the ceiling. “Level six!”

One of the two shooting was hit by return fire and collapsed. The other one went down to one knee and used walkway railing for cover. Mayn shifted feeds, and Freel saw the black-clad stranger.

“Level six, everyone!” Mayn shouted into a microphone. “Everyone, stop him! Kill this bastard!”

He hesitated for one second.

“Everyone not busy putting out the fires, stop him! Stop the damn fires!”

The stranger ducked out of firing range, detached something from his belt, and threw it at some shri tanks. It was a can of a popular beer brand. But those didn’t normally explode on impact.

“Damn it!” Mayn shouted, and pounded his desk as a new fireball sprouted.

“Let’s get him, boys,” Free said, and was now the last in line as they all hurried back down.

The docking bay was on the fourth level. They hadn’t visited the Big Nest enough to know every single nook and cranny, but they had passed through all the main walkways and rooms, and damn well knew the layout. He didn’t need to tell them which way to run down the hallway, or which turn to take.

Almost every wall that wasn’t needed for the barge’s integrity had been removed to make room for more shri tanks. And with a lot of the tanks on a rail system, many of the floors had been removed as well; no need to go to a tank when you could make it come to you. So once they exited the hallway, which itself held up a section of walkway, they were in a big, open space… discounting all the shri tanks. They blocked most of the view, but they sure didn’t block the smoke, which did block most the rest of the view.

Freel had never actually seen shri burn before. It was oily, acrid and awful, and they were only getting whiffs of it up on that walkway. Even with his sharply limited view, Freel could tell that the fires were spread out, burning in different parts of the barge, at different levels.

This was a disaster, and it was only going to get worse as long as that nameless bastard lived.

They found a flight of stairs leading down, and as much as Freel wanted to push to the front of the group the boys were moving fast. They all reached the fifth level, and would have gone straight down to the sixth, except smoke was rising from the nearby stairwell. It wasn’t the thickest of the plumes, but it didn’t need to be. The heat that came up along with it was quite enough.

They went with another walkway, cutting across the main space of the barge again. The smoke was thicker than above, closer to the source. This was no typical workplace, but there were still masks hanging from hooks at semi-regular intervals. Freel snatched one in passing and fit it over his face. The others didn’t, but they were already ahead, and he was not going to lose precious time by doing their thinking for them.

He could hear yelling now, and the cracking of guns. Boss Jakino didn’t want plasma weapons around all this shri, so the crew were issued solid-projectile guns. It sounded like the stranger had one of his own, for whatever reason.

They reached the other side, and passed by the dead body of a crewmember. Someone had taken a knife to his throat, commando-style. They went around that scene and down another set of stairs

The air was scorching hot on level six, and the boys started coughing. Yules happened to look Freel’s way, and he felt tempted to tap his mask, but he could be snide later. The gunfight seemed to be moving.

“They’re making some progress with the fire suppression!” Mayn shouted over the intercom. “If you can just-”

There was an explosion somewhere, mixed in with the whoosh of intense fire.

“Damn it!”

The shooting was coming from the front, and so the four of them ran straight down the length of the walkway. They arrived at an integral wall. It hadn’t included a door, but an opening had been rather crudely cut in. Kreb was about to be the first through when down below some more of the shri caught, and a fireball erupted.

They all fell back from the opening, and covered their faces from the blistering air. The fire passed, replaced by smoke.

“Go through!” Freel insisted. “This is our chance!”

He finally took the lead again, and covered his face as he charged on through. Even through the armour and the mask, the heat still smarted, and behind him Yules shrieked as the others followed.

The damn alarms kept screaming in everyone’s ears, some of the lights were going out as fires ate electrical wiring, and the ruined stabiliser made the barge just unsteady enough to make one a touch queasy. But Freel ignored it all, because now he saw the scene ahead, and tasted vengeance.

Two of the crewmembers were using railing for cover. In front of them was a section that held enormous tanks; not shri for once, but the main ingredients. Buying them continuously might arouse suspicion, so the boss went with rare bulk purchases.

Freel approached the situation in a crouch, his gun aimed towards the tanks..

“Hey!” he shouted, again for the sake of not startling high-strung men with guns.

They turned his way. They wore very standard hazardous chemicals jumpsuits, protective masks, and had simple carbines. Freel wondered if this was their first gunfight. It wasn’t an outside bet.

“What’s going on?” he asked as he crouched next to one of them.

“He’s over there somewhere! He’s got one of our guns! He’s shot at least three of our guys!”

“Does he have more of those grenades?” Freel asked.

“I don’t… I don’t know!”

The air was fairly smokey, and it attacked his eyes and his throat and his lungs the moment he slipped the mask off. But he couldn’t fit the goggles over it, and that was that.

“I don’t think he does!” the other man told him. He had the appearance of being prematurely aged by substance abuse, and completed the look with terrible stubble. “I caught a glimpse of him! I think his belt is empty!”

Freel scanned ahead. The fires were interfering with the thermal vision mode, to say nothing of all that metal in the way. But a quick bit of cycling and fine-tuning let him catch a glimpse of heat that was separate from the fires.

He pointed to the only other walkway that led to the tanks.

“Yules, Dunton, Kreb, go around. We’ll catch him in a crossfire. We all swoop in at the same time. Either he takes cover, and we converge on him and shoot him to pieces, or he runs, and we all get a clear shot at his back, or he shoots in one direction and exposes himself to the other. We’ve got him.”

The boys hurried off, moving in a crouch to stay hidden. The two Freel was left with looked… unenthusiastic.

“Come on, guys,” he said. “We got this. I’m wearing armour. These crappy carbines aren’t going to penetrate. I’ll take the lead. Just be with me to open fire.”

They looked slightly more optimistic, but not enough.

“I answer directly to the boss!” he told them. “How do you think he’s going to feel about this, without the bastard’s head?!”

That finally forced them into action, and as the other three got into position and signalled, they all got moving.

I’m coming for you.