ABC - Penance

Preston Gang Camp, Wasteland Area

By the time I got there, it was all over. Ghost and the four Sentinels had been hit by an EMP grenade, forcing the clone to reboot and toasting the mechanicals.

“What the hell happened?” I asked my partner, squatting at his side while Trixie and her Guards did a sweep of the area. We were about a hundred meters away from the access shaft to the service tunnel. The camp itself began about fifty meters further back, mostly hidden from sight by the decaying mounds of old industrial refuse that surrounded us, with only a few lights visible on the higher mountings.

In the shaded greys of my lowlight goggles, Ghost looked pale and unsteady. I switched to standard vision mode and used my torch to check him over. I was concerned to say the least, as in the weeks I had known the clone he had been an unbreakable rock, as solid as the earth we stood on.

“Did the pulse affect your systems?” I asked, shining my torch in his organic eye to check for any concussion.

“It’s not my first time being pulsed, Alvarez” he answered, showing the staid indifference I expected from him. “Just caught me by surprise, that’s all”

He pushed my torch away and got to his feet, towering over me once again. As if to prove he was fine, he extended his hand to me and I was lifted easily to my feet.

“I had him pinned down about twenty meters over there” Ghost told me, pointing with his rifle at a hollow in the junk piles. “The Sentinels were flanking his position and he was only using small arms fire against us, so I assumed he didn’t have anything heavier”

“Did you call in a drone to spot for you?” I asked innocently enough. He gave me his trademark flat glare, his cybernetic eye gleaming in the intermittent darkness.

“Of course” he replied and pointed to a pile of wreckage to our right. “That’s it over there. Once he got us all within range, he tossed out the EMP grenade. This guy knew what he was doing, that’s for sure”

Ghost and I walked the last steps to where Victor had made his stand. I flashed my torch in the hollow, seeing the hard plastic case still half buried in the trash. It was flung open, some items missing from inside it seemed. What remained were another EMP grenade, two standard flechette grenades and some spare magazines for a pistol.

“He had a stash of equipment hidden out here, in case of exactly the kind of raid we just pulled” I pondered aloud.

“Yeah” Ghost agreed. “This kind of equipment is hard to get hold of, even for a Jacker. He is not some low-life working his angles out in the Hole. Victor is a Player, maybe a Freelancer or possibly something more”

“Assassin?” I ventured. “His Ability would make him pretty effective in that kind of role”

“Could be” Ghost grunted. “Either way, he knows we are after him. He’s going to be hard to track down”

“Copy that” I agreed. “But we are one step closer to nailing the prick”

“How’s that?”

I tapped my Smart Goggles, right near the induction cable that connected them to the hardened Processor that lay snugly along my spine, covered by armour so it was protected from EMP bursts and enemy fire.

“I saw his bare naked face, in all its punchable glory” I said smugly. “With the image files stored in there, we have a chance of finding him”

“Good work, Inspector” Ghost complimented me.

“Thanks, Detective Gaunt” I responded.

We recalled the searchers and together we tramped back to the camp. There was still some work to be done there.

=====

Sam showed us the room Victor had claimed for himself in the building. She had her own room in the other big building that faced this one across the Arena and had spent little time with the man in here.

The door had a coded lock installed and no-one knew the number to unlock it. I examined the door frame, a solid welded metal affair cut into the side of a shipping container. Victor had been the sole occupant, a sign of his influence in a camp where whole families lived in smaller spaces. He had made sure he kept his privacy even in such a crowded living environment.

“Did anyone else ever go in there with him?” I asked Sam. She looked guiltily at the floor and nodded assent.

“I think he used to take some of the girls in there” she admitted in a halting voice. “I’m sorry, I wasn’t strong enough to stop him” She walked quickly away and I let her go. It was just another reason I needed to find this guy and put a bullet in his brain pan.

Ghost came and stood next to me. He had overheard the conversation and looked over the door and frame with his own experienced eyes.

“You think it’s booby trapped?” he asked me and I nodded agreement. “Me too. Might be set to detonate a charge if the door is forced or the lock is hacked”

“Yeah. Or set off a pulse inside to scramble any files he has stored digitally” I added.

The Guards and Police Auxiliary have lock crackers we are allowed to use, devices that would be highly illegal in the hands of a civilian. Yet I had a nagging suspicion that Victor would have planned for that, with his little safehouse set to detect any intrusions.

We needed whatever evidence was inside this locked room and I was pondering the options when the boy came to stand with Ghost and I. He was chewing on a protein bar we had doled out from the Guard Carrier, part of the emergency supplies all vehicles carried. I noted it was a Basic Bar, the same ones manufactured by the Wonder Bar factory.

The kid was enjoying it so I kept my thoughts to myself about how they were made.

“I know the code” he piped up between mouthfuls. “I’ll sell it to you”

I looked at the boy in surprise and he met my gaze boldly.

“How?” I demanded succinctly.

“Everybody ignores me around here, even Victor” the boy replied. “Last time he took Mara in there, I watched him put the code into the lock”. He pointed to a turn in the narrow corridor that ran between the various rooms. “I watched from there. My eyes are really good at seeing things in the distance”

I crouched a little, bringing my eyes in a direct line with his own. They looked like perfectly normal brown eyes, but there were golden flecks in the iris. Maybe he was an Awakened of some kind, gifted with exceptional vision. It didn’t matter to me, all I wanted was the code.

“Okay, I believe you kid. How much for the code?”

“Fifty Pandas and your promise” the kid said earnestly.

“My promise? To kill Victor you mean?”

“No, you are going to that anyway, aren’t you?” he answered me. “I want you to promise to come and help my sister and I if we need it. If someone else tries to hurt us again”

“Huh?” I said dumbfounded. “You want me? What about Sam or one of the other adults here at the camp”

He shook his head in denial.

“Nope. None of them are as scary as you, Miss Judy” he declared. “I saw you fight big Louis in our Arena. If you could kill Louis, there isn’t anyone who can stop you”

So he wanted a promise from Punching Judy, not from little old Luisa. I had to agree with the kid, I found my alter ego scary as hell too.

I grabbed out my wallet from a back pocket and drew out fifty Pandas in smaller notes. With due ceremony I handed the plastic notes to the boy.

“What’s your name, kid?” I asked. He eyed the notes I had given him and solemnly folded them into a pocket of his tattered jeans.

“Cisco” he said. “Cisco Ramirez”

“Okay, Cisco, I promise that if you need me, I will come” I declared. I held out my gloved hand and we duly shook to seal the agreement. “Now give me the code”

=====

The first thing we did was disarm the EMP grenade wired to the door. It was a simple enough job so I left it to Ghost while I nosed around the cramped living space. For a converted shipping container it was actually quite cosy, if you could ignore the pornographic posters on the wall and the box of sex toys beside the double bed.

Victor had raised the bed to allow long storage boxes to be slid beneath the metal frame. I gingerly pulled one out, half expecting a booby trap of some kind. The box didn’t go boom so I lifted the lid, nice and slowly.

Inside were stacks of packaged food, outdoor survival gear and some basic surveillance equipment. The next box had some hard plastic weapon cases nestled in shock absorbent packing material. I opened one at random, a case about a meter long and found a Smart Linked Machine Pistol, a similar model to the one I had with me. Spare magazines were stacked in the case and I extracted a couple of the 5mm Caseless rounds.

They were Ceramite tipped Armour Piercing bullets, each one worth enough Pandas to feed a family for a week.

Victor was definitely a player in some high stakes games, I was certain of that.

I closed the case and pushed the long box partially under the bed once more. Everything in here was going to be taken as evidence, so there was no point in being excessively tidy. I stepped over to the narrow work table he had at one end of the container, while Ghost had an OCD moment and pushed the box fully under the bed.

There was a datapad, maybe a year old, sitting on the desk. It was cable linked to a pair of big screens bolted to the metal wall of the container, a small adjustable stool placed on front of them.

My hand was reaching for the power switch on the datapad when a voice interrupted me from the doorway.

“Maybe you should let an expert do that, Inspector” called out the Tech wizard from the Police Auxiliary. She had been summoned from her air-conditioned van, now parked in the central plaza of the camp and seemed a bit grumpy.

“All yours, Sergeant” I conceded and stepped back to give her room. With Ghost, the Tech and myself in the room it was very cramped indeed. I ran my eyes around the space one last time and stepped out into the corridor, my partner following behind me.

We shuffled along the corridor to the far end, giving room for another Police Auxiliary Officer to get inside. He was a burly looking guy and had been given the task of ferrying everything of note from the container room and into the Guard Carrier.

As the pair of officers worked away, Ghost and I discussed what we had seen.

“He has a lot of very expensive equipment for someone living in the Wasteland” I opined to Ghost. “Even for Spitfield, he has too much money to be living like this”

“Agreed, Alvarez” Ghost nodded. “I think he uses this camp as an alternative base. It might even be a place he comes to purely for recreation”

“Recreation?” I wondered then I realised what he meant. I thought of the marks on Minke and those of the girl, Mara. In the Wasteland, you could get away with stuff that you couldn’t anywhere civilised. With enough Pandas or enough threats you could do whatever you wanted out here.

I wanted to be sick and I choked it down, tasting the sour bile in my mouth. Ghost took a bottle of water from his webbing and handed it to me silently. Some days it was good to have a stoic partner like him.

“Thanks” I told him and chugged half the bottle. The sourness was washed into my guts where it belonged, only the burning tang in my throat reminding me that some days I could be human too.

“I’m going to kill him” I muttered, more to myself. Ghost heard me anyway and smiled his own grim reply.

“I’ll help”