Continued From E2:P6
Balinski watched the feed from inside the mobile command center with Siyel. The operatives were efficient and clearly knew their craft as they moved through the building quickly and methodically. Establishing clear lines of cover and overlapping fields of fire as they moved from room to room. It took them less than a minute to clear the entire ground floor, an impressive feat for any group.
The feed switched as they received a report, “Ground floor clear, no sign of hostile or any other recent activity. We are moving to the rear of the structure, there seems to be another floor below this one. No obvious entrance, stand by.”
Siyel glanced at him and then nodded. “Standing by, we have a canine unit available if you require.” She covered the mic with her hand and glanced at him and Caesar. “You wouldn't mind?”
Balinski shook his head, “I don’t mind. But you are going to have to convince her to move.”
Caesar knew she was being talked about now and raised her large, furred head from his feet. Siyel looked at her and asked in a respectful manner, “Caesar, would you be willing to help my officers locate a hidden entrance?” Caesar seemed to balk slightly before glancing at him.
“Don't look at me, the lady asked you.” Caesar gave a small undignified grunt and then stood slowly.
Siyel smiled. “Thank you, Caesar, I promise I will make it up to you.” The cyberhound gave her a pointed look that told her she was going to hold Siyel to that promise before she trotted over to the door.
As she did the ramp door opened remotely and she hopped out of the vehicle. The voice over the comms replied not a second later. “Yes, a canine unit would be incredibly welcome. How long until you can get them…” they paused. “Oh, that was fast. Hello there, er, what is this unit’s designation?”
Siyel grinned and replied smartly, “Her name is Caesar and she is a lot smarter than she looks. Treat her like one of your officers, she will know what to do.”
The man’s voice replied, the screen showing a feed of Caesar sitting in front of the man with her cybernetic jaws lolling open. A hand entered the view making a gesture towards her, “Hey you there, Caesar. We need to locate some manner of entrance to a lower level. If you could.. sniff it out?” Caesar barked and nodded her head before putting her nose to the ground and sniffing about in an over exaggerated manner.
Balinski chuckled. “She can be such a ham at times.”
Siyel nodded in response but remained silent. Of course, her microphone was still live. The feeds followed the enhanced husky as she moved from room to room, with each one checked off the list she seemed to narrow down the scents she was looking for. After only a couple minutes she was pawing at a large double-decker washing machine in the back of the store. Her muted growls being broadcast across the feed.
Two officers were then directed to take hold of the machine and they collectively managed to wrench it out of place. Balinski had to give a low grunt as the wall behind was revealed to have a metal doorway situated behind the machines. “A secret door, who would have guessed.”
As the man stepped through into the relative darkness the feed started to fizz, the black and white flecks of static appearing all at once across the screen.
The atraxses woman on the other side of Siyel seemed to murmur in annoyance once more before turning to Siyel and speaking in a gruff yet oddly feminine voice. “We are losing their telemetry. It would seem that there is some sort of faraday meshing in the sub-basement that is blocking all our signals.”
That was bad news, it meant that the team would be entirely cut off from anything but direct line of sight communications. He stood, not knowing what to do but feeling the overwhelming urge to do something. Siyel put out an arm and dragged him back into his seat, well, he allowed her too. There was no way she could have budged his heavy cybernetic frame if he hadn’t wanted her to.
She shook her horned head at him and gestured to the consoles. “They will be fine. They are highly trained officers of the law, you know?”
She was right, but he hated sitting impotent along the sidelines. Watching was anathema to him, as a man of action he liked to be stuck right in the middle of the action. He winced as his bruises stung, yeah.. that had been going just swell for him so far.
The waiting was an agony, but after another few minutes several of the officers including Caesar exited the dead zone and messaged back to Siyel, “It looks all clear. There is nobody here, one casualty. Civilian. They were already dead when we found them, they look like the owner. Please advise?”
She pounded one of her fists on the counter top and hissed in frustration. “Be advised, I am coming in with escort. Leave the body where you found it, I want to get a look at the place myself.” Siyel tossed off her headset and donned a navy blue police windbreaker. With a toss of her short black hair she gestured to him, “Are you coming?”
Balinski stood and glanced at the atraxses woman, she seemed perfectly content to stay where she was and so he just nodded and placed the headset he had been using down upon the counter. He had to duck slightly as he exited the Beast behind Siyel, they walked along the street quickly towards the activity up ahead. He chanced a glance behind them and could just make out a police cruiser manning a barricade that was blocking traffic from this part of the road. That was smart, limiting both coverage and innocents in any potential crossfire.
Siyel was walking just to his front and left, he watched the back of her head as they neared the site. He was wondering once more what it was that was making this entire debacle feel so personal to her. As if she felt his eyes on her she glanced at him and frowned causing him to snap his eye back forwards. He thought he heard a chuckle but he couldn't be sure, and by then they had reached the laundromat.
The man who’s feed they had been watching stepped forwards and gave her a salute before looking Balinski up and down with a skeptical look. “This is.. your escort?”
She nodded and reached out, smacking Balinski on the chest. He jumped slightly at the unexpected contact. “Yes, this is Balinski Katars. Void warden. He saved my life no fewer than three times during the attack last night, I trust him with my life. Anything you can tell me you can also tell him.” Balinski’s remaining eyebrow rose at that, that was a heavy statement indeed. He was a little shocked to hear her speak of him so positively.
It wasn’t as if he had expected her not to respect him, but to hear her so clearly express her trust in him made his heart flutter again. That same strange feeling crawled through his stomach and mind. He cleared his throat and nodded to the man, extending a cybernetic hand. The black digits whirring softly as they articulated into a friendly gesture.
“Hello, pleased to make your acquaintance officer.” The man gave his hand a quick shake and then stepped towards the structure, his Colt-Franz LMR v.17 held low and to the ready in case of any threats.
The walk into the building was short and tense. He looked around for any signs of danger while simultaneously keeping an eye on Siyel. She seemed to observe everything at once. Of course she would be good at this, she had been on the force for nearly a decade already, the woman was in her commanding position for a reason after all.
As he rounded a corner he was surprised by a large fluffy object rocketing into him, it was Caesar. Her cybernetic legs propelled her high into the air as she jumped straight into his chest and rebounded off him.
“Ooouff!” he wheezed as she gave a series of happy little barks and wagged her tail. He shook his head and then stood straight again as Siyel and the other officer walked around the corner.
Siyel smiled and waved to the pup, “Hello Caesar. Thanks for helping us. Good girl.”
Caesar smiled wide, her cybernetic jaws straining as she just sneezed and then strutted up to Balinski’s side where she looked up at him expectantly. He rolled his eyes and then leaned down to give her head a quick scrub. “Oh all right, good girl. But you only get this one for now.”
He opened a concealed pocket in his trench coat and plucked out a single small biscuit from a resealable bag with the stylized cartoonish picture of a croc noppin on it. The happy looking lizard-dog was smiling with a thumbs up under the brightly colored letters that spelled out ‘Happy Chompers Noppin Treats’.
He held it up, waggling the small treat above the excited pup’s head. She barked and made a jump for it, snatching the cookie from his hand with surprising precision before scarfing it down maniacally.
He shook his head. “What do they put in these things?”
Clearly it was something that drove the poor pooch bonkers for them, he flicked his eyes back to the others and followed them as Caesar followed at his heels. Siyel entered the dark tunnel of the secret entrance and Balinski followed. The passageway was dark, no lights evident as they followed the stairwell down to a lower basement floor that looked to have been converted from some manner of undercity utility chamber.
The walls were bare brick and there were tunnels that branched off into the depths, most of them far too short for a being to stand comfortably. In the center of the room were several smashed tables, their dromemite surfaces warped as if by high heat and the contents of a large wooden crate scattered around the floor.
Balinski took several steps closer to the scene and saw that just beyond the mess was a large figure, their form unmoving and surrounded by a pool of dark orange fluid that glinted in the fluorescent light like tiny gemstones. It was a gre’vahn, they had been stripped naked and beaten to death it looked like. And from the look of the wounds the death had been rather recent as well.
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He covered his mouth at the grisly scene as he walked around to the front of the body. Siyel followed and then exclaimed in disgust.
“What in the lords mercy!” she turned away, her normally rosy features turning a pale shade of lavender as she had to take a second to recover.
Balinski himself was only a little better off, but he still felt his gorge rise at the sight. The large centauroid woman’s cat-like features had been smashed in, strips of tattered meat and the sparkling glint of shattered quartzoin visible through the mess that was once her face. What's more the woman's breasts seemed to have been cut from her mutilated chest and there were obscene slurs carved into the blood matted fur of her lower abdomen. From the deep scratches and gouges in the concrete floor around the woman’s corpse it looked as if the cutting may have been done while the poor woman was still alive.
He turned away now, the scene far more grisly than any of the mutilated and ruptured corpses he had seen in the war. This was not just a dead body, but the sheer cruelty and savagery of the act itself seemed to fog the very air with its insufferably evil brume.
He coughed weakly as he doubled over and had to take several steps away. Images forced themselves unbidden to the forefront of his mind and almost knocked him to his knees with their potency. Images of a tall furred alien in a blood stained coat and mask, a large surgical saw in one hand and a strip of chewed leather in the other. A voice echoed in his thoughts as if from a nightmare, ‘I’m sorry, but I need to remove your broken limbs. I am sorry.’
The psychosomatic pain of his cybernetics lit up like bonfires of sensation in his mind at the memory and he nearly blacked out from the neural overload, bet something stopped him from falling off the edge of that abyss.
A small whine sounded from his left and something soft butted into his side a few times in quick succession. He reached out near blindly and dragged Caesar close, hugging the cyberhound tightly and taking several deep calming breaths.
By the time he had recovered enough to stand Siyel had also regained her composure. She turned to the grim-faced human officer who had led them into the room and passed a hand over her horns. Her tail flicked in discomfort as she looked at the body again, “Lords Gavin.. You could have fucking warned me at least. That is, not good..” she finished simply.
Gavin nodded. “Yeah, well.. How do I accurately describe this? I guess I could have said the situation was FUBAR.”
Siyel nodded her horned head and then walked around the body to the other side before stopping again and averting her eyes. “Fucking perverts.. I hope.. no I just don’t.” she looked up at the ceiling as Balinski walked to the scattered packages on the floor.
As the other two talked quietly about the nature of the crime, he knelt and picked up one of the unruptured containers. It was a small vial of slightly silvery grey powder. He gave it a gentle shake and cycled through several different modes with his cybernetic eye before he spotted flecks of blue in it that glinted in the harsh white light. They were tiny, barely visible even to his enhanced cybernetic vision. He knew almost immediately what he was holding.
He stood and turned to Siyel holding up the small vial. “I know what this is.”
Gavin nodded and muttered, “yeah. It’s occusmite. Not exactly helpful in this instance.”
Balinski shrugged, “Sure. Unless you know who manufactured it.”
Siyel took a step in his direction, pointedly not looking at the broken body in the center of the room. “How on Jureillo do you know who manufactured that batch? There are illegal occusmite manufacturing rings all over the city.”
He tossed the bottle into the air before catching it a few times, weighing it in his hand as if it was important to his next statement. “Well, what I know is that the labs that make the good stuff, like this batch here.” he rattled the vial, the tiny tinkling sounds it made barely audible. “Tend to have signatures in them from the manufacturers. Something to mark their work and prevent counterfeiting. All a part of the business you know?”
She nodded. “Of course! And this batch is marked? How can you tell? The point of the marking is to be as indetectable as possible.” She walked over to him now, the nerivith woman was only a few centimeters shorter than him. Tall even for her own people. She was nearly able to look him in the eyes as she implored, “And who manufactured this batch?” She seemed to plead with him. Her violet eyes enraptured him as she stared into his very soul.
He coughed after a moment of silence and shook his head slightly. He held up the vial to the light and shook it. “It took me a bit of cycling through different color spectra, but I eventually noticed tiny flecks of blue in the 393 nanometer range specifically. That marks it out as unique and a product of the Psychosis Division.”
As he finished speaking she sacked her fist into her palm. “I knew it. This has all the hallmarks of the Pit Vipers. But they couldn't have come up with such an elaborate plan on their own, there had to be something guiding them.” She whirled around to the other officer. Pointing at them with a long fingered hand, she instructed commandingly, “Officer Gavin, I want you to run a sample of this to one of the technicians. Then call for a group of Tunnel Trawlers. I want these tunnels checked out.” The man gave her a crisp salute and then scurried away.
As his heavy footfalls receded it left Siyel alone in the room with only him and Caesar. She once more seemed to slump slightly, her normal stoic demeanour slipping like a mask. “I don’t know if I can do this, Balinski.” She walked towards one of the less damaged tables and leaned against its edge, her arms folded under her breasts as she looked over at him.
Balinski frowned. Where was this uncharacteristic emotion coming from? “I don’t believe that for a second Siyel. You are the best police officer I have ever seen, and I am not saying that just to make your head bigger.” She smiled slightly at his remark, but he continued. “Look, the truth of the matter is that this woman was likely killed before the raid even started. Those scumbags hopped themselves up on some fresh ockie and then had a rape party to get themselves in the mood.” Not to mention that the gre’vahn female had likely been at least tangentially aware of the criminal activity in the basement of her building before her ultimate fate.
He saw her shake her head. “No, I know that. But.. if I can’t help the people of this city then what good am I?” Her voice wavered slightly and he had to remind himself that he was talking to one of the highest ranking police officers in the city. She was an SC-3, in charge of counter-gang activities across the entire city.
That meant that this particular case must have some significance to her then, if she had been following it as closely as she had. He sidled over and leaned on the table next to her, pushing his already strange relationship with her to the limits of what he felt comfortable in a professional setting.
He gave her a hard look as he removed his hat and held it in both hands. “Look. I'm new to all this police stuff. I got my contract straight from the government as a sort of pity gift to a war cripple. They would have given me anything I wanted to make up for leaving me in that hell hole for…” He swallowed hard and changed the subject with a deep breath. She looked over at him, her expression changing ever so slightly. Her hard violet stare becoming slightly warmer in his own twisted imagination. “The fact of the matter is that I could have become anything. I chose to become a Warden. I wanted to help people, just like you do every single day. I saw injustice every day on the battlefield from corrupt officers and incompetent officials. I don’t see that when I am helping you, you are doing the work that nobody else can. Not because you have too, and not because it is easy. You do it because you care deeply for the people of this city. The people that are saved from injustice every single day by your task force operatives.” he had to pause for breath.
She took the opportunity to reach up and place a pink hand on his shoulder. “Thanks for that. I might not want to hear it, but I guess I am doing the work that others won’t. Thanks for reminding me.”
He nodded, his mouth snapping closed. He glanced down at her hand, the hand that was lingering slightly longer than was strictly necessary for the sake of comradery in that moment. He cleared his throat as Caesar whined. Siyel chuckled and removed her hand, reaching out to scrub the pup’s head.
Seeing her there wearing one of her rare smiles, it made him realise. He was indeed fond of her, surpassing that of simple friendship. He closed off the thoughts though, she had never shown any feelings towards him but mutual respect and so it was not his place to do anything different. “I think we can probably head back up now.”
As he moved to turn away he felt her hands grab his arm. Balinski jerked and looked back over his shoulder in surprise. She looked at him earnestly and then checked the surroundings before lowering her voice. “This is likely one of the very few times I can talk to you without fear of being overheard, Balinski. I’m being watched, somebody knows my every move I feel. There are ears everywhere.” his eyes widened at her words. What on Jureillo was she talking about?
She continued quickly, “I can’t say this up there. But I need you to catch the one responsible for this. Not for the city, for me… Will you do that for me, Balinski? Please?”
He looked at Siyel and felt something inside his mind shift. She had shown a side of herself that he had never seen before. He had seen her angry, he had even seen her panicked before. But he had never seen her look so desperate, every instinct in his body told him she was telling him the truth. And he had no reason not to trust her.
Balinski glanced down at Caesar who was looking at the pair with poorly veiled curiosity on her doggy features. He looked back at her and nodded. “Consider it done. They won’t escape justice again.”
She seemed to relax instantly and then released him before taking a deep breath and regaining her normal stoic composure. “Good, that's.. is good.” She placed her hands in the small of her back and stretched, pushing out her chest and causing a series of crackling pops. “Oough. It never gets any easier, trust me.” She gave him another nod and then started off towards the stairs.
Balinski started in surprise again as he felt something brush one of his hands, it was her tail. The dark tuft of hair on the end of her long sinuous appendage fluttering as it flicked away. She didn’t seem to react, it might have been unconscious or it could have been intentional. He would have no way of knowing and he sure as hell wasn’t going to ask her about it.
He just shook his head as she exited the room. What was he getting into? “Caesar, stop that.” he said as the insufferable pup kicked one of the glass vials across the floor. “That’s evidence tampering. I could report you to the field office for that.” he joked. She didn't seem to get the joke as she flattened her ears and gave a short whine.
He shook his head. “Oh you big baby. You know I wasn’t actually mad at you. Come on, let's get out of this place.”
He gave another glance to the body in the center of the room and burned the sight into his memory. He would find those responsible and make them suffer ten-fold for every atrocity they had ever committed. He grinned cruelly as he thought of just how he planned to make them pay for their crimes.
He strode out of the building and stopped on the edge of the street. He looked up at the sky, the orange colored sun was nearly directly overhead. As if to make a point he heard a small growl from his middle and had to chuckle as Caesar copied it.
He looked at her and smiled. “Yeah, I’m hungry too. What do you say we go and hit up a McDoinks Bugerhut? I'll get you an order of frine nuggets, does that sound fair?” She hopped up and down a few times before giving him a very positive woof.
He nodded, the dark thoughts that always scratched at the corners of his mind held at bay for another day. As long as they were together he could take on the world. He reached down and scrubbed her head, she was his best friend. And nothing would ever change that.
End of The Void Warden: Episode 2
Continued in Episode 3 -Pulling at Treads-