Present reality slowly returns, my battered eardrums finally passing their tinnitus message to my brain. A backdrop of crackling fire joins the ensemble, accompanied by underwater screams and sobs from distant wounded.
I groggily arrive at something resembling sensibility, several warning messages popping up in my vision - multiple bone fractures, a cerebral contusion, various epidermal lacerations - but my gene-altered cells are already restoring me to full functionality, healing in minutes what would normally take days or weeks, their miraculous construction making further demands on my still-growling stomach. I pat absentmindedly at my pocket, making sure the Stalker memory core is still intact. Its rigid corners meet my touch, the ultra-dense material seemingly immune to minor things like giant fuck-off explosions. Current mission objective secure, I push myself out of the wreckage of a storefront, decapitated holo-mannequins flickering erratically in the floating dust, fashions two years out of date cycling past in blurring waves of embarrassed couture, and survey the street. I try to ignore the echoes to either side - concussion will pass soon enough.
Half a block away, Skred’s shattered streetcart is toppled over on its roof, the printer spewing out a slurry of unprepared streetmeat into a viscous pile unencumbered by bun, topping, or heating, but of Skred and the rest of the line there’s no trace. I stagger over, hoping I might be able to salvage something to eat, but it’s no use - just a growing mound of pink paste. I lean against the mangled frame for a moment, trying to catch my thoughts, maybe eventually soothe my hunger, then turn around. I immediately wish I hadn’t.
For a second, it looks like the streetcart somehow managed to splatter its contents all across the buildings in a particularly deranged modern art exhibit, but then my eyes pick out chunks of bone and skin scrambled within the glistening mess and I suppress an urge to vomit. So that’s what happened to Skred and the other customers. If it hadn’t been for my gene-altered skeleton and muscle mass, along with hitting an open window instead of a reinforced wall, I’d have taken some significant damage, potentially even serious. Shrieks of pain echo from further down the street, but no one’s visible in my immediate area - too close to ground zero to survive the pulverizing blast wave with a standard human body.
I lurch away from the abattoir storefronts and creep back towards my shack, already anticipating what I’ll find. Sure enough, rounding the rubble corner reveals a smoldering crater of fused polymer and fire, the vaporized remains of my residence, along with the entire block surrounding it. I recognize the blast pattern as the result of an HV kinetic strike, sheer force of impact sufficient to generate the same result as an entire cargo-loader of conventional hi-ex. Someone really wanted me dead.
My stomach twists sharply, and I realize I also really need to eat something. Searching through my pack yields a ration bar, the bright package promising ‘One Hundred Percent Pure Mongolian Yak Teat,’ whatever that is. Chewing contemplatively, I head back towards Skred's cart and consider the facts available.
Item one - The attack was heavy ordnance, which means somewhere in the Protectorate someone authorized a ship-based military strike, which means there’s a symp with access to that authorization, which is bad. Real bad. The two hour delay is likely due to one of two things: either the symp is high enough in the command chain that the information wasn’t relayed to them immediately, or they’re in the direct comm chain but needed time to mobilize their local resources. Either way, uncovering my assailant is a mystery for later, not now, but I’ll have to anticipate significant opposition moving forward. If they were willing to burn an HV strike to try and take me out, they’re risking discovery for something they obviously think is important enough to take that risk.
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Item two - Someone, or multiple someones, are actively looking for me on a planet with, and I try not to think this too sarcastically, limited helpful resources. I trust the local security forces to handle an AI symp about as much as I’d trust a memeshow advertising weightloss supplements to drop those last five kilos, so assistance from the goons is a non-starter. Getting off Castor II was going to be hard enough back when it was just a matter of procuring the parts to fix up a neglected security cutter and then slipping past some irregular patrols - now I’m looking at potential inter-orbital combat maneuvers leading out to the slice boundary against at least one party with military authorizations, and I don’t even know if I have a ship yet.
Item three - I’m alone. Due to my necessary lack of augments, I have no internal access to the local datanet, and contacting my support team again is just going to confirm to whoever’s after me that their first attack missed. The Unusual Affairs insignia on the back of my hand is as liable to get me killed as to get me help now, and without an augment to access any backdoors built into the datanet, I’m running blind.
Item four - this ration bar tastes like sawdust pulled from a sewage reclamation pool.
Situation normal, all fucked up. Just another day as an Agent, though I’ve never heard of symps getting their hands on this much firepower before. A small grin blossoms on my face like a Sulan ice flower. Despite my earlier depression, this mission is far from over.
This is the worst thing to happen to me. What am I going to do next?
Whatever I have to.
I manage a last mouthful of the horrendous ration bar, silently offering a sad farewell to the hapless PortaYum vomiting out its final foodstocks, then take off in a ground-eating stride towards the spaceport, leaving the wreckage for Castor II’s now wildly understaffed emergency services to deal with. Hopefully things won’t get worse once night falls and I make my escape, but I’m not holding my breath. This has all the signs of turning into a clusterfuck that would do the sybarites of Matisse IV proud.
After doubling back multiple times to make sure I’m not being followed by any ground elements, as well as some scans from my more esoteric biological tools (forget what the VR shows claim, actually having sonar is weird), I finally fetch up in a small office building a kilometer out from the spaceport, home to several shipping companies, two of which are obvious smuggling fronts, and an overly optimistic vacation agency advertising cruises that won’t dock here for another twenty years, along with plenty of empty spaces for as-yet unclaimed business that may or may not take advantage of the predatory lending offers on prominent disply. More importantly, at least for my purposes, the building is one with a clear sightline to the hangars.
Entering is a matter of simply picking the mechanical lock, pre-terraformed planets not known for their stringent adherence to security protocols. A vacant corner office several floors up gives me the view I need. Staying well back from the window, I twitch specialized muscles in my left eye to zoom in on the furthest hangar, a relatively small dome huddled all by itself some distance past the two bigger, rectangular hangars. Unlike the other two, their lights twinkling like distant stars in the darkening sky, maintenance workers bustling to and fro like busy ants, the last hangar appears dreary and abandoned, its windows boarded up with battered plasteel panels. I frown.
It’s unlike a frontier world to leave a resource unused, especially one as comparatively advanced as a spaceport hangar. If nothing else, some enterprising mechanic should be running a secondary chop shop out of it for local vehicles, or using the fabricators to create all manner of small, practical, and highly illegal things to sell to the upstanding citizenry. The lack of activity tickles something in my nerves, and I’ve learned to listen to that tickle over the years. There’s something here that doesn’t fit, and if I had any other choice, I’d leave the hangar alone for now and report it as a follow-up item once I'm safely extricated.
Unfortunately, scanning the spaceport reveals no other options for a ship, at least not any that satisfy Home’s requirement of staying undetected, so it looks like my night has the potential to get... complicated. With the targeted destruction of my safehouse I have to assume my cover's blown, and whoever's looking for me will no doubt have an eye on the normal routes offplanet.
I sit back against the wall and start planning my escape.
