[Story] CSWNext: Sins of the Father

High tech intrigue and Cold War
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Mobius 1
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[Story] CSWNext: Sins of the Father

Post by Mobius 1 »

CSWNext: Sins of the Father

It's Five O'Clock Somewhere

Somewhere in the South Pacific, Late 2020s

“So, what I’m saying, is that that if Doles never took the shot, the Knicks would’ve been able to pull out the fourth game. No shot, no injury, a solid final quarter.”

“Dear god,” the man to Ryan’s right slurred, cradling his head in his hands, “do you ever shut up?”

“Why bother? Life without talking is life wasted,” Ryan Lennox signaled the bartender for another pint of lager. “And if we don’t look back and realizes all the bloody, terrible, hoooorible mistakes we’ve made in the past, how can we move forward? As Knicks fans, and as human beings, I guess.”

The bartender walked past, depositing a tall glass of beer for the young man. In his mid-twenties and wearing a tropical shirt whose garish patterns could be seen as a war crime in most civilized nations, Ryan Lennox was the sort of guy you would hesitate to invite to a party. Sure, he might liven it up but he’d also end up playing a stupid party trick and end up sleeping with half the women there.

Adjusting his sunglasses, Lennox leaned against the bar and watched the waves slowly lapping up against the beach as he sipped the lager. The island town was one of dozens in the south pacific, with a booming tourism trade and a just as robust crime circuit.

“Bad day, friend?” Ryan asked the man on his right. “C’mon, loosen your tie, I’ll buy you a drink, and let the island winds carry your troubles away.”

The man groaned. “Just lost most of my assets to some businessmen up north.”

“Yaks?” Ryan asked.

“How’d you know?” the man asked, sitting up.

Ryan shrugged adjusting a floppy straw hat as he looked up to watch the fans of the beachside bar lazily rotate above. “Pirates don’t bother much with the organized schemes types like you run.”

The man seemed to stiffen, and reached for a gun inside his jacket.

“Easy, friend.” Ryan said, not even bothering to react. “The scheme wasn’t half-baked, to be honest. But trying to carve out your own little notch in the islands would’ve gone a lot better if the locals you were stealing money from hadn’t hired us to run you out. You’re a small fry, but one of my friends doesn’t much like stealing money from disaster victims.”

“Get out before I ventilate you,” the suit said, leveling the gun at Ryan. It was an old Desert Eagle, all flash and would probably break the man’s wrist if he tried to fire it.

“I don’t like violence much, myself,” Ryan said, taking another sip from his beer. “There’s a time for bullets, and that’s when my associate gets involved.”

In response, one of the women sitting a nearby table stood, flipping a sawn-off shotgun out from a bag of towels. She cocked her hips to one side as she idly aimed the riot gun at the crook.

“Jacky, you see,” Ryan continued, “loves two things: getting a tan on the beach, and blowing scumbags clean in half with shotguns. And since you interrupted the former, she might get a chance to indulge the latter instinct. But,” Ryan said, holding up a finger, “there’s also a time for talk, and my second friend didn’t touch your hidden reserves when she drained your accounts to leave you with some free will about the thing.”

“What do you want?” the man asked.

“Well, considering you just made a sizable donation to tsunami relief, I was hoping you’d continue your charitable inclinations and give half of your reserves to the First International Charity of BACKSTOP.”

“You’re shaking me down?” His voice had turned angry.

“No,” Ryan said, feigning insult, “We’re robbing you, just so we’re clear. You transfer half of your funds to this account,” he slid a napkin with a string of numbers on it, “and you get to keep your miserable life.” He paused. “And half your nest egg, I suppose. You’ll need it when the Yakuza start wondering what went wrong.”

“If you drained my… business accounts, why bother with this routine? Why not just take it all?”

“Well, when my friend Lise and I snuck into your offices last night, we only managed to get access to your bankables, and it was good fortune we noticed your nest egg at all. I mean, we could eventually drain it, but we burned some pretty expensive ICEbreakers getting past the walls of Yak-built ICE.”

“And besides,” the young woman added, “like Ryan said, we’re big believers in free will. Choices, etcetera. You pay us handsomely for abusing you of the notion of being a tremendous dick, or I cut you in half.”

The man laughed, seeing something behind Jacky. “You two really are terrible at negotiating, you know that?”

“No one ever said it was a good choice,” Ryan snorted into his beer. “But let the goons fingering their pieces behind my friend that she’s a much faster shot than them and drinks raw eggs for breakfast. I’d rather not have this descend into an old-fashioned bar brawl. We’ve got a nice Mexican standoff going here, let’s be satisfied that we, as people, managed that much.”

“Plus,” Jacky added, “It’d be really embarrassing if they got their asses handed to them by a girl in a bikini.”

“That too,” Ryan said, nodding sagely. “What’s it going to be? Look at it this way. People always say you can’t put a price on human life. Well, we’re putting a price on yours, and it’s half of your account. Place that against, say, the price of the Yakuza skinning alive with one of those Chiba necroviruses, and I’d say it’s a blue light special.”

The man looked at Ryan, down at the paper, and back up, weighing his options. Finally setting his jaw, he holstered hand cannon and retrieved a phone from his pocket.

“You know the usual stuff,” Ryan said, watching him handle the transaction. “The money disappears, you’re toast. You come after us, toast. You take it out on the locals? Buttered toast.”

“Just one condition,” the man said, finishing the transfer.

Ryan’s watch buzzed, and he glanced down at it, seeing a new message on the hologram projector: TRANSFER VERIFIED – COG. “What is that, friend?”

“You stop talking and get out of my sight.”

Standing, Ryan fished out his wallet and tossed a pair of hundreds onto the bar, nodding to the bartender. “Sorry about the trouble.” Looking back at the suit, he offered a genuine smile. “Pleasure doing business, and believe me, we don’t want anything to do with you either. Best of luck on all your future ventures, hopefully they’re more… scrupulous.”

Greeted by a blank stare, Ryan chuckled and spun on his heel, slipping a hand around Jacky’s waist. “I hear the waves are wonderful back at the resort. Let’s go, Jacky.”

Covered by her shotgun, they retreated from the bar. Ryan was smiling the entire way, enjoying the ocean breeze, as Jacky whispered into his ear, “Next time you place our lives in the hands of a psychic nudge, let me know.”

“You two look wonderful together,” called a voice from the street.

The pair looked down, and finally cresting the high of adrenaline, quickly stepped away from each other.

Lise rolled her eyes from where she sat in the Jeep’s driver’s seat, head propped up lazily on one hand. Blowing a strand of black hair out of her eyes, she started up the Jeep’s engine. “How’d it go?”

“Wonderfully,” Ryan said.

“Disastrously,” Jacky said, reaching into the Jeep to grab a sarong to wrap her hips in. “Ryan didn’t notice that he had more hired help than just the two old hands.”

“Oh?” Ryan quirked an eyebrow, opening the passenger door for Jacky and gesturing gracefully. “You’re not talking about the one in the back with the hook hand, were you? What was he going to do, tell us pirate stories?”

“Aaaand the bus boy,” Jacky corrected, taking her seat. “Unless you thought it was only dishes in that carrying tub?”

Ryan laughed. “Oh, him? Slipped him a fifty to stay out of it.” Reaching into a side pocket on his swim trunks, he removed a cheap Chinese hold-out pistol and disassembled it. Dropping it into Jacky’s bag alongside the shotgun, he took the back seat of the jeep and lying across it, crossing his arms behind his head and staring at the sky. “Ye of little faith. COG said the transfer went through?” he asked Lise.

Pulling out of the parking spot and onto the lazily avenue ringing the island’s tourism district, Lise nodded. “Just over a million, but between repair costs for the Shaanxi from that bout in Hong Kong-”

“And the damage from letting Jinx fly our escape from Jakarta.”

“-And from when Gosely lit all of Ryan’s shit on fire,” Lise finished.

Jacky laughed, “I still owe that girl a beer.”

“She still wants me,” Ryan said, shaking his head and watching the clouds.

“Yeah, between the turboprop repairs and the ICEbreaker we’re running on a razor’s edge,” Lise finished.

“Any word on the origin of that ICE?” Jacky asked. “I heard it gave even COG trouble.”

“For a given definition of ‘trouble,’” Lise said. “But yes, it was high-grade, and not something the Yakuza could’ve given him.”

“What’s the mean?”

“I don’t know, Jacky. It wasn’t quite military grade, but something close to it. If I had any guess, it’d be-“

“Old Anti-KwangMk11 firewall protocols most likely,” said the face projected onto the right side of the windshield.

Jacky swore, and Lise nearly swerved into oncoming traffic. Even Ryan sat off, whipping off his sunglasses.

“How the hell did you hack my jeep?” Lise screamed.

“What the f-What made you think this’d be a good idea?” Jacky said, throwing her hands up into the air.

Ryan shook his head, looking at the scarred, battered face. “Long time no see, sir.”

“Looks like it’s time for my bi-monthly ‘what did you guys manage to stumble into this time’ talk,” Colonel John Baylor, USMC (Ret) said, adjusting his tie and pushing up his glasses with two fingers as he met the eyes of each of the members of BACKSTOP in turn. “And this time, I get to find out how you guys stumbled upon WRAITH-grade firewall code. Surely my blood pressure will be helped by the many wild and wonderful adventures that will come of this.”

He lit up a cigar, smiling, only for a woman’s hand to reach into the frame and snatch the cigar from his hand. A voice that sounded distinctly like the President’s admonished Baylor off-frame, only to add something in a knowing voice. “Oh, and Jacqueline, Alexis wants me know let you know that your mother say hi.”
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The day our skys fe||, the heavens split to create new skies.
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Re: [Story] CSWNext: Sins of the Father

Post by Booted Vulture »

Yay! Finally there is more to CSWNext than the random ideas thread.

Grown up Ryan is fricken hilarious. And that ending? Win. President Starr! And First Gentlemen (?) John Baylor?!

Ok, Baystar aside maybe his Vice Pres. OR head military advisor. Or just a groupie. Whatever this is awesome.
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Re: [Story] CSWNext: Sins of the Father

Post by Mobius 1 »

Officially he's the head of the Secret Service (which is probably a huge violation of interests but who cares) but unofficially he inherited most of the intelligence aparatus of MIDNIGHT just like the cabal did from the old 1970s types. That, along with his international contacts, makes him essentially a smaller-scale American version of Jackson Galahad Ridley.
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Re: [Story] CSWNext: Sins of the Father

Post by Mobius 1 »

We Are The People Our Parents Warned Us About

“How did you even know about the Kwang?” Lise asked, gripping the wheel tightly as she pulled the jeep off the highway into a hotel’s parking lot. The hologram had startled her almost to the point of crashing, which was usually Jacky’s department, and one the woman enthusiastically lorded over. Hell, it was the reason Jace Razard kept a flask of hard liquor with him at all times.

“Please,” Baylor said. “It’s my job to know about threats to the world and you guys are dustbusters to that sort of stuff.”

“Must run in the family,” Jacky grumbled, staring down her once-surrogate father.

“And besides, my best friend runs MI6. But that’s beyond the point. That Kernel AI Elizabeth desperately wants to keep secret from the Soviets used to belong to an old – that means long dead – friend of mine.”

“Do you want it back?” ground out Lise.

Baylor laughed, it coming out like a rude bark. “Why would I want something like that when the Alphabet Soup at my disposal? No, but I do make a point to keep an eye for WRAITH leftovers making the rounds. God knows we’ve had enough trouble with Razaq.”

“So you’re saying that ICE was WRAITH-tech?” Of the group, Ryan had a sore spot when it came to WRAITH – past history, dead dads, the like.

“Now, I don’t want to be the one to tell you how to live your lives…” Baylor began behind a sarcastic smirk.

“But you’ve been tracking someone selling WRAITH-tech in the region and you want us to sniff around like we’re Mystery, Inc until you have enough evidence to call in the cavalry,” Ryan finished.

Baylor put a hand to his mouth, feigning shock. “No, I was suggesting no such thing. I want you to sniff around like you’re Mystery, Inc until you have enough evidence, and I want you to take care of it yourselves. You’re big kids now, and I know how you hate being given a bedtime. Go wild. But, please, try not to topple any governments unless you have to. “ The image snapped off, and Jacky let out a deep, heartfelt oath.

“Is he usually this patronizing?” Lise asked, keying off the Jeep’s electric engine.

“No, actually,” Ryan said, reaching into the back and retrieving his duffel of gear. “He usually makes a point of reaching out to any new… talents on the circuit. Personal experience. If he’s this condescending, it means something’s going on back hom- back in America,” he finished, correcting himself.

“What does the mean?” Jacky asked, snatching Ryan’s hat off his head as a slow downpour began to waft in from the south.

“It means we’re on our own,” Ryan said. “And wading into deeper water than we have before.” He shouldered his duffel and fixed his collar against the rain before pointing to the modest airstrip beyond the island’s main resort. “C’mon, let’s get back to the Shaanxi. Time to knock on the sky and listen to the sound.”

-------------

Later that night, Ryan made his way down from the Shaanxi’s makeshift sleeping loft to find Lise hunched over her makeshift workstation, pecking owlishly at a keyboard, the light of the triple screens the only illumination in the dim cargo bay.

“Can’t sleep?” he asked, taking a swig from a half-empty bottle of whiskey. He offered some to her, but she waved a hand, declining the drink. Lise with alcohol was always a bad idea. It was probably the reason Lise was banned from Brazil. The entire country. Ryan, naturally, knew this.

Lise blew a half-hearted raspberry at Ryan before leaning back into her chair, sighing. “Looks like Baylor was onto something.” She pointed out various points on a map displayed on the left screen. “Old Antenora-Alpha metas popped up in Sydney trying to muscle into the local underground.” She pointed out another spot. “And here, in Jakarta, back when we worked with Jinx and Medley – the directed energy weapons were part of a arms cache that Chandra Gosely set up in 2008. And here, in Osaka, look there – though the JSDF covered it up, there’s a crew of CRATER suits fighting, yeah, a mass-production model SHADOW TEMPEST.”

Ryan stiffened and set down the bottle of whiskey, pulling up a chair next to Lise. “That’s spread out over the Pacific Rim, though. It’s too diffuse to be anything other than a gradual uncovering of WRAITH-tech.” He shot Lise a sideways glance. “This is the point where you prove me wrong.”

“Something like that,” Lise admitted, hitting a string of keys on her laser-projected keyboard, causing a time-map to overlap the incidents. “Adding about a dozen other incidents and laying it on a timeline, you see that someone-”

“-Or something-” Ryan said, waggling his eyebrows dramatically, only to get punched in the shoulder.

“-Or something is running the circuit commonly associated with underground cybernetics marketing. They hit all the major hubs on Silicon Loop – Las Piñas, Kowloon, the like.”

“I know of at least two of the old WRAITH twenty-three that worked along PacRim,” Ryan said. “There’s Uchida Masatake, who was a Colonel in the JSDF until he was chased off by Murayama’s crew back in 2019. I’m fairly sure he’s retired, or at least just taken a back seat in running the Yakuza clans so Murayama doesn’t eventually decide to finish the job.”

Running a search parameter on another monitor, Lise shook her head. “Using the BACKSTOP channels says Masatake tried to get back into the game, but TENGU had enough of him and kill him right on the turn of the decade. So he’s not in the position to be unloading old storehouses. Who’s the second?”

“Sip Et, the Eleventh – Thao Soeur. The Black Tiger of Thailand. The Mad Dog of Jakarta. The Fallen Tok-Guru of Silat. I can keep listing titles – he loves collecting them, but the point is that if he’s involved we might be screwed.”

“How screwed? Everyday screwed or that one time you pissed off a RAID team screwed? On a scale of one to the last time we were in Jakarta?”

“Like the last time but worst. That guy was Red Tiger, Soeur’s protégé. He had been running Soeur’s crew in his absence. So either one of his lieutenants is calling it quits and auctioning off the old gear, or Soeur’s back in business. And, predictably, Soeur’s the type to hold grudges. Like bad grudges, like set a guy on fire bad.”

“You have history with him?” Lise asked, meeting Ryan’s eyes.

Ryan looked away. “Not me, but I’m fairly sure there was a point where SOLIDSIX tried to kill him. Straight up rolled into Jakarta and burned down half of a city block to get this guy. It was brutal, and one of the few times short of say, Africa, or the Final Paragon that they all worked together to off a guy.”

“And what you’re getting at is that he might hold a grudge against us.”

Ryan paused, before snatching the bottle of whiskey off the desk and taking a swig. Wiping his mouth, he said, “If he knows we’re in town, which is likely considering we just bumped off a potential set-up of his.”

“I’m all for just packing up and leaving,” Lise said, spreading her hands. “We’ve spent the past nine months working our way across every bar and dystopian slum we can find in the region. If our welcome’s run out, it’s run out.”

Silent for a moment, mulling it over, Ryan finally stood up, squeezing Lise’s shoulder reassuringly. “We may need to call in some makers for this. Get the real lay of the land.”

“Ry?” Lise asked, looking up sharply.

He offered her a wan smile, bereft anything approaching warmth. “If we run from every person who might have a grudge on our parents, we might as well hit the next shuttle to the NATO moonbase.” He paused. “No, wait. I’m fairly sure Mrs. Starr’s pissed everything beyond the Absolute Defense Line anyway.”

Cracking her knuckles and prepping the old communication channels, Lise snorted at the idea. “We can’t really separate ‘enemies of Alexis Starr’ from ‘enemies of America,’ can we? We’re not exactly tied to any state. You left America before you hit your teens, I left at about the same time. Jacky grew up in Germany and then South America. We’re without state. Stateless.”

“What about me?” came a voice as Jacky entered the cargo bay, setting down a bag of island fruits and shrugging out of a light jacket, having returned from one last shopping run on the town before they lifted off.

“We were remembering how much you snore in your sleep,” Ryan said, looking over one shoulder. “We were hoping you’d oversleep with some native and we’d finally have an excuse to leave you behind.”

“If you did that, the charges I placed on the engines would automatically detonate, blowing you out the sky,” Jacky said, walking past towards the loft, whistling and twirling a key-chain detonator switch around one finger.

“She’s joking,” Lise said, unsure. “Right? Ryan, tell me she’s joking.”

Taking a swig straight from the bottle of whiskey, Ryan laughed, the sound hoarse. “I’m not so sure. Anyway, Jacky, we were considering the idea that a WRAITH Executive might be back on the scene with a grudge against us.”

“How much of an executive are we talking? Lieutenant?” Jacky’s voice called down from the loft as she changed into sleepwear.

“Like, one of the twenty three,” Ryan yelled back.

There was a thump from above, followed by a swift stream of curses. Sticking her head back out over the cargo bay, Jacky rubbed at a lump forming on her forehead. “You mean to tell me Mad Dog Soeur wants us dead?”

“You know of him?”

“Know him?” Jacky said, incensed. “Someone who enjoys lighting things on fire as much as I do? Shit, I remember when SOLIDSIX tried to take him down. Burned him alive. If that human imitation of burnt toast wants at us, I say we hit him head on. Cash in everything. See if he developed a phobia of fire in the intervening time and, if not, make sure it damn well sticks this time.”

Ryan thumped Lise back on shoulder, looking between the two women. “Jacky’s frightening love of violence and explosions aside, see what I mean? It’s not like we’re rolling up on old Daiyu Xifeng here. It’s only number eleven. And we’ve earned more than our share of nicknames ourselves.”

“Yeah,” Lise said, looking dubious. “When ‘damn free-range children these days’ ranks up there with ‘the Black Tiger of Jakarta’, e-mail me.”

“Chin up,” Ryan said. “And have COG chart us a course up towards Thailand. We’ve got us a Mad Dog to put down.”

He turned, and then realizing that his sleeping alcove was still a charred-out mess, spun on his heel and walked towards the nose of the plane and a makeshift hammock he had slung behind the pilot’s seat, cradling his bottle of alcohol dear.

“He was waiting the entire conversation to drop that one, wasn’t he?” Jacky asked.

“Most likely. Some things never die out,” Lise responded, hunching back over her workstation. “Get some sleep, Fixer. We’ve got a long week ahead of us.”
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Re: [Story] CSWNext: Sins of the Father

Post by Booted Vulture »

wooo1 Exposition express! Like the team here. And the pointing out the obvious, if we tangle with everyone with a grudge against our folks we'd be tangling with damn near the whole world.

one nitpick: Mrs Starr? Did Alexis make her husband take her name? in the future wouldn't it be Ms.
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Re: [Story] CSWNext: Sins of the Father

Post by Mobius 1 »

Trying to Reason with Hurricane Season

“I never like visiting Glodok,” Jacky said, not so much flitting between shoppers as plowing through a mass of people like an icebreaker through the polar cap. Lise followed in her wake, busy with her holo-watch while Ryan trailed behind, occasionally stopping to inspect an electronics stall or a drink vendor. Emerging from the waves of shoppers with a can of bintang in hand he chuckled at Jacky’s aggravation.

“You’re halfway across the globe,” Jacky continued, “and you find yourself in another Chinatown. Same electronics vendors, same lack of sightlines, same danger of civilian casualties, and if I wanted to pretend I’d stepped into Blade Runner or Neuromancer I’d go spend time in Japan proper.” She continued to rant as Ryan glanced over Lise’s shoulder to see the greasy complexion of Gurita, one of their prime contacts in the megacity.

“Long time no see, friend,” Ryan said to the hologram, tipping his beer in salute. He didn’t bother to speak over the low throbbing bass of a nearby nightclub, the general chatter of the crowd, or Jacky’s never-ending rant – Lise’s cybernetics were more than capable of picking up his voice.

Gurita’s wide face lit up like a lantern when he saw Ryan. “Little Lennox! It’s been too long! You still owe me that game of Surakarta, you know,” he said, shaking his finger jovially at the camera.

Spreading his hands, Ryan grinned at the information broker’s infectious energy. “Please, Gurita, you’d eat me alive.” He paused. “Along with half the food in Jakarta, in seems.”

“You jest, but I see no flaw in enjoying life to its fullest,” Gurita shot back. “Food, drink, knowledge – all to be taken in and enjoyed to their fullest, young Lennox.”

“And then some,” Ryan added.

“Any news on that ICE, Gurita?” Lise asked, throwing a benign glare over her shoulder at Ryan.

“I did find some leads,” Gurita admitted, glancing from side to side, “but perhaps it’d be better if I shared them with you in person, eh? We all can appreciate how, uh, sensitive these findings are, eh, young Bateau?”

Lise shared another glance with Ryan, pursing her lips. Gurita, while not known for his discretion in personal affairs, knew perfectly well when business were to be kept of a more private nature.

“We’re on our way now,” Lise said, pausing briefly to study a snap-fold baton computer, a high-spec clone from Tokyo. Flicking the screen open like a scroll, she watched the flex-screen harden and the keyboard projection cycle around to project into open air. She nodded to the vendor, and handed over a stack of rupiah notes for the model. “Well, in good time.”

“That’s fine, miss,” Gurita said, glancing over his shoulder at an unseen interruption. “My arms reach far and wide, and I’m fairly sure I have a client calling right now. We should be finished by the time you reach my block.”

“That’s no problem, Gur,” Ryan said, briefly wondering if he should ask about the possible intruder before deciding against it. Gurita saw business from all over the islands; they couldn’t expect him to see them exclusively. “See you then.”

Lise shook her wrist, dissolving the hologram before turning and walking backwards, counting on Jacky’s crowd-parting abilities to keep her upright. “Trap?” she asked, sticking her hands in her pockets, a common expression of apprehension that Ryan had picked up on.

“I give it fifty-fifty. Gurita’s never been anything less than reliable and professional but I never dismiss the chance to indulge in some good-old fashioned paranoia.”

“It’s not paranoia if it’s true,” Lise noted.

“No, it’s not,” Ryan admitted. “So do a trace on the units in the area. Police, spec-ops, well known criminal strike teams.”

“Already am,” Lise said, not slowing her paces.

Ryan took another swig from his Indonesian beer, shaking his head. He was never how sure Lise was integrated with her the kernel AI she had stolen years ago – it wasn’t a separate piece of metal, it was wetware, sharing her mind. And what might have started as a list of executable programs had evolved naturally, forming a personality of its own, or at least that’s what Ryan guessed. Lise wasn’t one to talk about it, but Ryan guessed with all the talk of the Stateless Society and transhumanism Lise wasn’t alone inside her own brain.

It didn’t matter to Ryan, as long as she didn’t go STYX. Lise had at one time been useless in combat, but over time he had noticed she was increasingly capable of pulling off feats of physical precision that were blatantly impossible. Lise had always shrugged off questions about the events but if he had a bet, Ryan would guess that she had harnessed COG’s computational prowess to build the sort of Expert Kernel that combat specialists in the USSR used to augment their combat abilities.

Lise made an expanding gesture with her hands that looked ridiculous to anyone who didn’t understand he was spreading out a dozen augmented reality windows in her vision. Then again, Ryan knew what she was doing, and it still looked ridiculous.

“…There’s a Detachment 88 unit a few miles away, but Death Wish-style vigilante murder death rampages against jihadi cells aside, I think we’re good there. There’s pirate activity at the docks a couple miles north, but they’re just carrying out the usual drug trades. There’s a few minor mercenary units, but they’re not actually doing anything beyond partying around town. But that’s just what I can see, mind.”

Glancing around with languid disinterest, Ryan monitored the crowd behind his sunglasses. He knew Jacky was easily more proficient than him at that task, but her ability to sense intent was nothing next to that of a fourth-generation psychic. He had never been paranoid in large crowds, in fact, he preferred them, to sink into the morass of general low-level buzzing, surges of lust, of rage, of pride, of avarice, and a few other deadly sins. It was like sinking into the ocean on a starless night, simply letting the waves buoy you along. Sources of danger would flash down like lightning strikes, momentarily brightening the area in a burst of stark focus.

An attempted robbery here, a fistfight in a back alley there. The low rumble of thunder, but nothing to worry about.

“There’s his office,” Jacky cut in, point up to a modest upper-floor flat that overlooked the heart of Glodok’s central thoroughfare. “Neon sign’s blue, means he’s free for customers.”

“I’d tell you be careful,” Ryan said, pulling himself out of the momentary meditation, “but knowing you, you probably developed at least three battle plans for Gurita’s apartment since last year.”

Jacky looks insulted. “Please,” she said, waving a hand dismissively. “How pedestrian. I have five plans a small binder of sub-contingencies. Let’s not be silly here.”

Climbing the anemic metal staircase that led up to a simple porch, Jacky knocked on the door in her usual shave-and-a-haircut routine. Not hearing an answer, she shook out her jacket, all the better to access her shoulder rig, and nudged open the door.

The office had never been tidy – Gurita had never catered to the sort of people who would care about something like that – but the debris and arcs of blood hadn’t been a part of the original décor unless the information broker’s tastes had taken a turn for the macabre. The broken screens were numerous and Ryan saw, scanning the room, that most of Gur’s gear had been shattered. He had never been the internal type like Lise, preferring most of his gear to be physical, top of the line. Gurita didn’t hold to any higher power, but his worship of the bleeding edge was decidedly religious. The security system, too, had been torn to shreds. Ryan noticed a drop-down turret sparking in one corner, the control lines cleanly severed, leaking hydraulic fluids.

Perhaps too much of a literalist, Gurita had always prized his cyberization. The two inner arms, Ryan recalled, had usually been kept close, like insectoid forearms, always holding a swirling glass of sake or a lit cigarette. Gurita, by no means a weak man, preferred to allow the two massive over-the-shoulder rigs do the heavy lifting, constantly rearranging the servers a floor below that handled most of his data mining and news monitoring.

One of the larger arms was torn in half, the shattered section pinned between a broken monitor and a bisected work bench. Both of the forearms were embedded in a nearby wall, switchblade fingers having left wide gouges around the drywall. Hell, Ryan was pretty sure he saw what was left of a real, flesh-and-blood limb peeking out from around a couch sitting in an expanding pool of white-cyberized blood.

Gurita himself was lying back on his expansive zero-gee battle chair, a hunk of metal that had been torn from a Super Raptor. His posture suggested a final resignation, as though he had collapsed into the chair after a long day of physical labor. The dozen or so wide slash wounds he bore to his torso and remaining limbs – four, by Ryan’s count even if not all of them were flesh – seemed more like proud battle scars than accumulated wounds meant to slowly bleed him out. The broker’s eyes were glassy, more tired than angry, saved for the knife currently sticking out of one of his eyes.

The slender redhead currently perched in Gurita’s lap had her back turned to them when she withdrew the knife and wiped it clean on a red button-down that had probably once been white a few minutes ago.

The gun cleared the holster faster than anyone could blink, and the redhead paused, glancing over her shoulder as Jacky settled her squarely in her sights. “Should’ve gone with a gun,” Jacky said down the barrel of the Five-seveN. “Shame. I always liked this apartment.”

“I always preferred blades,” the assassin said, disappearing the knife with a wave of one hand. “Memories are something you take for granted when you never have to relive someone else’s. Savoring all the emotions sears the experience into your mind. It’s something that’s definably yours, not a pass-me-down flash of another life.”

“I always enjoy these talks,” Jacky replied sincerely. “I always think, oh, we’re dealing with a professional, and then you open your mouth and I realize I’m dealing with a creepy clone of an international terrorist.”

Chandra Gosely stood, wiping her hands on her slacks. “That hurt, Fixer. I’m not creepy, I just… don’t see much point in playing up to expectations when people try to kill me simply over who I look like.”

“That’s why you bust in and murder our contacts in knock-down fights, instead. Like you said, letting your current actions define you instead.”

Chandra spread her hands. “I’ve been hunting down my… mother’s projects for a year now. This man,” she said, kicking Gurita’s corpse, “has been a WRAITH informant since day one. It’s how he broke into the scene.”

“You’re not hoping that’s convincing, is it?” Jacky asked, nudging Ryan until his rolled his eyes and drew his own gun to point it at the clone of Chandra Gosely. “I was going to buy you a beer for turning down blondie in such a wonderful fashion, but, eh, this sorta washes it out, you catch my drift, honey?”’

“Not entirely,” Gosely said, shaking her head. “I was hoping the rogue Detachment 88 fireteam that this toad,” she kicked his corpse again, “called in to cap you three would do the convincing for me.”

Ryan nodded to Lise, who immediately turned away, doing that outward-flicking motion again as she dove into augmented reality.

“Ryan,” Chandra said into the silence, “long time no see.”

“Too long,” Ryan said, forcing a fake grin onto his face. “Have I ever told you about my newly discovered love of hammocks, Chani? The way they roll when you’re sleeping on long flights, simply exquisite.” He shifted his pistol to one hand as he finished off his beer.

“It’s always good to expand your horizons,” Chandra said agreeably, walking to where she could find cover, with easy access to the fire escape. “If we’re all quite finished, I’d really hope we’d grab cover and use one of Fixer’s many plans – three, four? No, five plans, to get out of here alive.”

Shooting another glance at Lise, Ryan saw her give him a pained look at she collapsed the invisible windows with a crushing motion of one fist before reaching for her own weapon.

Before she could draw it, the apartment’s windows shattered in a hail of gunfire.
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Re: [Story] CSWNext: Sins of the Father

Post by Mobius 1 »

Blade Runner Blues

Lise went limp, dropping to the ground as dozens of bursts of dust detonated across the apartment. Glass, plastic, marble, it all exploded as bullets shredded the air above her head. Trajectories were traced and calculated, yellow lines highlighted in the chaos, COG doing the computations in the wetRAM implanted in the black of her skull. Four, no, five shooters. Two arrayed on the roof opposite, two more shooting from the balcony of the building northward, and one more firing from the plaza below.

She glances across the apartment, and with a nudge of her mind, COG highlighted a green path through the apartment that is uncovered the fields of fire. Her hand searched frantically through blood-slicked floor and found Ry’s hand. Clasping it with a single squeeze, she pulled him along, crouch-running to the far end of the apartment and next to Chani and Fixer.

Ry had never been great shakes compared to her augmented skills or Fixer’s natural talent, but he was already firing his gun at the hitmen to the north, muzzle flaring bright in the swirling dust.

“Time to go,” Chani announced, snatching one of Gurita’s severed forearms from the wall and shattering the closest window with it before leaping cleanly onto the fire escape.

Things might be getting hectic, Lise decided. Time to pause the episode of the Doctor Who she had been running for the past twenty minutes. Glancing around, she finally located a wireless access point for COG to access. Originally a sliver of SICKLE’s infiltration protocols stolen by the late Pete Fender, Lise had made the decision years ago to integrate the Kernel into her Soviet-giving cybernetic uplift.

This had made Lise potentially one of the most dangerous people on the face of the planet, able to access just about anything she could gain proximity to. More than a few governments wanted a word with her simply over the possible danger she represented.

Gurita’s firewalls were top-tier – not the sort of ICE you’d see around deep black government sites, but with the same DNA she’d originally seen in the Anti-Kwang ICE a couple days ago. It was obscured behind additions added by Gurita and the only way Lise would’ve known it had been derived from WRAITHtech was if she had torn it apart like she was right now – not a polite thing to do back when they had been on good terms with the broker.

The broker’s influence had derived more from his wide knowledge of the less savory aspect of the region than his abilities with cybersecurity, and Lise easily managed to sort towards Gur’s most recent files as well as his most visited. Filing through the porn and the like, she ran the dump onto the computer she had bought, dropping it onto the small 128TB hard drive for analysis later. The rip, once established, would continue while she was still in a quarter mile radius, which wasn’t going to be long, she thought as she was last through the window and out of the apartment.

Life caught up her at breakneck speed when an arc of bullets with one of the supports of the fire escape, dumping her and Ry a couple stories onto the wet pavement of the alley below.

She landed in a roll, coming up as she saw two men charging at her down the alleyway, machetes raised, probably local muscle hired by the 88 team. She brought her gun up, but was forced to parry with it as the first machete came arcing down. The sidearm went skittering out of reach, and Lise backed away, knowing she wasn’t as effective in a fist fight as anything involving guns.

Ry’s beer bottle smashed across the face of the second mercenary, sending him spinning in place as his compatriot send a series of slashes at Lise that she struggled to dodge in turn. Tarnished steel made a series of complicated arcs, and Lise fell into a dance that Jacky had taught her, mostly hypnotic footwork as she nudged her torso this way and that, letting the machete slide past her.

She saw Ry had started up the dance with his own partner as well, using the shattered bottle and the butt of his gun to keep his increasingly frustrated opponent at bay-

-Up above, she heard Fixer swear harshly as bullets traced above their heads – the rooftop men had finally changed position, forcing her and Chani back into a firefight. There came a grunt from above, and a man in black body armor dropped from above, landing between Lise and her partner with an accompanying crunching sound. Lise saw the throwing knife sticking from the man’s face mask and decided she was in good hands-

-Ry caught the merc’s machete and in a graceful spin, impaled the man on his own blade-

-Just in time for the second Detachment 88 man, a smoothly shaved anglo – Lise remembered the unit recruited mainly from Western special forces – drop from above in a crouch, his rifle strung over one shoulder-

Coming up with the man machete in hand, Ry’s strike was batted out of the way as the man caught Ry clean by the throat.

Dodging to one side, Lise shouldered the remaining merc into a dumpster. He rebounding with a metal clang, just in time for Lise to kick Ry’s discarded machete into her hands and catch the return blow on her own steel-

-The man stared impassively into Ry’s eyes, ignoring his scrabbling hands as he forced Ry to his knees-

Grinding the machete off into a wall, Lise balled up her free hand and slugged the merc in the face with all of her strength, stunning him long enough for her to slash him across the chest in a fountain of blood.

There was a shout from above, and Fixer dropped down from above, her empty Five-seveN holstered, cracking her knuckles as she caught the eyes of the man currently choking Ry to death. The man arched an imperious eyebrow at her, pausing to slick one strand of hair back into place before adjusting the tie under his armored vest.

“Hey,” Fixer said. “Last man standing. Let the pipsqueak go and pick a real fight.”

“We were supposed to at least try to take you alive,” the man said, his tone bored, his accent impeccably british, “but I don’t really see why at this point.”

There came the revving of an engine, and a commandeered angkot – minibus – came blaring down the alley at high speed, horn honking loudly. The man spun and produced a pistol, firing steadily – Lise saw Chani duck down and gun the engine.

Ry finally marshaled his strength and struck at the man’s elbow, breaking the grip on his neck and diving to the side just as the angkot slammed a corner into the dumpster. The slab of metal careened off the wall and struck the Detachment 88 soldier broadsides, sending him crashing against the far wall and unconscious to the ground.

Chani leaned out of the open driver’s side window and looked supremely smug. “You waiting for a written invitation? Get in, ladies. And Ryan.”

Picking himself up and dusting his shoulders off in an exaggerated manner, Ry took the passenger’s seat. “Thanks for the save. You get the rest of the crew?”

Fixer shook her head, following Lise into the back seat. “Chani got one of them, I lit another on fire, third got hit by the car, and the fourth bugged out with the hired help. Considering how we were dealing with…”

“Right,” Lise added. “It’s not like they’re known for their caution against civilian casualties.”

They all turned to Chandra, who was peeling the minibus out of the alleyway and through a lull in the crowds to merge onto a main road.

“I was just going to steal Gurita’s private database, skip town, and hire Lise to decrypt the information,” Chandra explained, weaving expertly through the traffic. “And considering Lise already has the intel, I have no problem sticking with you until we track down the WRAITHtech in the region.”

“If it’s any consolation, Jacky,” Lise said, “It looks like Gurita’s firewalls have the same DNA as the ICE down south.”

“Any chance it was Gurita selling the tech?” Ry asked, turning around in the seat, the hope for a quick wrap-up clear on his face.

“Not really,” Lise shook her head. “Gur’s no great shakes at security.”

“He’s a link the chain,” Chani clarified, her head on a swivel, watching for potential tails. “Like I said.”

“Yeah, but tearing him limb from limb didn’t do much for your credibility in the moment,” Fixer said, exasperated. “Look, I- Front left.”

The truck pulled in front of the angkot and they all saw the man from the alleyway, tie and armored waistcoat immaculate, smiling grimly as he hefted a rocket launcher.

“Well, sh-“ Ryan muttered, before being cut off as Chani swerved the minibus hard to the right, crunching into a cab just as the well-dressed man fired the launcher.

The rocket streaked by, knocking off their left mirror and impacted the engine block of a garbage truck, sending it flipping in place, sending garbage spewing in a wide arc over the toll road.

The well-dressed man tilted his head slightly before throwing the spent tube aside and kicking an assault rifle into his hands, racking the charging level, and aiming at the angkot.

“Hit the deck!” Fixer shouted, dragging Lise down as Chani accelerated, trying to pass the truck-

-The well-dressed man opened up with the rifle.

The back windows of the minibus exploded in a shower of glass, and Lise gritted her teeth as the bullets whizzed by over her head. She heard Fixer keeping up a constant stream of curses, realizing she was out of ammo.

Chani gunned the engine again and sloughed the bus to the left, impacting the front corner of the truck and sending it spinning on impact. The well-dressed man was nearly knocked off his feet, and he dropped into a crouch to avoid being tossed from the bed of the truck.

The entire angkot rocked as the truck continued its spin, embedding itself in the rear of the angkot – it was all one giant kinetic mess, and Lise had only just begun to calculate momentum and angles and impact effects when a fist crashed through the window behind her. She spun to see the well-dressed man hanging onto the back, his rifle in one hand as he maneuvered it in for a killshot.

Out of the corner of her eye, Lise saw the truck peel away, a throwing knife sticking out of the eye of the now-dead driver.

Fixer grunted and lashed out his one boot, sending the rifle spinning away into traffic. The well-dressed man watched the gun tumble away before whipping his head back to Fixer, an exasperated now, really look on his face. Lining up another kick, Fixer lashed out again, only for him to shoulder to blow aside, snaking an arm around the leg and tugging hey off balance.

A knife whistled by Lise’s head and the man let go off the captive limb to snatch the blade out of the air, holding it blade-side between two fingers. He glanced at it with an increasingly annoyed expression, before flicking it at Fixer, who had to roll to the side to avoid the knife now sticking out the seat cushion.

Lise snatched the still-quivering knife, thinking to try her own luck, before Chani threw the entire minibus into another spin – both she and the well-dressed man whirled to see a concrete divider approaching at such at angle as to scrap the man off the van in straight into the grave.

Releasing Fixer’s leg, he snaked up out of sight onto the roof. Chani, seeing this in the rearview mirror, threw her hands up in an exasperated gesture, and swerved the bus back into another direction. Doggedly, he kept his grip, and disappeared from sight.

Cutting across traffic to a scene pull-off that overlooked the bay, Chani slammed on the brakes. This was what finally did it, momentum sending the man careening off the roof and off the van entirely, out over a guardrail. He hung there for a moment, offering them twin middle fingers, before disappearing with a splash some twenty feet down.

“Jesus christ,” breathed Ry. “I need to find out who makes armored waistcoats.”

“You might need it,” Lise said, looking at the data analysis results COG was spitting into her field of vision. “We might have to visit EXCHANGE EAST.”
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Re: [Story] CSWNext: Sins of the Father

Post by Mobius 1 »

That's What Living Is To Me

Ryan glanced over the rim of his martini, swirling the olive in the glass and watching the crowd mingle below. The rich, famous, and corrupt of the region dressed in all their finery. His sense of the crowd was that of the charged facetiousness – everyone was all smiles, grace, class, and, in the end, complete distrust. Ryan moved through these circles like a prowling shark, swimming just along the edges, watching and observing.

“Explain to me this,” he asked his companion. “If our Mad Dog is from Thailand and had most of his forces stationed there, why is he so commonly associated with Jakarta? Why make his base of operations here?”

Smoothing her red dress and sipping slowly from a glass of chardonnay that would bankrupt most small countries, Chandra elegantly shrugged one shoulder. “Word is he was too brutal even for his superiors, and he was exiled from his homeland when he was young. They say get gone. Surfaced back in Jakarta, a rising star in the top silat delanggang in the city. Got real hot, see. Right up until the Tok-Guru decides Soeur isn’t worth the trouble and exiles him.”

“Sensing a pattern,” Ryan said, leaning against the bar, his preferred hangout.

“Probably will sense another one,” Chandra nodded. “He rips out the heart of the Tok-Guru. Rips out the heart of anyone who challenges him, which ends up being more and more people, right? Bodies start piling over the late nineties, and Soeur carves out a section of Jakarta on his own. He heads back to Thailand and murders his way through half the military structure. No one can stop this guy. No one wants to. He brute forces his way into power, this twisted ball of resentment and rage.”

“I take it your… mother didn’t feel too strong about him?”

“No,” Chandra said after a long pause. “No, she didn’t at all. He was too ruthless for her tastes. She admired the web of influence he had built up across politics in the region, if not the way he maintained it. Souer would sit back, run his newfound empire, and if a hint of dissention wafted up his way he’d go on a rampage. Brought a new meaning to hearts and minds.”

“I’ll bet,” Ryan replied. Finally deciding to try his martini, he shrugged. Even if the ingredients were top-notch, he didn’t find the same enjoyment in the drink as he did the simple bintang or the island lager. It was cursory, assembled from a high-tier collection but it wasn’t greater than the sum of its parts. “I remember when SOLIDSIX rolled in here right after Africa. Vargas was dead. Stahl hunted down. Ellington-Jones imprisoned. Masatake’s head was put on a figurative pike. Soeur knew he was next and decided to fortify his home base. It wasn’t pretty afterwards. Mom still has the scars.”

“I understand you may have something of a grudge against Soeur,” Chandra said slowly, piecing together her words as she went. “And I can appreciate the old Jedi Mind trick used to get aboard this yacht, but EXCHANGE EAST? You’re playing with fire here, Ryan.”

Ryan chuckled into his martini. “Last time a member of my extended family stepped into an EXCHANGE function, organized crime nearly collapsed in the western hemisphere and three WRAITH heads ended up six feet under.”

“You’re no John Baylor,” she shot back. “And I’m no Chandra Gosely.”

“We’re carving our own path, here,” he said. “And if there’s a place to find the origin of something as high-caliber as that ICE, it’d be through here. What’s more, you notice Waistcoat back there? He’s an old retainer. Name’s Cross. He was Soeur’s old triggerman, real skilled at deading people. Thought I recognized him, but even I could’ve remembered when Baylor filled him full of buckshot.”

“He’s an aug?” Chandra asked.

“He’d have to be, at this point. Looked ten years younger than he really is, and getting back up that quickly after the alleyway? He’s running on metal like Lise or chems like late-grade WRAITH metas.”

Chandra jerked her chin towards a man in a white suit who had just boarded the yacht. “You may have made a mistake, here, Ryan.”

“Oh?”

Lise’s voice buzzed in his hidden earpiece. “Of course he did. We can bribe and handwave his way on, but all it takes is one person to send this house of cards collapsing to the ground.”

Ryan rolled his eyes, watching the man make his way through the crowd a skill he couldn’t have managed several decades. He just phased through the crowd, flowing like water. “That’s why our friend’s here covering us.” He made eye contact with the woman in the red qipao sitting at the roulette tables. Only Jacky would wear a qipao in Indonesia, but the way she wore it, nobody seemed to care. “And besides. We’re summoning a bigger fish here.”

“You wouldn’t” Lise said.

“I would.”

The man reached the bar, standing between Ryan and Chandra and receiving a glass of wine that seemed to be composed of liquid money. He spun on one heel, leaning calmly against the war, mirroring Ryan and Chandra’s posture as he watched the crowd below.

“I always love questions of scale. Your friend, Gurita, styled himself as an information broker, a financier of projects of vision. He played both sides, as you found out this afternoon. Amateurish, as our young friend here proved. But limited. Very limited. He saw fit to oversee perhaps a chain of islands, small in scale and influence.” He sipped the wine. “Hatten, top vintage, tres magnifique. I always enjoyed Indonesian wines, gifted, of course, by the French hand and expertise. I sample wine from across the globe, much like my enterprises. I always find myself coming back to this region. Perhaps Gurita had something right.”

He swirled the wine in the glass, sniffing it, taking in the aroma before continuing. “It’s the growth. Japan. China. Oceania. The Islands. It’s intoxicating, the speed, one can barely keep up with it. Much like the EXCHANGE.” He gestured vaguely over the yacht. “Like a phoenix rising from the ashes of its predecessor, the scale much wider, despite the limiting name. The free market in its purest form. Nodes across the rim. From here to Tokyo, from Melbourne to Kuala Lumpur. Scale, Mister Lennox. I operate on one end, and I question if you know you where you fall on it at all.”

“You always enjoyed your speeches,” Chandra said, flipping her hair.

The man smiled jovially, showing her shark teeth that Ryan decided were refined by decades of experience. “Your predecessor said much the same, young one. Sins of the father. Action, reaction, revenge, vengeance, it’s all a cycle, turning over and over. I try to avoid such cycles, and to end them where possible. Vargas and Stahl, their cycles ended. Other continue, despite my best efforts. You’ve met my old colleagues.”

“Razaq,” Ryan said, baring his teeth.

“I never liked him. He didn’t have a sense of decorum, of class. Malcolm at least had the air, but Razaq? No, not at all. Unrefined. Much like one more unfinished cycle, starting to repeat itself anew.”

“Thao Souer.”

“You seem fixated on him, young man. Tied down by the chains of the past. Just another link in the chain. Regrettable. Just reenacting a meme destined to perpetuate until all are dead.”

“So I make a choice. To end the chain. Everyone has a choice.”

The man smacked his lips. “No. Wrong. Choice is an illusion, created by those with power for those without it. A very persuasive illusion, but still nothing more than an illusion. My predecessor himself was convinced that causality was the true power, cause and effect, the real question being why. The real currency. Discover where we are, links in a chain, and from there our field of influence.”

Draining his wine, he set the glass back on the bar. “Utter nonsense. He is dead, and I would not be where I was without free will, and to that end I can recognize that allowing the technology tied to Razaq to be leaked onto the market would be quite the… catastrophe. I’ve always been a fan of the phoenix, but not when the subject in question is Thao Soeur. A brute attempting to ingratiate himself, to give himself an air of class. I can only wish Ridley finished the job when he lit Soeur on fire.”

He shrugged, flopping one hand over in a noncommittal gesture. “But to first have that choice, one must first gain power.” He pointed out another man who had stepped onto the yacht, dressed in a white shirt and black waistcoat, hair slicked back and scanning the crowd. “The power needed to break the cycle. Prove yourselves worthy of that power, and perhaps we can do business.”

Ryan straightened, catching Chandra’s eye and then across the casino to see that Jacky had already disengaged from the roulette tables, shadowing the wall opposite Cross, judging lines of fire.

“I suggest you take this outside,” the man added encouragingly. “I happen to like this yacht, and the last time one of your extended family started a fight in an EXCHANGE event, three executive ended up dead.” Extending one wrist, he glanced at a silver watch. “I’ll be here for ten minutes,” Comte Le Feuvre said, waving them adieu.

“Right,” Ryan said, taking Chandra’s arm in his and descending to the stairs to the main floor. “Jacky,” he said to the radio. “Let’s take this outside.”

“Worried about collateral damage?” she asked, voice on edge.

“No,” Ryan said, “Just wanting to break a cycle.”
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Re: [Story] CSWNext: Sins of the Father

Post by Mobius 1 »

Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy

Reaper Junior was walking down the stairs with Clone-Girl, loosening his tie and cracking his knuckles. It was a hollow gesture, Jacky thought, as she’d be the one to put Cross down. She caught the eyes of the man at the head of the bar, and he raised his wine glass to her in salute. She responded with a mock bow, acknowledging Le Feuvre before reaching the center of the bidding floor, catching Cross’ attention.

Cross habitually adjusted his tie in response, glancing left to right and then back at Jacky. He had no problem doing this right here and now. Jacky jerked her head to Le Feuvre, and Cross gave a knowing nod, a fencer acknowledging the point. This alone gave Jacky hope, Cross’ consistent avoidance of truly throwing down in public – barring the completely reasonable rocket launcher – meant Soeur hadn’t hit high gear yet, and there was a good chance their hearts would remain in their chests. For now.

She offered him her hand, and he took it, redirecting her forward motion into an easy pirouette. Jacky enjoyed dancing, it required a precision that she often wound useful when handling high explosives. A quick two step here, adjusting a detonator wire there. She caught Ryan’s eye and struggled to hold down the laughter at the sight of his dumbfounded expression. Cross smiled thinly at her slight quake and they wove into an intricate series of steps as the band switched into a swift flamenco number.

Clone-Girl took Ryan’s hand and they too began the salsa, weaving concentric circles around her and Cross. Cross actually chuckled at this, a low British-accented baritone. “Someone’s jealous.”

“Ryan’s usually one to do this dance with our targets, not me.”

“Oh?” Cross asked, quirking an eyebrow. “Well, he is rather enjoying his partner’s company, isn’t he? What happens with you?”

“I usually end up lighting them on fire,” Jacky said conversationally. “Simpler, more efficient.”

“My employer can certainly appreciate liberal application of fire, after all.”

“I’m sure he can,” she said. “That was a wonderful leg lock back on the van, you know that? Used me as leverage to hold on while you used your now-free hand to catch the knife.”

Cross paused before shaking his head, his smile nostalgic. “Believe it or not, your adoptive father used that move on me several years ago. Tossed me out of a helicopter. It was quite the teaching moment. Fortunately Miss Gosely was a bit faster on forcing me away or you’ve eaten pavement.”

Jacky felt Ryan’s eyes on her back, sweeping over her regularly like a lighthouse beam. He was probably trembling in his shoes over the idea of her handling a social moment. Well, three minutes had passed so far, and nobody was on fire, so she was showing him.

Best not to disappoint him. “So, what was your plan here? Start a fight onboard the yacht?”

“To a degree. My employer always favored public shows of force, and what better than at the house of Le Feuvre?”

“Didn’t expect him to be here in person?”

“He doesn’t appear often. He’s, pardon the pun, a wraith. His influence is international, but he only personally appears when he sees the need to give a personal touch to the course of events.”

“Enough to deter your boss?” Jacky fished.

The beat of the drums and the tempo of the guitar began to pick up, and the pace of the dance followed suit. Ryan and Clone Girl swung past, and Cross spun Jacky again, before smoothly switching her off with Ryan.

“When I said breaking the cycle,” Ryan said, taking her hands, “I was hoping we’d just kill him on the docks instead of talking it out.”

She rocked her head back, rolling her eyes. “Is it opposite day here? I’m usually the one wanting to put someone down.”

Ryan stepped back, clapping along to the beat. “Just more efficient, is all.”

“And you’re jealous of his waistcoat.”

“And that,” he admitted.

“Well,” Jacky admitted, “I was about to find out if Le Feuvre wouldn’t sent him running until we switched off. What made you think summoning him was a good idea?”

“I know you come from the position that the enemy of my enemy is also a target to be hit with a rocket launcher, but I at least can appreciate playing the sides off of each other.”

“Le Feuvre would support us if we go after Soeur?”

“To a degree,” Ryan said. “Provided we deal with Cross first.”

The tempo slowed down a bit, heading into the second bridge, and Ryan swirled her face-first into Clone-girl to have a testosterone-laden dance-off with Cross, probably with the intent of sourcing the waistcoat before things went to hell.

The clone slid easily into a simple beat, mirroring Jacky’s actions to an almost unnerving degree.

“You’re doing that on purpose,” Jacky accused.

“Perhaps,” the clone said. “Or perhaps it’s simply what you want to see. It doesn’t take a genius to see how much distrust you place in me.”

“I don’t do clones,” Jacky said quickly. “Akamatsu. Nix. All those of Kroner. It doesn’t work out well.”

“You see me as a walking disaster?”

“Your default approach to Gurita was to tear him limb from limb.”

The clone spun around Jacky, chuckling sarcastically. “Explain to me how that’s not hypocritical, exactly?”

“I dunno,” Jacky said, thrusting out her jaw. “Communication. You could’ve warned a girl.”

“And you would’ve believed me? I’m the clone of Chandra Gosely. You’re the type to only trust by experience. You, Lise, and Ryan have all saved each other’s lives several times over.”

“We’ve all got trust issues,” Jacky admitted. “You ultimately save our lives back in Glodok, but the last time we worked together, you stole a couple million from us and lit Ryan’s shit on fire. Which… I admit, never fails to make me smile.”

“Look, Fixer,” the clo- Chandra said. “We don’t have to like each other. But we can at least respect each other. And perhaps even trust.”

“Perhaps,” Jacky said hesitatingly. “But let’s finish our business here first, right?”

“Sure thing,” Chandra smiled, before spinning away and latching onto Ryan, leaving Jacky face-to-face with Cross again. He gracefully offered her his hand, and the music hit the final stretch to the finale, the four guitarists working completely in tandem, fingers flying, the notes coming at breakneck speed.

“Ryan get what he needed?” Jacky asked.

“It’s a tailor from Tokyo, actually. Rumor has it Jack Ridley buys his suits from there.”

“Sure thing, Hans,” Jacky shot back. “Let’s hash out where we go from here, then.”

“To answer you earlier question, then.” Cross’ footwork was lighting quick, and Jacky found herself struggling to keep up. “I’m afraid Le Feuvre miscalculated. It happens, every now and then. Soeur never likes a challenge, and he never trusted the broker to the same degree Stahl did.”

“Just so we have all our cards on the table.”

“Indeed,” Cross said. “It was young Gosely who convinced me, actually, to step back.”

“What’d she say?”

“I respect you, Miss Jensen,” he said, starting over her head, “and I can see you’ve outmaneuvered me by bringing in Le Feuvre. It’s regrettable it will force Soeur’s hand, but you at least averted a… ballroom blitz for tonight.”

The guitars hit their climactic string of intricate riffs, and the guitarists started a smooth set of backing vocals. The world began to spin around Jacky as they hit the last set of motions in the dance before striking a final pose, Cross tipping her backwards, face close to hers, a single hair out of place.

“So why not sidestep this all completely, then? We- you - can avoid this coming bloodbath entirely. No need to back the same horse twice.”

Cross’ expression slowly became resigned as he raised her back up to standing. “We’re all tied by our pasts, dear. You may have the chance to break your chains, but I owe Soeur too much to abandon him.”

Jacky’s eyes went wide with understanding. “He was the one who rebuilt you after you were tossed out of the chopper.”

“Among other things,” Cross said shortly. “You wouldn’t fight against Mister Baylor, would you? Blood is thicker than water, in the end.” He stepped away from Jacky and bowed deeply, taking her hand and kissing it softly, the gesture more one of respect than anything else. Enjoy the night, Jacky.”

Jacky turned to see Ryan disengage from Chandra, his face utterly confused, before turning back to see that Cross had completely disappeared. “Figures,” she muttered. “Meet a dude who’s not Ryan and he’s a bad guy. Great job, Jacky.”

"At least nobody died," Ryan said. "That's an achievement, I guess."
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Re: [Story] CSWNext: Sins of the Father

Post by Mobius 1 »

Fortunate Son

“Was it anything I should be worried about?”

She leaned in over one side, resting her head on his shoulder and throwing and arm around him. Closing his eyes, he relaxed into the hug before reaching over and taking up the mug of coffee for a sip.

“There’s the usual,” Baylor said, enjoying the flavor of the roast. Muranov had recommended it to him, and Baylor half drank it out of the sheer ridiculousness of a full-body cyborg having surprisingly excellent taste in coffee. “We’ve been chafing against Star Chamber in South America over the Brazil Situation, someone may have privatized the singularity in Russia – ironic, I know – and I’ve got a feeling that that brewing trade war between Japan and China is being manufactured by Freya Korovin to shore up her hold on Daiyu’s old contacts.”

Alexis gave him a dubious look. “Abraham Wright swears it’s just China flexing its muscles to stave off a conflict with the Soviets instead.”

“Yeah, and your national security advisor didn’t inherit MIDNIGHT’s intelligence apparatus, did he?” He set his coffee down and keyed a string of commands into the computer, showing Alexis the appropriate reports. “I mean, he’s not wrong, they’re getting squeezed from both sides. He’s got it right on the geopolitical part, it’s my job to dig and see if any of our old pals are making moves.”

She ruffled his hair before standing and looking at the reports. “And to think, one day you’re crawling through the mud, the next you’re my own shadow cabinet and geopolitical analyst.”

He glanced over his shoulder and stuck his tongue out at her. “And you went from punching aliens and mutants to running the country. Usually it’s the other way around for presidents, dear-“ he held his hands at a warning glance – “fine, I won’t quote Independence Day. But all things considered, it’s been a pretty quiet week. We’re at the baseline of crises. Normal operating temperature. Crises-paradigm.”

“You’re babbling,” Alexis said, chuckling. “And I know you try to avoid sleep, but I’d rather not have you falling asleep on your feet when Fuchs visits tomorrow.”

“Herzog would understand,” Baylor laughed, “He’s all imperious eyebrows and German judgment, but I was on security detail when I saw him and Dante go drinking once after a G12 summit and I’ll never be able to take him seriously ever again. Ever.” Still, he made a closed-fist gesture, and the holo-screens collapsed into darkness. “If only the kids could see me now. I worry – no, I know we come off as these impassionate manipulators. I know I would’ve hated the hell out of me twenty years ago.”

Alexis leaned against the counter, crossing her arms. “You don’t want to appear overbearing, but you don’t know how to help them while still keeping in mind the greater view and context you now place the world in.”

Exactly,” Baylor threw up his hands. “We’re third generation here. We inherited this apparatus, this machine that we can’t in good conscience put down. We decided after Final Paragon to use this power to only better the world – ease suffering, promote harmony, all that jazz – while still hunting down those bastards that were left. But I remember what Teague told me. It wasn’t any different for them when they started out.”

“Even with all the benefits of hindsight, you fear that somewhere along the line the system will change you as opposed to the other way around.” Alexis cinched her robe a bit tighter, a nervous habit she had developed after being awoken many a time by international emergencies. “I can’t claim to have known Ryan and Jacky when they were growing up, but somewhere down the line, I get that we lost some vital degree of trust with them.”

“That’s what kills me,” Baylor said, reaching over and reflexively taking a sip of his coffee, putting the mug down, and then picking it up again and taking another gulp. The rapid-fire sips were more born of Alexis’ attempt to weed him off of cigars, the ticks a way of burning off the nervous energy his clone metabolism built up at alarming rates. “We all know exactly when it happened, too. Fucking Razaq.”

Alexis’ eyes narrowed at the mention of the name. “That was a disaster all around. You couldn’t have known he’d manage to capture them.”

“I decided to go after his supplier, and we ended up with a hundred dead on our hands and them up close and personal with him and Nazi Marry Poppins in the Nave.”

“You can’t beat yourself up over this, John, you can’t,” she said imploringly, spinning his chair around and taking his hands in hers, squeezing them gently. “Nobody knew who Razaq really was at the time. We made the best decisions we could at the time – that attack led to us preventing another that would have killed tens of thousands. We have to think on the larger scale now, and trust the younger generation – Backstop, the Farley twins, hell, even the Gosely clone – to be ready to inherit what we create.”

He pinched the bridge of his nose. “Shit like this makes me understand while Jace started drinking.”

“That’s not funny,” she said disapprovingly. “He’s been, well not sober, but functioning for almost a decade now. Speaking of which, how is he and Ashe?”

“They’ve been sniffing around Indonesia, actually,” he said, reaching for his mug only to find it empty. “I heard some rumors WRAITHtech – executive-level stuff even Le Feuvre would hold off of EXCHANGE EAST – in the region, and they jumped at the chance to do some field work. All the training left them rearing for fieldwork, I guess.”

“And it has nothing to do with Backstop being in the area.”

“Well, everything, actually. Ashe gets worried when Jacky goes a week without blowing something up – it’s their equivalent not responding to texts. But – wait, actually, I’m getting a call from them.”

“Oh?” Alexis asked, straightening. “Oh, okay. I’ve been globehopping for thirty years and for the life of me I’ll never be able to handle time zones. Throw them up on screen.”

“Yes ma’am,” Baylor said, spinning in his chair and waving the screens back to life. The scarred face of Jace Razard filled the screen, leaning in and holding the screen tight against the turbulence of the flight.

“Couldn’t find a good ride in?” Baylor asked.

“Oh, go jump in a lake, John,” Jace said, rolling his eyes. He threw his hands into the air. “Go swing by Burma, she says, see who’s commanding Soeur’s old unit, she says. Nothing will go wrong at all.”

“Trouble with the locals?” Alexis asked, leaning in to be captured by the camera.

“Oh, hey, Lex,” Jace said. “You know I love you and all, but the next time your husband asks me to play Rambo in the jungle, I’ll kick him in the balls.”

“I thought you wanted to be in the field, Gold?” she asked, laughing despite herself.

“What I love is intel work. Liaising. Great work, that. So many vowels. But, look, the take-away point of this is that twofold. One, these guys aren’t nearly as quiet as they should be. Like, ‘oh hey, we were in the middle of something,’ loud. I mean, nothing gets my blood pumping like taking on a third-string TEMPEST knock-off, but these guys win out for just being tenacious little assholes.”

“What was the second, point, Jace?” John asked.

“Oh, yeah,” Jace said. Bullets sparked in the background, anti-air flying up from the jungle below, and he didn’t even flinch as metal pinged around the tiltrotor’s cabin. “Numbers would be like what we’d expect if we were seeing normal dispersal due to time. Abandoned bases and materiel doesn’t suggest that at all. If anything, these guys are the skeleton crew.”

John sat bolt upright, and Jace damn near cackled. “Yeah,” he said, “you went on a rant about baseline crises earlier, didn’t you? Well, pleased to meet you, Mr. Baylor, I’m Murphy, and I’d like to introduce you to the lost battalion of army troops who I’d desperately like to account for.”

“I’m assuming you can handle what’s left?” Alexis said into the ensuing silence.

“We contracted out one of the more experienced DAYLIGHT teams to mop up the stragglers, but it might be a day or two until we can extricate ourselves. It’ll give us enough time to figure out where these guys have gone off to and where our next major disaster’s going to be.”

“Keep me updated, and say hi to Ashe for me. I assume she’s okay?” John asked, rolling his mug in his hand.

“Skippy. She loves this stuff. She’s down below somewhere, practicing fieldcraft and murdercraft with a team.”

“I get the feeling you’ve been wanting to say murdercraft for a while now.”

Jace actually did cackle this time. “It’s like stumbling into a slasher movie, only you’re partners with the villain.”

“I had my fair share of… fun in Burma back during TWIN SNAKES. I can imagine just fine,” John said, shaking his head. “I’ll want a full update tomorrow. Good hunting, Gold.”

“Try not to get too fat, old man,” Jace shot back. “Always a pleasure, Lex.” The screen snapped off.

“Soeur’s old unit is on the move,” Alexis said, rubbing her chin. “Does that mean what I think it means?”

“Yeah,” John said. “I may have just maneuvered Ryan, Jacky, and Lise into a potential bloodbath."
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Re: [Story] CSWNext: Sins of the Father

Post by Invictus »

It's getting very interesting with all the hindsight at the actual and implied backstory out there. I admittedly haven't paid a lot of attention to the ongoing plot of CSW, but I'm following this just to triangulate some points on the incestuous meta-character that is John Baylor.

Pedantry: by "synched her robe a bit tighter" I presume you meant "cinched", unless it really is spacefuture smart fabric that could be adjusted by wi-fi.
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Re: [Story] CSWNext: Sins of the Father

Post by Mobius 1 »

Yeah, I was sitting there wondering which word to use. Thanks.
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Re: [Story] CSWNext: Sins of the Father

Post by Mobius 1 »

Volcano

The message arrived from Le Feuvre the next morning.

Lise hadn’t slept much over the course of the night, or, at least, Ryan thought the bags under her eyes were a giveaway. She tended to hunch over her deck when she was in more on data-diving mode, without heed to anything but the call of nature.

He offered her the steaming cup of tea and she gratefully accepted it, stifling a yawn. “You wouldn’t believe what I’ve found on Gur’s drive.”

“I have an idea.” Ryan’s eyes sparkled as he settled onto the desk next to her.

“He was quite the little busybody,” Lise continued. “He’d been using his free time to set up Jakarta like a freaking spider web. A pay off there, a construction there. A lot of money dropped at the docks, purchasing security force loyalty…” She rubbed her eyes and looked up at him. “Ryan, I think he was prepping Jakarta for a war. Like, it’s poised over this edge, everything just in perfect equilibrium, and all it takes is one push.”

“What are odds he was working for someone else, like Korovin or a lesser power?” Jacky swung down from the sleeping loft above, the half-disassembled SCAR she had been cleaning still in her hands. “We haven’t had concrete solid proof it’s Soeur. Ultimately, I mean. Cross is a close, but he’s not Mad Dog.”

“Well,” Lise said, keying over to a couple major news sites, “There’s currently a trade war boiling over between China and Japan that has good odds of going to blows. I’d been tapped into some of Backstop channels, and words is that Korovin’s engineering at least part of it. Odds are it’s completely divorced from what’s happening here. The major criminal power in the region gleefully sold out Soeur to SOLIDSIX, so he’s out. Too much of a status quo sort of guy.”

“And besides,” Ryan added, tossing Jacky a half-black cloth for the SCAR’s receiver, “he made sure to dissociate himself from WRAITH when he took power, mostly to avoid another SOLIDSIX raid.”

There came a knock on the forward hatch by the cockpit, and three guns appeared in hands, aimed at the person currently climbing in through the seemingly locked door.

“Whoa, guys,” Chandra said, holding up the fast food bags in her hands as mock shields, “just me.”

“Could’ve knocked before overriding my locks,” Lise grumbled.

“I did knock,” Chandra responded, tossing Ryan a bag of knock-off McDonalds’. “Onc-“ She caught Jacky’s expression and softened her tone. “Oh. This is one of those trust situations, isn’t it?”

“I don’t care,” Ryan said, extracting an egg sandwich from its wrapper and speaking through a mouthful of hashbrowns. “She bribed my stomach.”

“What’s up?” Jacky asked, accepting a pair of bags from Chandra and passing one to Lise.

“Le Feuvre sent me a messenger just a couple minutes ago,” Chandra explained, stretching her arms before looping her hair into a simple tail in the same style as Jacky’s. “It’s kinda big.”

“Well, don’t leave me hanging,” Lise said, spinning her crash chair around to face Chandra.

“Well,” Chandra said, “in about an hour and a half, a high-priority prisoner – his words, not mine – is being transferred across the New Memorial Bridge ringing the bay. There are bound to be a selection of undercover cars in a convoy around the transport vehicle, like a secret honor guard. The guards were supposed to be drawn from various agencies, but here’s the thing: Le Feuvre hinted that some of the teams may be corrupt, but that he didn’t know who exactly.”

Ryan nudged Lise’s shoulder at this. “You have an idea of who Gurita was setting up on the payroll, right? If we could get close enough, could you identify who the moles are?”

“I should be, granted you can get visuals.” They both knew it would be tricky at the least.

Jacky voiced another concern Lise had had. “And we can’t tip them off that we’re scoping them out. We’ll need two cars. Lise, you can back us up from here, right?”

“Most likely, yeah, I can. I’d need my deck’s uplink to the databases anyway to pull this off.”

“It’s worth a shot,” Ryan said. “If we can source the moles, we have a chance at prevented a potential escape attempt.”

“You should be on the lookout anyway,” Lise waved a hand at the fold-up comp sitting on her desk. “They’ll know Gurita’s dead by now and that they might have a potential security breach.”

“Oh, they know,” Chandra assured her. “Cross saw you in the angkot, which means he probably did his research afterwards. They might not expect us to even know about the transport, but I can bet he’ll organize a back-up plan in case we show up.”

“I took the liberty of organizing backup.” Ryan stood, brushing his nails against his tee. “Jinx and Medley still owe me from Cuba. And from the damage to the Shaanxi.”

“What’d you do in Cub- oh, never mind,” Jacky said, cutting herself off. “How soon?”

“Later this afternoon,” Ryan said through another bite of egg sandwich. “They were in Tokyo tracking down leads on some lost Samurai city before their usual channels closed down due to the potential war. They didn’t get what they were looking for, but I promised to take them along on our next Adventure-type adventure.”

“You have other types of adventures?” Chandra asked, raising her eyebrows.

“Sure,” Jacky said, ticking off her fingers, “Adventures where we find buried treasure. Adventures where we help the local populace from some imperialistic side effect. Adventures where we almost get eaten by a megalomaniacal supervillain.”

“And this one, right now,” Ryan added, “where we stumbled across a plan to bust an international crimelord out of his as-of-five-minutes-ago unknown imprisonment. Fun shit.” She snapped the folding stock onto her now-pristine SCAR and began loading hand-cleaned rounds into a waiting magazine. “I’ll bet Le Feuvre’s bugging out of town.”

“Seemed a safe bet,” Chandra said. “His yacht was gone this morning. He rarely sticks around after surfacing in any one place, and with a potential firefight on his hands, it was prudent to get out of dodge.”

“Could we expect any more intel from him?” Lise asked, gesturing at her deck. “I don’t want to find out what’s planned as it happens.”

Chandra wiggled her hand in a so-so gesture. “That’s up to him, but it’s not like he’d be enthused with Soeur coming back to power. But he’s just as likely to adjust the scenario from another angle – another group – as he is to give us a second nudge.”

Ryan washed down the last of his sandwich and washed it down with some of Lise’s tea despite her scandalized expression before brushing his hands on his jeans. “An hour and a half, then? We’ll need to set up. Let’s get down to business, to defeat, the h-”

“Shut up, Ryan,” Jacky sighed.

***

“That it?” Ryan asked, switching lanes to let a tractor-trailer pass unimpeded.

“The big grey one?” Chandra asked, sitting in the back of the rented SUV with mutlispectrum goggles on. “Obviously. It’s like they’re not even trying.”

“They don’t need to,” Jacky buzzed in over Ryan’s earpiece. “I can identify at least six different escorts here, and I’ve got a bad feeling about two more. Can you get a look inside the transport?”

Touching a finger lightly to a side knob, Chandra instinctively thrust her head forward, as though peering closer at the blocky armored car. “There’s a driver, and two guards holding rifles directly on a single prisoner. Heat-mapping’s pretty touch and go here, but it looks like he’s bound hand and foot by those sticky anti-kinetic goop balls SWAT teams use.”

“I’m doing a rough profile overlay,” Lise said from back in the Shaanxi. “He’s about a hundred pounds of muscle heavier, but I’ve got a fifty-eight percent match to some of Soeur’s characteristics. Posture, the like.”

Ryan saw Jacky’s sedan gun ahead, pacing side-by-side with one of the possible escorts. “I’ve got eyes on a Indonesian male, mid forties,stache and mowahk combo.”

“That’s a field agent from the intelligence bureau. Beyond some piracy and prostitution bribes a couple years ago, he’s clean. I can see his passenger, and it looks like his protégé. Clean also.”

“This many agencies doesn’t make sense. If they were trying to keep Mad Dog secret, it’d make sense to keep the loop small.”

“Or maybe they’re just jockeying for prestige,” Chandra suggested. “Black male, early twenties, goatee, red beret.”

“Detachment 88. Brutality complaints, but clean.” Lise knocked another other sighting from Jacky.

“I’ll pulling alongside a police van,” Ryan explained to Lise over the radio. “Chandra, can you x-ray or whatever the interior?”

“It may do better than on the prisoner transport, at least,” she said, spinning another knob. “Okay. Here we go.” She listed off a fireteam of four heavily armed suits, all strapped into the back.

“Two are clean. But the one with dreads and the one with the prosthetic arm are on Gurita’s list. They aren’t direct action, though, just blind eye types.”

“Well, we’ll see how well they holds up when the chips are down,” Jacky scoffed. “Eyepatch in passenger’s seat on red pickup.”

“Uh, yeah, that was Gurita’s main enforcer,” Lise said, sounding worried.

“He’s at the front of the convoy, so he’s not a position to directly influence the prisoner, at least.” Ryan noted. “How’s the airspace looking, Lise?”

“Clear, for now,” she said after a pause. “Flights are being looped around the bay and I’ve got chatter that potential launcher points have been staked out and observ- wait. I have a sighting of Cross after the meeting last night.”

“Where?” Jacky asked quickly, sounding worried.

“Glodok, again. Dealer whose specialty is – oh no. You guys might want to keep an eye on the sky.”

“Easier said than done, he-“

The missiles hit in a staggered wave.

The black minivan in front of Ryan exploded, flipping clean over them, tracing a fiery arc through the air as they went burst through the momentary fireball.

Ryan whipped his head around in time to see another contrail in the air, and the police van Chandra had covered was struck broadsides, simply tumbling off the bridge and into the bay far below.

A stream of curses was beginning to filter through Ryan’s earpiece as Jacky swerved to avoid a third missile that hit a silver SUV. The explosion jackknifed the vehicle and caused a pair of wrecks that Ryan only barely managed to dodge himself, the whiplash of his quick turns sending an undignified Chandra bouncing around in the back of their car.

The Predator drone roared by over his head, and before Ryan could realize that he was about to live out a Tom Cruise movie, a pair of helicopters swept over opposite ends of the now sequestered section of bridge and opened fire with door guns.

“I’d say we found Plan B,” Ryan muttered.

Chandra ripped off her goggles, groaning. “I hate Plan B, I could see Plan B through my eyelids.”

Jacky would have chimed in, but at that moment Ryan saw the contrail of a 40mm grenade arc out from the chopper in front of them. Before he could say a word, the detonation sent Jacky’s sedan flipping through the air.
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Re: [Story] CSWNext: Sins of the Father

Post by Mobius 1 »

Under Pressure

Light began to filter through her eyes, and her arm passed through the haze of dust and debris. She held up her hand, illumination flickering between the fingers, an on-off-on-off pattern across her face.

“Christ, make sure she’s still dead!”

The light was blocked completely, and she saw a man straddling the open doorway of sedan, peering down the scope of a submachine gun, a laser sight painting her forehead. “Say goodnight, lass.”

Jacky hit the gas, and somewhat miraculously, the sedan jumped in place, spinning a couple feet to the side and sending the man sprawling into the car. She yelled, but she had already snaked her hands around his head. “Goodnight,” she whispered in his ear, before breaking his neck.

“Frank!” someone yelled, and Jacky tugged the corpse just as a burst of machine gun fire raked the interior of the overturned sedan. The body jerked several times, body armor absorbing the hits, but Jacky still had to grit her teeth as a bullet traced a light furrow on one bicep.

The barrage abated, and she gave it a one-two count before pushing out of side of the sedan opposite the direction of the fire, SMG in hand.

She had only just regained her feet when another mercenary, standing guard on an overturned tractor trailer, gave a shout. “Shit, she’s still alive!”

“Yes,” Jacky growled. “I’m still alive.”

The submachine gun rattled, and the man was swatted off his feet, falling back out of sight, the only thing remaining a vague red mist.

She barely ducked back into cover when another pair of rifles opened up on her position, forcing her to crouch low, swearing to herself. A moment later, there came a whistling sound as though the air itself was being severed, and a sudden yelp before one of the rifles cut short. She smiled thinly to herself. Chandra was on her three o’clock.

There was a crunch on her left, and Jacky spun, SMG firing, just in time for Eyepatch to slap the gun with his own pistol, punching forward at her and firing at the same time. She jerked her head to the right, feeling the slug tug at her trailing ponytail before she rolled past the punch, locking one of his legs in hers. She hoped to send him sprawling and was already tossing her SMG to her other hand to get a clear shot when he turned the fall into a roll, rebounding off the concrete siding of the bridge.

She caught her SMG in her right hand, and they both thrust their guns forward, slapping them to the side and shrugging off punches, a firearm swordfight at practically zero range. They spun perhaps twice in the place, grappling, but Jacky knew she was in trouble when the SMG when click-click-click – empty.

Another knife sailed through the air just as Eyepatch was about to turn her momentary hesitation to his advantage, and he flinched backwards to avoid the knife, just in time for Jacky to brace herself against the exposed undercarriage of her sedan, lift her legs up, and place both of her boots square in his chest.

His remaining eye went wide, and he grasped desperately at her feet, but she shook him away. Off-balance, he teetered on the edge of the barrier before falling out of sight without so much as a scream.

Jacky whirled and gave Chandra a thumbs-up, just before another missile hit the bridge twenty feet away.

The impact sideswiped her, an invisible giant just batting her against the divider, and she should have followed eyepatch if her center of gravity had been any higher. Instead, she bounced off, and barely avoided being crushed by the sliding sedan.

The predator soared by overhead, and she knew she was going to kill the goddamn thing before anything else went down.

The SCAR was still in the sedan, and she rolled back into the crumpled cabin, crawling over the torn driver’s seat to claw at a black briefcase lodged between a support beam and a chunk of concrete. It was stuck, and she just barely managed to loop her fingers through the handle. Bracing her legs against the floor of the car – now hanging above her – she began to pull.

“Jacky!” Ryan voiced came in over a wash of static. “Drone’s coming back around!”

“Holy shit,” she breathed, yanking again on the case. “Just once can these things be simple.”

One last, final tug, and it came free, and she sent it spinning out of shattered rear window, skittering on the pavement, before beginning on the task of extricating herself from the sedan. She heard a dozen separate rifles blaring – the moles versus the security forces, choppers flying overwatch above, and in the background, the roar of the jet-powered Predator variant.

“Shitshitshitsheeeeit.” It was on a loop as she finally rolled drunkenly out of the car, hitting a sprint with a wobbly step, then another, and then hitting full speed when-

The sedan exploded when the Hellfire missile struck it dead-center, the blast wave throwing Jacky off her feet and forward at such a speed that she didn’t have to Lise to calculate that putting face to pavement would be lethal.

She instead impacted cloth and flesh, and Ryan grunted as he wrapped his arms around her, rolling with the blast wave and to the side, behind his SUV, bleeding off her momentum to merely reduce them to an awkward heap of tangled limbs.

He pushed her off him just in time for Jacky to see Chandra with the now-open briefcase. “Fixer!” she shouted, tossing her the assembled SCAR.

Jacky caught it, racking the charging handle and chambering the first round of specially prepared 5.56mm EMP ammo. Shouldering the rifle, she sighted down the scope, acquiring the turning predator and pulling the trigger, sending the derivative Soviet anti-cyborg rounds downrange.

The bullets traced an electric blue streak through the air brighter than any conventional tracer, and Jacky easily corrected her fire as the Predator came around for another pass. By the time the on-board AI realized what it was dealing with Jacky had clipped its wing. The drone wobbled under the impact, the stunning effect giving its engine a puffing pause.

Reeling and unable to dodge, the drone broke apart in a blossom of blue-tinged fire when Jacky put the rest of her clip into its bulbous nose. Shrapnel and larger slivers of metal rained down, and Ryan pulled her back into cover to avoid the worst of the debris.

“Reload!” she shouted, and caught Chandra’s waiting magazine. Dropping the spent mag, she swiftly loaded a fresh collection of conventional rounds. “Situation?” she asked.

“Surveillance has one chopper over the transport,” Lise said quickly, voice taught with tension. “The other’s rooting out the remaining guards.”

As she said it, a shoulder-fired missile arced up at one of the choppers, which was too close to even pop flares. The missile struck the heli’s tail, sending it autorotating down through the bridge, taking a chunk out of the road as it went.

The other chopper responded by edging away from the transport, maneuvering to give the door gunner an angle on the anti-air. Another rocket flew up, but now forewarned, the second pilot dodged the missile, popping flares and nudging just into the right angle to give his gunner a clean shot. The machine gun opened fire, and Jacky saw a trio of suits go down under the high-caliber fusillade.

The transport rocked violently, and a rear door flew off, landing about a hundred feet away in the ocean.

“Oh, shit,” Ryan said.

The man that emerged from the armored car stood for a half a second, seemingly enjoying the first fresh air in ages, before leaping ten feet straight up, falling back down onto the roof of his former prison. Letting out a tremendous roar, he swung his orb-covered hands in a full circle, bringing them together in an ear-shattering crack.

Four halves of unbreakable gel fell onto the roof with a series of hundred-pound clangs.

“AT LAST!” The man screamed towards the heavens, spreading his arms wide. His head was bald, the skin bone-white, worn as though it had melted and re-solidified in a position no human could endure. “AFTER NINE LONG YEARS, I AM FREE!”

Birds took to the air. It was that sort of moment.

And Thao Soeur, the Mad Dog of Jakarta, got so angry that he caught fire.

“That’s new,” Ryan said, in the small voice.

“You do remember that he was the only Executive who solved his problems personally?” Chandra said, slowly. “Like, with his bare fricking hands?”

“The fire’s new,” Ryan shot back.

The burning WRAITH Executive leapt down from the armored car and, backed by the helicopter overwatch, began to walk quite calmly down the bridge.

Towards them.

“Oh, shit,” Ryan repeated.

An overturned truck blocked Soeur’s path. Soeur punted it so hard it exploded. He walked unharmed through the wreckage, a beacon that could be seen a half mile.

“’Ties with Enoch Razaq suspected,’” Jacky quoted from the dossier, punching Ryan repeatedly on the arm. “It makes soooo much more sense now, ass!”

Soeur paused, and as though wanting to pause to take in the breeze again, turned south to face Jakarta, hands on his hips, chest thrust out in pride.

As though on silent command, fireballs blossomed over the megacity. Ryan remembered Baylor’s story about the beginning of the Second Civil War in Moscow, how the entire city had begun to simply quake in the distance as dozens of firefights broke out and many more explosives went off in unison.

“And to begin,” Soeur said, projecting his voice across the entire bridge, “with the wretched country that has held me captive for so long. When I’m done, Jakarta will be a gaping wound visible from space!” He waved one arm at the sky, as though grasping the sun.

“My god,” Chandra said. “He really is fucking insane. What the hell did we just walk into?”

“Homecoming tour, 2027 style,” Jacky said, looking down at the rifle that suddenly seemed puny in her hands.

Souer’s form seemed to ripple, the fires wavering in place, and she slowly pivoted to see one very brave and very stupid man firing a squad automatic weapon at him. The bullets were being absorbed by the aura of flames, simply melting into nothingness before they could even touch the crime lord.

Spreading his arms wide, Soeur offered the man a grin that seemed to go from ear to ear. “My friend! For too long we’ve looked at each other from opposite bars! But now we are free, on equal ground, men standing unburdened by the shackles of our past!”

He strode over to the now-gibbering guard, who backed up against a broken coupe, his SAW finally going dry.

“Come, let us embrace,” Soeur said, drawing the man in for a hug.

The guard didn’t have time to do anything before he caught fire. Souer held him close in a jovial bear hug, before taking a half step back and, still cradling the screaming man with one arm, thrust his other hand straight through his victim’s chest.

Jacky could see the still-beating heart from here, right until Soeur closed his fist, crushing the heart in a starburst of blood.

“At least he’s not wasting any time getting down to business,” she said. “We might be screwed.”
SHADOW TEMPEST BLACK || STB2: MIDNIGHT PARADOX
The day our skys fe||, the heavens split to create new skies.
Mobius 1
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Re: [Story] CSWNext: Sins of the Father

Post by Mobius 1 »

Don't Stop Me Now

“Pass me the briefcase,” Jacky said, not taking her eyes off Soeur.

“Are you out of your mind?” Chandra asked.

“Completely. Absolutely. Now pass me the case.”

Ryan sighed and reached past Chandra to grasp the foam-lined case and hand it to Jacky. Accepting it, Jacky popped out the SCAR’s liner and produced an under-barrel grenade launcher complete with a bandolier of HE rounds.

“She’s not going to-“

“Yeah,” Ryan said, “she is. Loot a corpse, we’ll need stuff to back up with. Lise, how long on our support?”

“Less than five minutes. Stall for time, Ry.”

Sliding the launcher onto the SCAR’s bottom rail, Jacky began to load the grenades into the pump-action magazine. Squinting down the bridge, she began to judge angles and, more importantly, where she could place the grenades to achieve maximum boom.

She wanted to test that shield. The way it was swirling – probably tech from Razaq. Hell, most days, she simply assumed anything that wasn’t hardware was creepy shit from the douchebag. It was either that or Soeur had unlocked some secret technique of Silat that allowed him to catch fire. She didn’t put it past him.

Perhaps sensing there were still hearts caged by bone on the bridge, Soeur began to prowl forward again, closing the distance. If he took just a few steps more, he’d be between two potential enveloping explosives-

“Why, hello ther-“ The Black Tiger of Thailand began to call towards them, waving a hand heartily-

-Before her mind could finish the godawful pun, Jacky leaned out from behind cover and placed a launched grenade just to the right of Soeur’s legs.

The gas tanks of the pickup and the passenger bus caught, and the ensuing explosion towered so high that the chopper had to wave off, retiring to a respectable distance lest it get caught in the blast.

And like something straight out of a nightmare, the inferno gave birth to a figure wreathed in flames, stride unfaltering as Soeur cleared the enveloping conflagration and gave her a frank look.

“I’m certainly glad to meet you too, young lady. I can always appreciate forward thinking, sound tactical planning, decisive action – perhaps I should offer you a job.”

“No thanks,” Jacky called back, pumping the launcher and chambering another grenade. “Saw what happens when someone shakes your hand.”

How the hell were they going to get out of here? They could run, but she could already see the chopper circling wide, hoping to flank them. It was still giving them a decent distance, but she had the feeling that that respect was rapidly running out.

Her eyes were roving the bridge, and she began to notice the accumulated damage – multiple missile strikes, grenades from the helicopters, the gouge from the crash site. And then she saw it. An intersection point, a single locus from which she could command the confrontation.

She caught Ryan’s attention and sent him a quick series of hand signals detailing her plan. His eyes widened briefly before he nodded, gathering his courage. Checking his newly acquired rifle over, he took a couple of deep breaths and stood, aiming it squarely at Soeur’s head. “Coma estas, amigo? Wanna think it over before you take another step?”

Despite himself, Soeur actually stopped.

“You see, my lovely friend here is quite good with explosives. You two should share a beer at some point, talk about blast waves and explosive decompression. Talk shop.”

“I’d give you my number,” Soeur said, gesturing at his torn prison pants, “but I haven’t been shopping in quite some time.”

“Well, look around, take in the brave new world,” Ryan said, “and notice that if my associate here pumps a grenade into the tension cable to your right, this bridge is going to suffer a catastrophic collapse. Our side might shake it out but it’ll probably stand tall. You, you get a fine bath.”

“And what’s to say I don’t order my air support to simply snipe you from afar, son?” Soeur tone suggested this was a simple chess match, a friendly game between equals.

“Well, then her dead man’s switch on the rest of her grenades goes off and the whole bridge - and I mean the whole shebang – goes. You may be a Silat master, but you don’t need to be a Pokemon master to know fire types don’t do so good against water. What happens when you take a trip in the dunk tank, eh?”

Souer nodded to himself, agreeing. “This is a good point. I’m obviously not going to simply leave the hemisphere, but you’d surely be agreeable to me simply withdrawing for now?”

“Live to fight another day. We’ve done no wrong by you so far.”

“This is reasonable.” He stuck his hands in his pockets, nodding again. “You make a persuasive argument, Ryan.”

“Oh, goddammit,” Jacky murmured.

Scuffing one shoe on the pavement, Soeur’s friendly smile became positively sharklike. “The touch of the psychic mesmer is fairly unique, and you’re too be commended. Your skills are well-developed, but the last time someone tried that trick on me…” He looked directly at Ryan, eyes literally smoking. “I stabbed your mother twice in the chest.”

Jacky turned to Chandra, some twenty feet away. “Time’s up.”

Resettling her rifle, she pulled the launcher’s trigger.

Several things happened at once.

As one, Lise automatically triggered the helium bottles on their belts, and the Fulton balloons burst from Ryan, Jacky, and Chandra’s backpacked, unfurling and yanking them off their feet.

The sound of a sniper rifle caught up with them a beat after it hit the car behind where Jacky had been standing just a second before, passing clean between her legs.

Soeur kicked a car so hard it slid to his right, incredibly loud, throwing up a trail of sparks. It was too slow to intercept the grenade, though, and the explosive hit the tension cable, disintegrating the concrete mount and throwing the criminally stress section of the bridge into complete and utter chaos.

Jacky only caught a brief glimpse of Mad Dog’s face, already far below, and the bridge folded in on itself, collapsing outward in segmented chunks, falling into the bay far below. She didn’t know if it would kill him, but she’d be sure to attend his funeral if it did.

To her right, Chandra and Ryan had overcome the initial shock of the ascent and were burst-firing at the chopper, forcing the marksman to take cover lest he be winged. The chopper oriented towards him, and Jacky saw the large hellfire missile dangling from one stubby wing. That’d put an end to their day real quick.

They didn’t notice the second chopper – a fat old Huey – over the sound of the man-made disaster below until it was literally over their heads, hanging a sudden turn as it hooked not one, not two, but all three of their Fulton Recovery Balloons on its landing struts. The impact sent them arcing through the air like they were on a roller coaster at the fair, and they had prime view to their rescuers launching a volley of dumb-fired rockets at the advancing enemy helo.

The pilot, to his credit, realized what was happening, and pulled away, but it was too late – pair of rockets hit the belly the craft, bucking it. The chopper peeled away, bleeding thick, voluminous waves of smoke.

Before their own helicopter has even stabilized Jacky was already fast-climbing the lines attaching her to the recovered balloon. She made the ascent in record time, and accepted a glove hand that pulled her into the passenger bay.

“You guys always collapse national infrastructure when you visit town?” Jinx Farley asked as she settled back into a light crouch, brushing her short bubblegum pink hair out of the way of her aviators.

“Only on special occasions. Better break out the champagne,” Jacky answered, taking a three-count to catch her breath before crossing the open bay on her hands and knees to help Chandra up. “But this is honestly only a seven on our usual scale. The government’s still intact.”

“Yeah,” the pilot yelled over the rotors, leaning around to nod to Jacky. Her blonde hair was cut short, like her sisters, flaring out at the tips around her headset. “But not for long, considering the amount of troops moving around down there. You gals sure know how to pick ‘em.”
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The day our skys fe||, the heavens split to create new skies.
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Re: [Story] CSWNext: Sins of the Father

Post by Booted Vulture »

Well I got all caught up and damn. That escalated quickly. I mean that really got out of hand fast. (Jacky hasn't killed anyone with a trident yet. Thought tbf Alexis might by the end of the story. if you'll pardon the pun)

I quite like the future tech we've got at the moment. It's cool and aside from the multilimbed cyborg information broker its not completel over the top. There's also some nice reference to miniature computers and 'small 128TB hard drive' which amused me. Moore's law still going strong?

Oh and you managed to work in a pokémon reference in of all things.

It's funny that with the Baylor/Starr/Gold chapter that things appear to be happening on quite an epic scale yet its still small scale peice compared to say STB2
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Siege
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Re: [Story] CSWNext: Sins of the Father

Post by Siege »

Ooookay, so finally - finally - caught up with this. And I like it. It's not quite how I imagined it, but hey, it's not me that's writing it, so that's what's supposed to happen. I like the banter - you've always been good at banter, Moby - and the near-future cyberness of it all, the characterization of the people involved is fun and the action, well, that's always great.

If I may offer a point of possible improvement though, I think you might want to take a little more time to set the scene. Like, whether it's a beach bar or a ruined stash house, I feel they could all do with a little more description of the environment, and a little more of slow building instead of jumping right off into one-line zingers and character introductions.

What I find funniest though is the obvious differences in the way we approach stories. In yours, the protagonists just casually waltz into almost-gunfights somehow concealing shotguns whilst wearing nothing but a bikini. And they shoot their mouths off doing it. Whereas in my stories people prep forever and bring hordes of armed and armored goons and ten backup plans just to arrest a single person. And they scowl a lot doing it.

One thing's the same though: Le Comte is exactly as I imagined him.

All things considered I love it, but I still think (and I've said this before) that you ought to slow the pace of posting story bits a bit. 'Cause it's quite daunting to have so much stuff posted in like a week, and then having to catch up with it all at some point. For me at least slowing the tempo would do wonders.
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