Chapter 2

The hustle of the city made him want to leave to escape its madness. The Agency enabled that for him, though now at the expense of his friend. He turned from the window, glancing down at the bloody rag in his sink, then looked back at the wound he changed the bandaging on. A small caliber mag rifle round in the meat of his shoulder. A clean in and out. Despite that, the velocity of the round bored a much larger hole through him than it otherwise would have.

The medbed’s automated system had patched him up sufficiently to travel back with an extraction team, thankfully. Though on his return, he needed to change the dressing again. His own skills, while capable, didn’t match up to the precision of the medbed’s capabilities. He just wouldn’t be entering any gymnastics competitions today.

Jon stared into the mirror at a broken shell of a man. Humpty Dumpty put back together with spit, tape and a dash of hope. He was lucky Sam pushed him out of the truck and forced him to leave. The subsequent recovery had put him down for several weeks. Multiple doctor’s visits to make sure he hadn’t suffered permanent cranial damage. Mental and Physical rehab. Sam had saved his life. Jon just hoped he could make that sacrifice worth it. But in this city? In this life? One life was just another small light extinguished. The mega cities didn’t care.

An alarm prompt blinked up with a plaintive beeping in his UI. He swiped the notification aside, annoyed. Raven booked him an appointment to report to Wilson. He needed to find out what was going on at HQ, and that meant stopping in for his debrief. He needed to know why someone had Sam targeted by who and why.

Jon didn’t think the Agency had answers for his questions, but it was worth a shot. This would allow him to at least gauge the mood in the office. Feel the vibe of what the big brains were thinking. That wouldn’t ease the pain he carried physically or emotionally, but this is a step in the right direction. Always move forward. That mantra had kept him going all too often when his body felt like failing him. Or when his soul felt like breaking.

Jon wiped the blood off his hands in the sink. He tossed the ruined rag into the trash, making sure he looked half presentable. He gently resting his injured arm into a sling secured over his suit’s jacket, drawing a soft hiss of air in pain. The pain killers hadn’t kicked in fully yet.

They would expect him soon now. Raven got the word when he was medically cleared for light activity. Wilson wouldn’t give him long to drag his feet, and he didn’t plan to dawdle. Sam’s death had planted a need to move in him, and his glass and steel cage had given him little room to do that.

He reflected on the past few weeks grimly. Plenty of missions had gone pear-shaped in the past and turned into shit shows. Jon was no stranger to being forced to think on his toes. He stayed with the Agency this long, partly because of that. The need for adaptability and the challenge it presented. He craved that deep down.

Jon grabbed his keys off the kitchen countertop, then walked slowly for the door. Resolute to face down not just Capital City’s chaos, but the world’s. Mindful not to push himself too hard though, lest he encourage another colossus of a migraine to settle in for the ride too. He grunted as he tugged his door open with his offhand. The wounded shoulder muscle tensed, drawing sharp needles of pain against the slow spreading numb from the painkillers.

Summoning his car, the parking lift brought the black sedan up from his in-ground garage and the car’s AI drove it the short distance to where he stood. He settled inside the driver’s seat, buckling himself in. The onboard operating system synchronized with his V-Lenses. He programmed his destination, then willed the car to execute the commands with a flick of his hand in the UI.

He cruised casually down the city streets, neon signs, food stands, and bystanders going about their life passing him by. In the less upscale parts of town, the grime and filth of the city made itself more apparent. Trash collected at the sides of the streets. Building facades that needed a good cleaning. Gang graffiti in the back alleys. The smell of urine and drugs. Despite its flaws, he liked it back here more than the inner city core. It was more honest back here, even if it was still just as cutthroat.

He watched from behind tinted windows as everyone went about their lives. They were all tiny cogs in the larger machine of Capital City. Miniscule and insignificant on the macroscopic scale. A beat cop writing a taking a report. A hooker trying to make her bag. Gangers hanging out on the corner comparing augs and cars. He spotted a man with a black metallic arm that looked a lot like the unit his father had. The man yelled at a street vendor selling noodles and sushi. Frowning, memories of his father threatened to boil up, and he forced himself to look away. A specter from his childhood in real time.

The car edged into motion from the stoplight when the light changed, and he noticed that much of the bystanders on the street were augs. Some with minor headwear alterations, like a system tap or ram boosters. Others with more extreme physical changes, like full-on limb replacements of varying colors and types. He realized just how behind he was in the rat race of relevance in Capital City.

There was a subtle sweet spot where one had to stay to remain in harmony with the city. Move too slowly and the city ate you up, leaving you just another forgotten name and face. If you hustled too fast, though? Tried too hard to move ahead of the flow? Then you broke that fragile surface tension of the city’s non-newtonian fluid like balance, and the City devoured you, anyway. Usually for being foolish and making mistakes. So he avoided the game altogether and stayed unaugmented, and worked for the Agency, one of the last few vestiges of the Government with any ownership interest now. He knew it wasn’t always as honest as he’d prefer, but it wasn’t a corporation at least.

The random faces of Capital City blurred together as both his focus and the car’s speed picked up. Augs...Nakeds...Corpos and Govies. His father had been a victim of the City’s hustle. A former Govie that turned Corpo during the rise of biotech limb replacement. The city chewed him up and spit out what remained to destroy his small family of three.

Pulling up to the parking garage for the Agency, he leaned out for the sensor post to scan him. His vision blurred like a poor video signal for a moment as a red warning box popped up in his view that read “Authorized Scan in Progress, Please stand by”. The gate lifted and his car advanced onto the yellow box designated on the street.

The monthly bill for the garage access displayed in his UI. His credit was almost spent, and he needed to recharge it. Flicking his hand at the flashing sign, he allowed the transfer of creddy’s to the garage’s account. The digits climbed back up and stopped flashing red, turning a happy green again.

He walked into the Agency lobby and stepped through the scanner at the doors. Giving Barry the afternoon shift guard a nod, the large broad chested guard returned the greeting. Barry ran the Malicious Augmentation check, and the scan beeped negatively.

Since you could engineer your brain into a super-advanced hacking device, having those kinds of augs tripped red flags. Jon had seen exceptions made in the past if there were extenuating circumstances at play. Netrunners posed the largest security hazard, unless they hired one to consult for a case.

“You’re ready, Mr. Masters.”

“Thanks.” He gave Barry a nod with a half salute as he made his way to the elevator. When the lift doors opened up, they revealed Director Wilson and Raven.

“Senior Agent Masters, Let’s go chat,” Wilson said. The director’s expression was hard to read. A glance at Raven yielded even fewer results. She remained inscrutable as ever. He swore one day to figure how she did that and crack that stoney exterior. Today is not that day.

Wilson gestured to a secured conference room, moving aside to allow Jon inside first, followed by Raven and Wilson last. When Jon stepped inside, he noted that the security EM field jammed his v-lens signal. Nothing in or out. Wilson had a file under his arms. When they all took a seat at the table, the Director opened the brown folder jacket up slowly and deliberately. Photos and reports filled the interior of the folder. Jon figured this was Sam’s file jacket, documenting his activities. The last surviving record of Sam’s life with the Agency as Jon’s asset.

A moment of silence stretched on uncomfortably before the Director cleared his voice to speak. The act was a cute little demonstration of power. This is Wilson’s show, and he wanted Jon to know. That made Jon want to glare, but he tamped down the urge. He could keep his cool long enough to see where this went. He forced himself to settle into the cool metal chair opposite Wilson, adopting an impassive expression.

“As a Senior Agent, you’re familiar with the post operation debriefing protocol.”

Jon nodded once, then added a verbal affirmative.

“Good. I understand you and Mr. Lacerno were close. One might even call you peers, friends, or comrades in arms.”

“That’s right. If you’ve read his file, you’d know we served together before I recruited him. He was a good friend. I wanna know who set him up.”

Wilson’s lip quirked at that. Like the man found his loyalty to Sam’s situation endearing. Jon couldn’t place why, but this rubbed him wrong. Raven remained static for the time being, watching the two converse. That made her hard to read, leaving him alone with his suspicion.

“Then perhaps you’re in luck, Agent. While we’ve not decrypted the data you brought back in full, we have pulled a partial dump. We believe we know who may have sent the strike team after you and your man.”

Initially, Jon’s brows knit in confusion. He knew the tech teams pretty well, and they usually needed much longer for the turnaround he’d expected. This was too fast, too soon, suspicious even. Jon sat forward. “Who?”

Wilson fished a photo of a man out of the file and slid the image forward for Jon to inspect. Seeing a paper photo almost felt quaint for a moment. Most images were completely digital these days. He scrutinized it for a moment in his hand. A middle-aged man in a thawb, with a thick black beard and sporting large black-lensed aviator glasses captured in the middle of a passionate speech, stared back at him. He wore the top of an old desert camouflaged uniform with the sleeves removed. The nametape read “Masri”.

Masri had some kind of augmentation on the side of his head. Without a network connection, Jon couldn’t pin the aug accurately, but enhancement looked like a ram buffer for executing softs and codes. The augmentation Masri used struck Jon as a rare sight for most in the middle east. Few in the region indulged in the practice, viewing augmentation as a desecration of the body before god and tradition. That didn’t even factor in the costs or accessibility of a chop doc. Let alone accessibility to one capable enough. He held the picture closer, trying to make out the markings on the box on the man’s neck.

“That’s a dual unit. Vocalizer and ICE Breaker. He got it installed in Tehran. Illegally, I might add,” Wilson said approvingly of Jon’s scrutiny. “That lets him project his voice louder or use translation software for all the speeches he records before his attacks on top of cracking firewalls.”

Mild surprise caused him to blink. “Oh, is that all?”

He couldn’t restrain the scowl for the man’s augmentation. Wilson keyed in on that. Jon set the photo down. He couldn’t help feel like augmentations were a cheat. Chalk that up to lack of trust in them or their users. Jon nodded, setting the picture down, giving the image a curt nod.

“So, you think this Masri is the one who had my man assassinated?”

“As you’re no doubt aware, Masri operates in the region where his men conduct grandiose attacks using stolen corporate munitions. The situation there has been progressively eroding, and many in Congress are banging the war drums for the corporations to get more involved.”

“So, how does Sam factor into this?”

“That we aren’t sure of yet. I’m assuming we’ll find that out once we finish our decryption efforts. For now, we’ve got Masri, and a powerful motive for putting your man down.”

“And that is?” Jon asked. They’d given him Masri’s name, but for no reason yet.

“Well, as you know, Iraq is a corporate solar farm zone, but the region has been heating lately. We suspect there are local elements dissatisfied with our ongoing involvement in the region.”

Wilson showed Jon several photos of downed passenger jets. Crashes caused by stolen surface-to-air munitions. Jon recalled the No-fly zone declared in the region a year back in response to the third jet going down. That seemed to slow the antagonization, but not by much.

“Masri has been escalating his attacks, and our suspicion is that Sam stumbled onto the prelude of an attack and was targeted for it.”

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Jon’s brow twitched. This didn’t feel right. Those weren’t local men that came after him and Sam; they were corpo black hats. Disbelief flashed across his expression, but he quickly schooled his features into neutral. He shot Raven a glance, but her blank expression told him she had nothing yet. He really hated feeling like he had no support here. He steeled his nerves and remained calm. He remembered his rules.

Let the scenario play out. Examine and analyze the situation and results. Then act.

She bought the sales pitch version of Wilson’s selling. So why is Wilson feeding him this? The hair on the back of his neck stood at attention. He doubted Masri had Sam put down, but they were clearly aiming him at Masri. He needed answers, and the only way to get them was to return to the scene of the attack. Anxiety quickly seized his heart, causing it to race. The action had left an… echo in his mind he’d been unable to process yet. Jon inhaled deeply, then resumed.

“So what’s the mission?”

“Nothing yet, but let me ask you this. What would you do if you found out who took out your man?”

“I’d hunt them all down and burn everything they cared about to the fucking ground.”

“Exactly. Leave nothing standing. We have to respond to this with totality.”

“Understood. What should I do until then?”

Wilson’s eyes brightened as a half-smile eased through his features. “Go home. Get some rest. You look like hell. And when you’re well enough? Go find your answers and get Sam his justice.”

He tried to nod, but the jolting pain gave him enough to rethink it. Jon still hurt like hell, but while his body worked to repair itself, he still felt wounded mentally. “I will. Thank you.”

“Dismissed Agent.”

Jon stood, wincing slightly as the pain in his side flared up. Once Wilson stepped out of earshot, Raven gently pulled him aside.

“I saw that look. You don’t agree with Wilson’s assessment. Why?”

He paused, not responding initially. Could he trust her? Is it wise to voice anything here? He glanced around, noting the camera placements. Before giving her an apologetic smile, and rubbed his head.

“Catch me later? I’m beat.”

“Okay, and put some ice on the eye,” she said.

He lingered a moment, his gaze off in the distance. His mind drifting to Sam, the gunfire, sweat, and blood making a sticky mess. Nothing about that exchange was operationally correct. That stuck with him in a way that refused to let go. What prompted him to break protocol so urgently?

“Jon?” Raven said, leaning into his view. “Earth to Jon? You in there?”

He blinked, shaking his head. “Yeah, sorry. Train of thought got away from me.”

She folded her arms, but kept her expression neutral. “What about?”

He frowned, trying to phrase the chaos in his mind, “It’s been hard trying to cope with what happened.” He still had to be diplomatic with his concerns. Not willing to let on his suspicion that Wilson is lying to him. “Losing someone never was easy. Each time always feels like the first.”

Raven reached out, putting a hand on his shoulder. “Look, you had a rough few weeks. Rest on this before deciding anything rash.”

He gestured around him, defeated. “Look around, Raven. What are we becoming? What am I becoming? I lost a man on my team, and the best we can do is a wrist slap because I called the widow. We might have a target who conveniently is a thorn we’d love to trim conveniently lined up and waiting.”

She opened her mouth to respond, but fell short and remained silent.

“I’m not an idiot, Raven. I’m aware of the line of business we’re in. Secrets and compartmentalization are there to protect us and the people. But that drop turning into a shootout as frantic as...” he trailed off. “That wasn’t bad luck. They hit us in an ambush. Someone knew what was going to happen and positioned those strike teams immaculately. If Sam didn’t tip me off when he did, you might be in Arlington, burying the both of us right now.”

He went quiet, leaning against the wall, trying to keep the guilt and shame from overtaking him. “I can’t let his death be as insignificant as a Drone Operator losing a mech on a mission. Sam isn’t some piece of hardware to write off as a loss. The man had a family, a life, with morals and ideals and dreams and ambitions. And now he’s dead. If that means nothing anymore, then what good are we?”

Raven nodded, but put her hand on his shoulder again in solidarity. “Let’s get you home before you do anything stupid, eh?”

#

“You didn’t need to follow me home. It’s not like I drove,” Jon said over his shoulder to Raven.

She shrugged noncommittally, following him up the steps to his house. He opened the front door and gestured for her to come in. She hung her jacket on the rack by the door and followed him into the house. Pulling her jet-black hair into a ponytail, she gave him an appraising look. “Spoken with your doc yet?”

“Not today.”

Making his way to the fridge. Opening the door, he pulled out a few beers and came back to hand her one.

“Bit early for a drink, isn’t it?” she asked wryly.

He glanced at the clock and shrugged. “After the past few days? Never.”

She nodded silently in agreement. He took a long pull before setting the bottle on the kitchen island. She glanced down and smiled at the family photo, and her brow knit.

“I always meant to ask why there are no pictures of your father up.”

“That’s complicated,” Jon said.

She shrugged, folding her arms and leaning her hip against the countertop. “I have nothing scheduled.”

Hesitation gripped him for a long moment as she continued to watch him for a response. Finally, he took his beer off the island and went to the living room to drop into a chair, gesturing for her to do so too.

“You remember when GeneTech launched its fresh LIMB line?”

“Who could forget? They changed body augmentation overnight.”

Jon sniffed at that. He recalled memories of pain, fear, and anxiety. “Yeah. They placed my old man in the first phase of trials.”

Raven’s eyes widened as she suddenly realized where this went. “Your old man got to be one of the first phase rejections.”

“Yeah. Mom struggled through it at first, but eventually, the family split up over his episodes.”

“Did anyone get hurt?”

Jon lifted his beer up to point to the right side of his face. “He broke my jaw when he raged out once. Smashed the entire kitchen to pieces. We called the cops, but because the rage had him so strong, they deployed the Maxtac team, but they were too slow to show up. Took four hours for the rejection rage to fade. The coward ran away when he couldn’t bear to see us after what he did. Not that Mom planned to fight the decision. Insurance refused to pay anything out, said the wreckage stemmed from user-inflicted damages, so they didn’t need to cover anything.”

She opened her mouth to speak but said nothing.

“He used to be so strong. And the last memory I have of him is looking at me and recoiling, turning his back on me. He looked so weak then. I’ve still not figured out what scares me more. What he did, or what he turned into when his implant went nuts.”

Raven tilted her head to the side, finally making a connection now that she had the supplemental information to do so. “Is this why you’re so against further augmentation?”

He gave her a crisp nod, then took another swig of his beer. “Yeah. I made my mind up that having a complete body is useless if you can’t control it and worse, if all that body did is tear your family apart.”

Raven winced, “I hear that. But they’ve made so many advancements since then. Have you reconsidered? Rejection is so much easier to treat these days. I recall seeing on your file you’re marked down as Do Not Augment.”

He shifted in his seat. “I know. I still haven’t changed my mind. I just don’t want that loss of control. My old man got lucky that he only broke my jaw.”

Raven nodded, adding quietly, “That can’t have been easy to deal with.”

“No. Took years of therapy to make it this far. Mostly. My therapist said that trauma is something that I won’t really get over so much as just learn to cope with. She found me a solid peer group of Survivors of Cyberpsychosis, though. One guy, Roland, you’d probably like him. He served as a Joe back at the phase 2 trials. His battle buddy had a new LIMB. The matte olive drab green types they marketed out to the soldiers? I guess he was on a mission and he ran low on his meds. The rage settled in and the guy beat most of his squad into the dirt. Roland woke up with compound fractures in his arm so bad they had to amputate it at the shoulder. They offered him a replacement, but he passed. I guess I see a lot of what I could have become in him. I got lucky with just a broken jaw. He lost his damn arm.” He shook his head, just trying to process the craziness of it.

“That couldn’t have been easy to go through. For him or you,” Raven said.

He knew Raven served herself in the UK. She understood the unwritten pact. All soldiers learned the mantra at some point if they saw action. Trauma isn’t something that you can forget or conquer. The only recourse is to accept and carry it in whatever way you can. This multiplied even worse for commanders because war at its finest is just a pure distilled form of capitalism. You spend the currency you have. Sometimes it’s advanced munitions or weapons platforms. And in the worst fights, commanders would have to spend the lives of their people as currency to buy the best outcome they could afford.

He took the last pull from his beer, drowning the voice that threatened to answer deep inside him. For now, he had to settle for the truth of not quite knowing. He didn’t have the entire picture when they mess with Sam went down. But he planned to find out. He refused to accept that he’d spent Sam’s life needlessly. Someone else had forced that situation and he needed to know why.

Raven stood, “It sounds like you have some good support pillars. I should return to the office. If you want answers, you’ll need a runner. You can trust calling the shots for you.”

He stood, walking her to the door, “Helps, you’re the best NetRunner I know.” Raven came to the Agency from the UK and fell into a NetRunner role not long after the government stood the department up. Raven hacked networks, ran softs like daemons and worms that jammed up or cracked security, and basically acted as his eye in the sky. If there is a god in his world, she is the closest thing to it. She dressed more like a counter-Netrunner. Able to access the murky darknet, and ferret out the Runners, but also attack back.

Her eyes flashed blue as she sent him updated contact details. Her service protocol number had changed again.

“New chip?”

She shook her head, “Nah, grabbed some new Intrusion Countermeasure Execution code. The Agency’s InfoSec team put out a Warning Order on some new ICE breakers being tracked in field use.”

His brows furrowed. It seemed like the digital side of his work was a writhing, thriving, living being. Always developing and always changing. “An upgrade?”

Raven nodded, “Can never be too careful, can you? I like to think of it hardening walls personally. And hey, if you need anyone to talk to, you know how to reach me.” She patted his shoulder, drawing a wince from him, and she flinched reflexively.

“Sorry, forgot about that one,” she said. Then she put on her jacket and slipped outside.

He watched her leave just long enough before she rounded the corner to the street. Once Raven slipped out of view, he fished a black data chip from his pocket. His own private copy of whatever got Sam killed. He wanted to tell her what happened, but he couldn’t yet. Not without proof.

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