Section 99: Don't Scratch, You'll Make It Worse

Welcome back to the Freelands, where shit is escalating.

PREVIOUSLY IN SECTION 99: On the trail of the ruthless Outlier pirate lord Aldous Hargrave, Section 99 operator Van Parker, a cybernetic hitman with the callsign of CANINE-06, infiltrated one of the Dread Captain's safehouses on the Planet Evergreen. There, after eradicating enemy opposition in a signature showing of his messy ultraviolence, he came upon Hargrave's long hidden and shellshocked father. But before the elder Hargrave could be interrogated by Van's ally, a psychic arissiyan fatale callsigned 'Snare', he was sliced to ribbons by the menace known as Lazzo, a cyber-zombie hitman in jester's clothes, a madman with a penchant for filament wire weaponry, tech-based necromancy and commedia dell'arte.

After an unsure fight, Van found a way to obliterate Lazzo's body, ripping off his undying head. What Snare tore loose from his malevolent psyche shocked them both: a pirate slave trafficking operation, hidden in the backyard of Port of St. Joseph, the hub of all Freeland settlement.

The same trafficking operation that aimed to use Captain Telin Enara and her cousin, Engineer Keeda Maniro as patsies to incite an air of instability the social climate of St. Joes', the sort of vulnerable state Outliers like Hargrave prey on to build their demesne out of other peoples' homes. The problem was, the man in charge of the setup of the Cousins from Clan Maniro, Howard Stanley, was a bum who underestimated the abilities of Telin, and wound up with a nicked femoral artery when he tried to tie off her loose end. Personally vetted by a psychic 99 operator, the occultist tattooed-man called Figment, she was elevated above doubt. With Scumbag Stanley taken into custody for interrogation, Telin and Keeda find themselves waiting on a call to loop them into the unfolding disaster...

---

“Don’t Scratch, You’ll Make It Worse”

Telin Enara had gone to sleep angry and woken up motivated. It was just a day later from her incident with the Eyar Fountain Dock Security, a day being set up to take the fall for a corrupt and slaving member of Section 97; a day spent wishing she had hit the jigrik that had set her up for his fall harder, that she hadn’t given him more scars. She should have torn out his femoral and let him dye the carpet red. His fault for having one of those so close to the surface, a real fatal flaw for the Consortium’s supposed “warrior race.”

She took a breath, and strove to recenter herself. She didn’t need to have hate in her morning, she didn’t need to be rotting alive from bitterness and recurrent patterns of prejudice. As she looked out from her comped hotel room, looking down at the Snow Globe’s central spire hanging garden and arboretum. Artificial waterfalls ran down rippled glass panels that decorated the core support beams and conduits, feeding plots and ponds. Cleverly hidden gravitic panels made the overflow run back up into the overhead reservoir without pipes or pressure. She let the visual mesmerize her, soothe her. She scratched at the fur on her her ears, following their long felinoid shape with her claws, the warmth and the tingle acting like a low-yield but instantaneous aspirin. I will not be angry today. I will not be angry today. I will not be angry today.

She needed productivity. She needed clarity of mind. But mostly, she needed her phone to ring. “Call you tomorrow about the people that tried to ruin your reputation and frame you for sapient trafficking, then tried to kill you, just sit tight until then.” The nerve of these fucking terrans…

…Sorry, Terrans, she thought to herself, looking down at the people enjoying the hanging gardens. Dammit, they looked nice, they didn’t deserve that.

The sound of the ring made her sink to all fours, compressing like a spring, then launching herself three body lengths across the room, clearing her unmade bed with a hip twist that made her corkscrew through the air, then grabbing her phone as she rolled past it. All things considered, she was even more tense than she realized.

“Captain Enara,” she answered with her most professional tone, while inverted in a headstand.

“Enara, Figment,” the said the voice on the other end of the line. “Sorry for the wait.”

“Tell me you made him talk,” was the only thing Telin could think to say.

“I’ve never had to make someone talk to know what they know,” said Figment. “Besides, it’s much harder to lie to my method than an interrogation.”

“Fair enough.”

“You should come in, bring your sister.”

“She’s my cousin.”

“Bring your cousin. If you’re both going to be a part of this, you need to be fully looped in to what just happened. Central Security, please, in about 15 minutes if you can. You won’t have to call, I’ll know when you’re close.” He hung up.

---

Inside of 5 minutes, Telin was dragging Keeda aboard Snow Globe Express, for a quick trip down the central spire to the station’s Central Security dispatch. It was probably to their detriment that they’d hopped on a space station’s tram system so soon after having gotten up, as the tricks it played with the local gravity were not fun for a mind half-awake.

“Cute terran rockstar-guy says jump, you go flying across the room, yaz?” said Keeda, getting herself situated.

“Not even going to dignify that with an answer,” Telin’s reply was almost a growl. She was trying to remember if Keeda was actually older than her, and whether or not it was appropriate to make her a Kit in public over that. “There’s just too much… too much to the terran look…”

“Yes, thinking again: probably not the best to tease someone who’s still got blood under her claws.”

“Shut up, I shower, sometimes,” Telin said with a smirk. Somehow there was a validating comfort in having her mood acknowledged. The best she could do was relax in return, if only slightly.

“You still convinced this is still somehow your fault? Even if you admit that we got made as decoys?”

Telin’s frown came right back. “I leave from 99 long enough, and things go on enough of a slide that I get victimized. The Stars are speaking to me. They’re telling me I’m the missing piece that let this happen. That if I didn’t… leave-”

“You are a highly capable star captain with combat experience at both capital and strike-scale. You are also exactly one of them,” said Keeda.

“Yeah, obviously the one that was laying down on the job.”

Keeda pulled a sneer as she looked away, and then immediately apologized to the lady in the seat across from her that she made eye contact with- sorry, that wasn’t for you, it was for my ludicrous relative who is talking nonsense in a language you don’t speak. She knew it was useless to try and break through stubbornness like hers. Keeda recognized this streak in Telin, the bit of her that committed to plans out of sheer spite, and though she shared Telin’s outlook on this situation- no, you do not go and smear our Clan’s Reputation like that, thank you -Keeda also wanted at least quench the haze of anger roiling off her cousin, because it was shrouding her eyes and making her blind. She deserved to approach a terrible situation with clear vision, free of ego, because Keeda understood that beyond the disgusting feeling of personal violation being used as a patsy can bring, there was a deeper, colder maliciousness happening, one that was a more professional evil. This was a case where actually, it was perfectly reasonable to Blame Society, and Get on With Business.

“Well then wake up proper, and put your feelings away, clean and tidy,” Keeda said, finally. “You don’t go to work riled and expect a smooth day.”

“I just want to get this feeling off of me,” said Telin. “It’s like I spilled something sugary on myself, but also it’s giving me a rash somehow…”

“So don’t scratch, you’ll make it worse,” Keeda responded.

Telin exhaled through her nose, and scratched at her ears again. She then felt self conscious, and snickered to herself. In that moment, she was bolstered by a familiar feeling: respect for her relative.

---

The staff at security central gave Telin and Keeda a wide berth. They’d been briefed on what what their department had done to a pair of space truckers, and that one of theirs who’d been identified as traitor got hauled out on a stretcher, with a near-fatal femoral bleed in his groin. A shadow hung over Section 97 in the Snow Globe; the ones that had species-issues with rhidlings took on a bitter mood, while the ones that knew there was a grift going on were groping for an exit door, all the while the ones that just wanted to keep their station safe wanted to haul out the colonial guillotine and start shortening their former comrades. The presence of Section 99 in the union hall was keeping the tension toward the background, as nobody wanted to provoke a psychic menace on the scale of Figment in the pursuit of his official business.

Plus, Telin could tell by the way the desk agents kept a 5-step distance from him, that they were terrified of him. Six and a half feet tall, a man who might be fashion-model skinny in a timeline where he didn’t require as much functional muscle as he needed for his chosen line of work, clad in an armoured, tailed coat with a collar that only hinted at the extent of his tattoos, he exhibited danger colours in their local habitat. She recognized some of them, and one of them on his face was even rhidling- it was Katagiite, an ancient script used by the old Central Clans, a phrase mentally-ill members of the clergy would mark themselves with before they understood the actual nature of their issue, meaning Benign-Possessed. She didn’t know how she felt about it hiding under his ear, but Telin also could piece together a reason its presence together with the other Terran and Arissiyan symbols she knew and saw rift into his skin: he was trying to contain what was in him, through any magical or spiritual means necessary.

Figment waved them over from across the front counter, and a clerk opened the passthrough for them as politely as he could manage.

“They’ve set aside a room for us, we’re going to be surrounded by people I’ve personally vetted,” Figment didn’t bother with a hello. He resonated the professionalism of a spinning buzzsaw blade.

“What about the ones you haven’t?” Telin asked, quietly.

I can hear the untrustworthy ones, Figment spoke into her mind directly. She winced at his voice, as it resolved as a frying of radio static that stung her in the neurons, than calmed to a sensation like an impossibly sharp needle of cold glass lancing her in the mind. I’ve put the locals here who aren’t Equipped With a Radio on their scent, they don’t know they’re already got.

Unless they let them slide out the side doors… Telin’s thoughts resolved as a growl in her own mind.

You know what a neuroghast is? Figment notioned her an odd thought.

…no? She knew she couldn’t lie to him, even if she wanted to.

Neither do these people, said Figment. None of you want to know, but I will teach them if they don’t follow through on Freeland ethical standards, and set out some traps to catch the pests in their walls.

Telin considered his answer. She was satisfied. And slightly afraid. Fair enough, she thought back to him, managing the mental equivalent of breaking eye contact with him as she said it.

He led them wordlessly through banks of desks and terminals, a densely packed infocenter that was as much made for early warning of potential shipboard emergencies as it was the local crimewatch. Part of the reality of life aboard a working and living space station: you couldn’t just watch what the people were doing and call it security, you had to also monitor the heat exchanges, the water reservoirs, the air cyclers, the hull seals. The emergency and medical responders of Section 96 also watched those systems, and watched them even closer, but two sets of eyes have a habit of catching a problem before it can produce dead bodies.

He led them to a secured meeting room in the back of the desk pool, its glass door held open by a desk agent in a black beret and shades who nodded them in wordlessly. An older terran with a beared trimmed like a brush and hair that made him look aerodynamic was standing at a respectful attention, despite the section chief ID on his vest denoting him as a man in charge.

“Ms. Enara. Ms. Maniro,” he offered a hand, a big, hairless, clawless mitt that was big even compared to his own species, Telin noted. She was ornery, but took it anyway, and he was polite enough to let her guide the shake. “Martin Kellog, 2nd Shift Chief. I apologize what happened to you happened on my watch.” He offered his hand to Keeda, who shook it, minorly marvelling at how it completely engulfed hers. “Understand that Operator Figment and I have devised a means of rooting out the issue that our union currently finds itself with.”

He’s being professional, like Figment is; he’s not downplaying it, he’s trying not to set you off, Telin smoothed herself against the urge to bite. She swallowed, and breathed, and said, “I’m glad you and others care, then.”

“We aren’t Outliers, and we don’t care to have them get up to their Tendencies among us. Got no choice but to take it serious,” said Kellog. “Harold Stanley is being dealt with, just to begin with.”

“How so?” asked Keeda.

“Scumbag Stanley has pledged his support in prosecuting the operation as an intelligent witness to action.” Figment answered the question for Kellog. “At least to me, in my Headspace; we’ll see what he says to an ops lawyer when he wakes up from his coma.” The short translation: ‘if anyone tries to prosecute us for the assuredly Very Unpleasant Things we’re about to do to some suspected Outliers, we’ve got someone that will speak for us in an interstellar court of rights.’ It was how smaller operations that weren’t backed by larger colonial militias properly ticked their boxes, so as to do an Ugly thing right and minimize the chances everyone involved winds up as a war criminal.

Figment turned his attention to Telin specifically. “Sincerely, good job, with his bloodloss and all. You have no idea how much easier it is to break into a spent mind than a fully awake one. Mental defenses move in slow motion, so to speak.”

Telin took that as a compliment; she knew that he knew she would, but not every morsel thrown overboard had a hook in it.

Kellog gave Figment a nod and moved to the door. “Our end is in motion. I’ll be in touch,” he motioned to the desk agent at the door who walked with him. She was sure to press the polarity switch on the office’s glass though, turning clear windows into a wall of what looked like frost made of coal dust.

“So I have a question for the both of you, and be completely honest:” Figment asked, once  the room was sealed. “Do you want the quick version or the long version? They’re both as detailed, it’s just the quick one takes a bit of a willing step on your parts.”

“...gonna need you explain the quick version,” Keeda asked before Telin could. “That option seems wired, the way you say that.”

“Well, I could either go over my investigation notes and intel with you in presentation, and we can have a Q&A session, or I can take you by the hand in direct interface and give you everything I know, as I experienced it, in a psychic download.”

Figment had gotten to the first d in ‘psychic download’ when Keeda’s hand raised up to grasp his. The speed and precision she did it with would have seemed mechanical, if it wasn’t charged with a giddy enthusiasm for a new type of mind expansion. The look she gave Telin through her thick glasses was one her cousin recognized instantly, calico eyes doubled up on their normal levels of crazy: don’t ruin this for me by being a square, you square. Telin gave her the slightest sneer back, had a little inward shiver over the psychic bungie jump Figment had sent her on the day before, and then raised her own hand in kind.

Figment met her eyes with his. It’s okay, he sent to her mind, I come with seatbelts in this mode.

The ‘thank you’ she said back was quiet enough that it barely even registered in her mind. That’s when he took her hand, and her perception of reality exploded into glass shards and screen static.

Alarm. Disorientation. A feeling like she was flipping through space, while also standing stably on her own two feet. Sensations, a lot of them like pain, some of them unexpectedly pleasant; chaotic signals across nerves, like tissue crimped off by a tourniquet was being flushed with blood, stabs that went straight to the bone, sparks that lit her skin and hair on fire, while also exhaling a warm breath down her neck and trailing smooth hands down back. A switch flicked in her head, and she understood what was happening: he was telling her how to feel like him, think like him, be like him so as to properly take in his memories.

The strangest thing of all, was what a change it was for her to be tall. Telin knew she probably shouldn’t have gotten hung up on this, but she did anyway, because it was somehow the weirdest part of the trip.

She opened his eyes, and was in the interrogation room with Scumbag Stanley. His sudden appearance put a match to anger packed like powder, and in the loose physics of her headspace, she saw no problem in lashing out at a man in a hospital bed with a hard left to his face. Except she meant to peel his face off with an uppercut claw, and instead, she reached out with a blunt, clawless, tattooed paw, slapping him upside the head, then digging fingertips into Stanley’s scalp. Telin was surprised- Figment wasn’t a slouch when it came to getting hooked into a gizek’s skin. Despite only working with a set of trimmed nails, he managed some painful depth, and she respected his hustle.

“Ooh, good cut,” Telin heard Keeda in the mixing of minds. Somehow it felt like she was behind Telin, watching from the audience, but she couldn’t hone in onto her in the vague strangeness of her headspace. She was having a hard enough time dealing with being in Figment’s point of view, let alone the psychic twinge of having her Intrepid Traveller of a cousin heckling from the cheap seats.

Another mental rush, but this time one she was in control of, like she’d leapt off a diving board into clear water. She sank in Figment’s body through its depths, and broke through a bottom that was a stained sky. Freefalling between spectral highrises that loomed infinitely high from on the horizon, they dropped as one body to the sickly mindscape of a man whose brush with a combat castration and slow death by bloodloss left him spent, dark and sluggish inside his own head. His trauma was self apparent- Telin didn’t recognize what world that lived in Howard Stanley’s mind, but she somehow suspected it was Terra, and that the towers on the horizon of his mind were the cosmopolis arcologies that housed Privileged Citizen Enclaves in areas the Consortium hadn’t bothered trying to environmentally repair. She had Figment’s insight; forever in the distance, out of reach- Stanley was probably born dust-poor, in the depths of some terran hellmouth, and his happy place was looking at the places he could never afford to live from kilometers away. The twinge of pity she might of felt for Stanley was washed away once she realized: he was still chasing those towers at all cost, not understanding he was past the point of needing to be ruthless, because what he had in the Freelands still wasn’t enough.

They stood as a gestalt with hands in pockets flanked doorless rises that lined either side of a road that hung detached between them like an elevated highway, their sidewalks sunken storeys down over a sudden sharp edge, with elaborate steel catwalks and staircases connecting the upper and lower levels ways that only made sense in dream logic. With two voices that were one, they stated: “who put you up to this, and what did they tell you?”

The highrises loomed over them, coming to sudden, colossal animance and displaying territorial posture. The foundations of the street rumbled their collective voice as an earthquake register of Stanley’s: this is my head, not yours; you don’t know what I am, and you don’t know what I can show you.

Telin felt the oddest sense of anxiety, one that bloomed rapidly into the intrusion of a scream. Images brushed her mind, of being six years old, of someone that was her mother but not her mother. She was sitting despondent in the kitchen of a squalid Megarise apartment, holding a blade unbolted from a cardboard slicer she’d stolen from work. Her head was resting against a wall slick with blood that stretched to the ceiling and floor, splotched with thicker matter that was too pink and pulverized to be recognizable. 

Telin winced when she felt the trigger pull of trauma, as that mother that was not her mother made slow eye contact with her, and put both feet under her to stand…

With a gesture of his outstretched hand, Figment struck her with electrokinetic lightning, sizzling her skin and making her emit a gutterally undignified noise, her limbs thrashing out a dying dance as she dropped her improvised murder weapon with a clatter. Before she fell, the conjured memory collapsed into ether entirely, its mental residue reconstituting momentarily as a hall of mirrors panorama of Stanley’s face in an agonized rictus. 

She did it because she hated them, Figment said, psychically stabbing Stanley in the heart with a pick made of words. She spared you because she loved you. She just didn’t love you as much as she hated them.

Telin never wanted to hear a noise like the full 360 scream Stanley emitted in response, a scream that was once a boy and a man raging his grief through the same voice at maximum volume.

And unfortunately, Figment continued, you’re not as uncommon as you think. Another gesture, and another lance of psychokinetic electricity, one that arced between the looming highrises and made them recede like fingers burnt by a hot stovetop. One in particular reared all the way back over, uprooting from its foundations and crashing down to street level as a huge domino. The quaking impact shattered it into pieces, which resolved and rendered into a mountain of individual corpses. Every one of them was Harold Stanley at a different stage in his life, his face twisted in pain, frozen in horror, or blank from shock. Every last one of his preserved bad memories, spilled out like a box of rotting toy soldiers.

It was also, from Figment’s experience, a path toward what he was looking at. Because while there was no book of numbered rules in the quantum experience, seasoned coverts understood that a mind never breaches in an arbitrary direction; when it pushes you in one direction, then fails in the opposite direction, chase it down as it retreats. It’ll lead you to what it was protecting.

Sure enough: out of the pile, a single survivor at the very end of the carcass avalanche, snared by the tangled limbs and dead weight his own still and cold other selves. Funnily enough, he was wearing his work uniform, except his hair was a little different, a little shaggier, and he had a beard that didn’t really suit him- probably recent enough of a memory that Stanley was only one or two haircuts removed from whatever deal he’d signed off on. Figment and Telin leapt off the roadside to the fallen remains below, landing with a wet crunch in a pile of cloned carnage.

“I’m going to ask you again,” both Figment and Telin said with the same voice, approaching him over dead Stanleys like soft-but-firm cobblestones. “Who put you up to this, and how much did they tell you?”

“Fuck you!” screamed the one living Stanley, tangled up in himself, ragged and hoarse. The sky tried to crackle with lightning, but it only managed a little rumble of thunder.

Figment stamped on the face of one of the corpses he trod over. Its eyes momentarily dilated to clarity, and spoke in a clear moan: “A fourteen-year-boy stabbed me in the kidney with a boxcutter while his mom distracted me to steal my wallet and access cards, that bitch. The only hospital I could afford was an overcrowded budget sub-brand outlet that kept me on a gurney in a hallway, laying on my side for three days before they released me because I was ‘probably fine, just keep an eye on it.’” The corpse paused and gasped, like a fish trying to breathe through gills that weren’t filtering water. “I nearly went into In-Dent because of your fucking bill and that’s what you give me? ‘Keep an eye on it?’ How the fuck do I keep an eye on a hole in my back when I don’t even own a mirror, you stupid-” and then it fell dead again.

“Hm. That’s pretty lousy,” Figment said, shrugging. “I wonder if I can find more embarrassing, though?”

“WAIT, STOP-” the one Stanley at the end of the heap screamed. Figment heard him, but he wasn’t listening. Onto the collarbone of a Stanley that looked closer to his current age, stomp:

“I was cited and demoted at work because I tried to jam up some breakdancers for a public safety violation and I was drunk at work. I registered a point-15, because the day before, my bitch girlfriend left me over some bills. Or something, hell if I know,” the Stanley with the beginnings of a receding hairline said. He almost seemed relieved when he died again.

“...are these all going to be about women?” Figment asked, with a genuine curiosity. “Or is this just you not knowing how to act like grownup?”

Figment stopped himself from stomping a particularly young-looking Stanley- he didn’t have it in him to hit him that low. So instead, he bent his leg over in a sort of half-crescent motion, with all the swagger of a mean prankster who definitely Meant to Do That, before stomping an older Stanley in the face, one whose face was a rictus of pain and surprise.

“I was bothering some arissiyans because I didn’t like how they were looking at me, and I didn’t hear the call for gangway because I was yelling too loud. A powerjack hit me in the leg, broke my ankle, and I fell down a set of four stairs trying to keep balance.”

“That’s just embarrassing,” Figment said. “Petty, also.”

“STOP,” shouted the Stanley at the end of the carnage, still trying to free himself. “STOP, I WILL HELP YOU, STOP, PLEASE COME GET ME.” This wasn’t anguish, this wasn’t agony, this was a man feverishly trying to assert strength while desperately avoiding a well-overdue introspective reckoning.

“And you’ll lie to me at first, which is why I’m going to walk over on sidewalk of your worst memories,” Figment said, performatively taking a big step without letting it fall. Stanley knew he was beat but he needed to understand how badly he was beaten- him leading with a clumsy Trauma Repulsion Technique just showed Figment exactly where he buried his collection of exposed nerves, then made them like a gory field of wild grasses to tromp through. Figment drove home the point that as of this moment, Scumbag Stanley wasn’t even safe inside his own skull, because he had an intruder with a partial set of blueprints loose in his brain. Figment needed him to know: he wasn’t about to hurt Stanley, as much as he was about to remind him of his entire history of pain, exactly as he felt it, the very second it happened to him. Either that, or cop to the fact that was, at very least, accessory to trafficking an intelligent species- his choice.

“HARGRAVE WAS SUPPOSED TO SEND ME A GUY FOR A SIT-DOWN AND HE SHOWED ME A GODDAMNED DEMON INSTEAD. HELP ME,” the one living Stanley screamed. “PLEASE HELP ME, PLEASE,” His voice frayed that time, just the tiniest bit; the sky crackled with lethargic electricity, and a feeling like the hair on his arms charging with static zapped Figment. “ Chaos in the dreamscape, genuine fear, the mental equivalent of a metal detector squealing over a pistol in an ankle holster. This is real, attack this, Figment thought to himself.

He lifted his foot again, and he blinked as he leaned forward; when he opened his eyes again, he’d closed the distance through a warp in the dreamspace, stamping his foot down on the chest of the last living Stanley, curbing him back into the pile of his dead contemporaries.

“Interesting,” Figment said.  “I happen to know a few demons. Maybe we’re mutuals.”

A dream within a dream, head trauma within head trauma- Figment crashed his clawed left hand into the last living Stanley’s temple and ratcheted his fingers tight.

“He does that good, I think he’s part rhidling,” Telin heard Keeda from her place in the psychic bleachers. Somehow she sounded like she was above Telin now, and also upside down.

It was that thought that signalled another mental dive into the psyche of Howard Stanley, an otherwise inconsequential bastard of a man, who made one too-mean of a decision and made himself the worst kind of consequential. This one was short, straight, efficient, that of a willing mind accepting intrusion- it was like going down a waterslide, especially now that she found herself disjointed in the mindscape from Figment’s mental image, momentarily separated from the psychic piggyback ride they were taking. She looked down at her hands in the abstract-tubular liminal space she found herself in- they were just hers, not Figment’s as well. So she looked behind her: there was Keeda, reclined like she was poolside in a lounge chair, just another weekend afternoon for her. They made eye contact, and Keeda shrugged with a smirk.

Terrans never should have given us Acid, Telin thought at her.

Then reality hit her like the click of a metal door closing. Telin was in Stanley’s body now, and it was violating, the last person she wanted to be. The second she registered that she’d mentally manifested in a drunken oaf that looked like man fired from a gym teacher job at a discount-scale Inner Galaxy work preparatory, she wanted to shower him off with scalding water. 

She found herself staring through his eyes at a pair of Grey Men flanking a pair of empty chairs, at a table that was empty but for an open palmtop. Its open holo-polymer screen was lighting the room as well as the one overhead lamp they had on. They stared, impassively, one from behind black rim glasses that made him hard to read, another that stood stiff and still like a armour on a rack, but for the insane stare she was wearing beneath her infantry crew cut. If she’s not Perved up, she’s just fuckin nuts, Telin heard Stanley’s thoughts. There was a tone to them made her want to mute the volume- he had a functional idiot’s understanding of the world, and the arrogance of a jaded, pampered genius.

Stanley sneered out a sheesh. “Are you people trying to intimidate me in my own backyard? You know who I am, right??”

They said nothing. Stanley wasn’t even sure they shifted to notice him.

“You fuckers give me a reason why I don’t just walk out of here. Because if I open this door and walk out, I’m gonna jam so many IDed uniforms up your asses, you’ll be shitting cufflinks for a week, and it’s just gonna be work-order business for them, they’re gonna get paid.”

Because I want to look at what’s on that computer, a thought hit Stanley’s mind. The phrasing seemed odd, but to Telin’s perspective, it sounded like it came from his headspace.

Yeah. I am pretty interested in that computer, Stanley said to himself. Alarm bells went off to Telin. There was a mental inflection that was off to her, like she’d heard a vocalist sing a lyric, then a second vocalist attempt to be its exact echo, only the second singer wasn’t as skilled or experienced, clumsier and hoarser. She pulled at the thread of a less elegant mental narrative, and feelings of guilt, regret, fear and self-loathing spilled out of the gaps it opened. Telin could feel the Stanley that was still in his present state of mind, The One True Stanley, and he was in so much pain over what he now realized was the worst mistake of his life. Why did I listen to that? That wasn’t me. THAT WASN’T ME, FUCK.

He plopped himself in the a like he owned it, because in his mind, he pretty much did. He eyed the pair of tooled-up geeks that were apparently Hargrave’s muscle- they didn’t look pirate to Stanley, but on the other hand, Hargrave didn’t seem like the sort to try to send some voidsweat mopes in tattoos and cargo pants through customs and not expect them to go “yar, matey.” As she unravelled this thought pattern, Telin realized she had to pull back away from Stanley’s thinking, lest it make her stupider- to her eyes, these were either among the more professional people in Hargrave’s ranks, or merc proxies hired as a physical security layer.

Instead her eyes focused where Stanley’s were, on the palmtop screen and a symbol that looked like it was some sort of official seal from across the room. Up close, it was definitely some sort of logo, or maybe something older, like some royal’s seal or something. Wait, is that a Clan crest- it couldn’t be, there’s Terran writing there:

Chaos is Inevitability, a Sea.

Huh. It was there a second ago, but when Telin looked back for it in Stanley’s peripheral vision, there wasn’t even a hint of it. Instead, she followed his focus, along the edge of a geometric whorl that didn’t actually seem to have a stable shape- Telin was noticing it, Stanley wasn’t, but it was shifting before their eyes. He was looking too close, so close that he could make out more writing.

No Shore is Eternal.

Tension in the mixture of minds, something that felt like Figment’s reaction. A momentary wince of his pain, of reliving the shock-experience of nearly being blown up by a bomb. Here’s the part where we eject, was the coherent thought of his she could make out amid what felt like the sound of a conventional jet engine spooling up. 

Stanley blinked. When his eyes opened, the image was just the words:

Only a God Can Sail Such Terrible Waves.

Telin couldn’t fully process what she was reading before a pair of hands grabbed her by the shoulders and yanked her out of her current perception of time and space. She landed with the slightest bump in what seemed to be a vague recreation of a classic terran film theater. Down the row of seats that had broken her fall, she saw Keeda, with her feet kicked up on the seat in front of her.

“I was here the whole time!” She greeted Telin and Figment with a wave.

“...the hell?” Figment said involuntarily when he saw her. He focused himself, and turned to Telin.

“Sorry about that,” he said, and knew she was going to ask: “That was a Coding Engram, a psychic booby trap. You, uh… you don’t see many of those, enough that some folks think they don’t even exist. It’s part of what I wanted you to see.”

“So like, a quantum landmine?” Telin said, incredulous.

“Actually less versatile,” Figment said. “They’re really good at trapping minds, but they have to have the quantum nearby to keep the protocol sustained. But snap one shut on a man like Stanley and every time he sees something that reminds him of that symbol? His instructions and his loyalties get reinforced.”

“His instructions?”

Figment pointed to the screen. “You should watch the movie.”

The second that Telin turned her head, her view of Stanley’s memory resumed. The screen surged at her, as from the empty chair across the table, a thread of prismatic smoke coiled from its seat, then expanded like powder exploding against a candle flame. A figure made of molten glass emerged from underneath the dim overhead light and cooled into a man that was probably a terran once, but for a very drastic something changing him into something more and less at the same time: face structure of a Terran, but plated with scales that looked like his finger and toenails had gone rogue and pulled a hostile takeover of his skin. They were green, then blue, then a deep grey, thick in a way that looked as much like a bird’s plumage as it did a lizard’s hide. His eyes were something different, and actually two somethings different: both had secondary lids, but one was a vertical slit like a Rhidling’s eye, only rust-red in a way more like you’d see in an Arissiyan’s iris, while the other was milky, seemingly dead and blind, save for a trio of pseudo-lenses that seemed to freely float in the vitreous, readjusting and rearranging themselves as the man’s glare shifted. His nose had keratinized into a beak or a bore-horn, and a head of long hair that seemed more like the mane of a grazing animal was the foundation for a pair of horns with small, chaotic protrusions.

In other words: Hargrave’s goddamned Demon.

The man-creature snarled through a smile that looked like carnivore teeth playing a cover of insect mandibles. From beneath a coat that looked like half an animal-hide duster, half a religious vestment, he stabbed a left hand that was as well-clawed as a Rhidling’s, only coloured like green obsidian and looking about as sharp. Four fingers stabbed needles into Stanley’s scalp, and a thumb gigged him across the hairline, made him bleed just so. Psychic electricity ran through him like a pulse, made his body jolt and curl like he was being fried with a stun gun. In the mental theater Telin was in, the speakers blared reverbing music of the spheres, and in the mix, she got hints of words and phrases in multiple languages. Be efficient; if you take a loss, it comes from you, and you will trust in the Plan as response; you are one thin spoke in a large wheel, you are easily replaced and we can turn without you; only use those you have compromised; check, check and triple check you have a Pawn in play, and not just any trader- you will expose us if you bring our evidence into the wrong investigation; a willing, unknowing Pawn is more worthy than a clumsy, ill-played Rook.

The blast subsided, leaving a silence that was tangible and hollow. A yelp of pain blurred Stanley’s vision, as the hooked claws hitched in his skin reeled him downward into the tabletop, smashing him face first into the palmtop. The image he saw in its screen as he broke it was the image he saw in the blood that stung his vision when he opened his eyes. It was the image of a four-armed skeleton thrusting four spears into the surface of a planet from on high. Accompanying it, a phrase: HAIL HARGRAVE, HOLD FAST, AND WITNESS ERIS. It burned into his corneas like a brand, faded to vision spots, and was gone.

The man-creature folded his retracted his claws like switchblades. Free from their support, Stanley hit the floor in a slumping roll, his arms marionetting up like he’d taken a hard shot to the temple. The moans he made were equal parts agony and mental exhaustion, a man making the sounds of a child that needed an ambulance. It was the closest thing to pity Telin could conceivably feel for a man like Stanley, and it was only a twinge.

The man-creature stood over him, straddling his head. His two Grey Men flanked, him forming a triangle formation around him.

“Would you like to work for Captain Hargrave, Mr. Stanley?”

Stanley nodded.

That’s when the picture faced from the screen, and light in the theater died. With it, sound audibly collapsed inward on itself, resulting in an ear-pop fierce enough to make Telin wince and shut her eyes. When she opened them again, she was Real again, back in the meeting room in central security.

“So now you understand why it was easier that I show you like that,” said Figment, releasing her hand. His eyes made the oddest glow for a lingering moment, like tears made out of light and shifting reality. It faded over a few seconds, his eyes returning to their normal dark brown-unto-black.

The strangest thing about the experience, the thing that made her want to throw up more than any feeling of physical or mental distress? It was the complete absence of either, save for the strange feeling of electricity charging across her brain. She was fine, but for a tiny fading tingle, a tingle that she realized were outside thoughts being written into her grey matter, a literal download of information that just wasn’t there before. Except it felt like she knew it, like she reviewed it, like she was the one who put in the calls and got the bad news.

Like the call Figment put in yesterday, not long after volume-ripping Scumbag Scott’s memory of his corrupt activities. Something that needed checking right that second:

Why Do These Fuckers Think They Have a Base in Port of St. Joseph??

The call back, over a secured line from 99-Blackbox, the union’s intelligence end: “Unfortunately, after an operation on Evergreen, it appears that they do have a base in Port of St. Joseph. Secured intel is being punched to you- you’ve been looped in.”

Telin reviewed the details in her mind: some cyborg shock-assassin and another mindwalker like Figment had come across one of Hargrave’s family members in an outpost on Evergreen. They made everyone inside into fertilizer, save for one particularly unkillable enemy combatant that was on hand to knock off Hargrave’s relative before he talked. From him, they instead ripped out images of a debris mine converted into a pirate enclave, trade hub and slaving operation. Out of the portholes, a clear view of the The Ocean Stone, the City in Space: the massive, hollow asteroid that housed the millions-strong colony that was Port of St. Joseph.

“Interesting…” Telin heard her cousin say. “It’s… it’s not often that I want to kill someone quite so honestly… no one of them in particular, just… any one of them that wants to volunteer to lean into my hand and hang themselves…”

She was shaking. Her frown was subtle, a little twist in her lips and a mean glint in her severely nearsighted eyes. But her hands were curled into clawed fists, and they were vibrating. Because Keeda was a Maniro by blood, Maniro of Maniro. Maniro was one of the clans that had built St. Joe’s, made a colony founded by terrans and cogitoi into a place that rhidlings too had a stake in. They were core and cornerstone to its history, they still operated the shipbuilding yard inside of its void-territories. The Saganda Clan followed in their wake, and became known as the Gardeners of St. Joseph for their extensive work in geoengineering a dead, stone hollow into a bafflingly vibrant ecosystem of cave flora and plants capable of living off of artificial sunlight. Both were now seen as being prominent forces for good in the city, the Maniros representing the strength of Freeland infrastructure, the Sagandas for pouring rivers into an underground desert.

And now, they of Maniro, had been set up to be the traffickers of kidnapped members of Saganda.

The enormity of what had happened to them washed over Telin, as the details smacked her in her forebrain. They were patsies for a reason, because of their Clan, because of the importance of their Clan. Because if the Maniros were found to be slavers, it’d cast a shadow of corruption over the entire colony, let alone Maniro, who would be seen as the worst among their kin. Their smeared presence in the colony would stoke the sort of intolerance that men like Hargrave built themselves off of, leaving wiggle room for a theoretical cadre of Hargrave-aligned members of the local council to consolidate power… which 99 intel believes already is in place and is already benefitting from Hargrave’s influence and boons. 

“...so I get to go and take Mr. Stanley’s face off with my claws, yeah?” Telin asked Figment.

“He’s not doing well, actually,” Figment said, his voice playing a tiny violin. “I don’t think he liked being made to relive that, he’s stopped talking since I let him go. And eating. And blinking. Trust me, when he comes out of how he’s feeling, he won’t be treated softly. Reformation programs don’t easy on SecVols that use their clearances to mature their criminal careers.”

She wanted to say, I should have ripped his throat out. But the new data in her head kept it internal- no, actually, that would have benefitted them. It would have felt great, and only helped them, massively.

“I guess his life just became a tasteful studio apartment staring off into deep space for the foreseeable future. Y’know, if he doesn’t burn out and get himself shortened under the guillotine for acting out…” Telin didn’t like cages, she preferred a healthy balance of mental hospitals and graves. But what do you do with a man whose crime is intolerable cruelty, who’s too healthy to be ill and too pathetic to kill? “Maybe if he’s nice, they’ll give him a telescope…”

“Maybe,” Figment agreed. “This is why I wanted you looped in- not only were you targeted, you are now proof of a conspiracy. I can’t just let you go, but also, you’re deactivated 99 assets, deep enough into our union that you have enough rank to sit off the ground in the chain of command and require a Callsign while under active duty. You are members of a targeted group that was an attempted leverage point by a Hostile Outlier Element; you are also Individuals of Exceptional Ability. Believe me, where we might be going would benefit from a pilot cleared for anything with thrusters and an starship engineer with enough credentials to disarm a Consortium House’s nuclear weapon, let alone Freeland systems compromised by Outlier technology. You can understand why many already think you Need to be along with this operation as it develops.”

“And you can count me as one of them,” Telin said. It was easy to say, in a way that she knew was hers, not any influence of Figment’s, nor anything that Stanley’s thoughts had put into her psyche. It made her feel clean to say it, like she’d shaken off the dirt and debris her psychic trip had stained her with. Revert to the training she’d undertaken against quantum threat: repeat it in your own language, in other languages you know, say it in a different way every time you say it. If you can still vocalize the thought without using any words the psychic did when you were under their influence, it’s probably yours. “At the very least, you probably need a ride over there, I imagine.”

“I need that, yes,” Figment said. “I also need more on our side. Because right now, this isn’t a situation that we can just roll into with an army and start flatlining bad guys; we need specialists to work with this to work smarter and dismantle this thing from the inside.”

“Dismantling is one of my talents,” Keeda said. “You have my mark.” Her voice trailed off with a growl, her thoughts distantly elsewhere, and dark.

“So that’s us three,” Telin said. “Anyone else so far?”

Figment produced his phone, opening the screen and throwing a series of images to the meeting rooms’ screen.

The first was an arissiyan woman, breathtaking in her facial structure, with flawless hair and ears long enough to make Telin look. She was wearing a pair of cobalt-blue round-lens shades in her picture, and that was strange given the purpose of a casefile photo. The alternate image said why: with them removed, her eyes were empty save for a sunken graft of skin over lids that were cauterized shut. It explained the one imperfection in her face, the heat-scar across the flat of her nose’s bridge- a clumsy hand had done her surgery, on an uncaring one.

“Snare. An asset, like you. Blind but for her quantum perception, which makes her a somewhat limited direct combatant when it comes to a firefight. And also, if she lays one finger on you, she will become your one God of Creation and Destruction, she’s so completely out of even my depth as a covert quantum. I can steal memories in a mindscape and zap people with electricity; she can make you believe you’re dead while standing, breathing and still capable of following directions. She doesn’t have to volume rip an an interrogation subject, she can make them want to sing what they know, literally. She can turn invisible by making a mark just think she’s not there, hallucinate her absence. It’s where she gets her name from- one minute, you’re safe, the next, she’s got you.”

“If you can’t change a mind, you can turn it’s pockets out and show the contents to the honest…” Keeda said mostly to herself.

“Exactly,” Figment said. “Plus it’s nice having someone around to remind myself that I’m just a capable warlock. It keeps me honest…” He swiped, and the next image filled the screen.

Telin wasn’t sure what she was looking at, at first. Largely a mechanical being, hulking and asymmetric, so she assumed some form of combat-frame cogitoi, right up until she looked at the profile and saw TERRAN in plain text. Their face was obscured by a visor, or a fully enclosing environment helmet, it was hard to tell in the picture. Even still, Telin could make out features, and they were a strange mixture of chilling and bolstering: they’d been heavily reconstructed, and not via reconstitution, but reconstruction in bare metal and polymer. Scars were deep enough to suggest penetrating trauma to the skull that they’d survived, and not just one instance of it. Yet even still, there was an apparent warmth and serenity in their eyes- a predator animal, but one in its glorious element.

“Sisu. They’re an awful lot. They were found a Consortium support ship, and as far as they know, their entire life to that point was spent being added to by fash boffins trying to see what the saturation point for heavy-grade cybernetic augmentation was. Pricks never figured it out, cause Sisu survived everything they were wired with, and this includes the mini antimatter reactor in their chest that they call a heart. Yes, they can use it as a weapon, before you ask. Thing is, when you’ve got access to weapons that feed directly off that power source, you’ve got a lot more direct means of bringing that energy to bear. We can’t fit a tank into St. Joe’s, but we can fit Sisu, and they’re better than five tanks. Op4 shows us muscle? Sisu will show them hell up close.”

“I was about to question you being a warlock,” Telin said, eyes wide. “And then you show me a demon you’re in contact with…”

“Please,” Figment said with a smile. “Sisu’s a painter. They like watercolour landscapes, in addition to making bad guys ashes.” He swiped his phone one more time. “Now, see, this guy? This guy’s just mean.”

He was Terran, shaggy haired, with eyes that looked sleepy, sunken and gaunt. The lines on his face showed a lifetime of pain and stress; the curl of his lips, the resting smirk despite all else, told her he was an absolute bastard, though whether or not it was to positive or negative effect remained to be seen. Curious- despite the wear on his face, it all looked like stress and hard life. The only scar on his face was a split eyebrow, and parts of him looked strangely young and vital, despite how weathered and roughed up he seemed otherwise. He could have been 22, 32, or 42- all had evidence. The profile said ‘HEAVILY AUGMENTED’- it was probably a side effect of whatever self-repair systems he had, or the maintenance processes he underwent.

He had an energy that was familiar. She didn’t like it, not because of the familiarity, but the pain associated with it. Another one of you… she said inwardly.

“Canine. He might look like he’s in a state of mall-punk arrested development, but trust me, this motherfucker’s other leather jacket is made of dead fascists. Apparently he’s the product of some insane Consortium super soldier project that got its corporation liquidated and its House subdivided, it was such a money pit fiasco. The pricetag on his augments are estimated at around 3.2 billion dollars in material cost alone, and he’s the only working prototype they managed to keep sane and alive. He can do the funnybook hero stuff you’re expecting, tall buildings and locomotives and all that, but the shit that makes him dangerous is the sensor suite- you can’t hide from this guy, because he’s made to sniff out people using everything from sonar to spectrogram to DNA profiling, and subvert everything from active security systems to psychics. He’s sort of like if a bunker buster chain smoked.”

Telin blinked, slowly. “He looks like a nightmare,” she said.

“He looks nicer than that, but would be nice to have a nightmare on hand for these purposes…” added Keeda.

“Interrogator. Soldier. Commando. And now, Pilot, Engineer and… eh, Spy, people get a bit of a bug up them over ‘Warlock.’”

“Eh, not going to argue about Warlock, given what just happened…” Keeda said. She was still feeling the brain tingles, and having fun with them despite the sour mood. “So then- what now?”

Telin already knew the answer: “We get out of here, and put these people on the backfoot. Because I don’t think they’re going to be expecting us. Especially not with him.”

Her eyes went back to the screen, and the three profiles shown side-by-side in summary. Snare, beautiful and mysterious; Sisu, baleful and powerful; Canine, terrifying, gleeful, and touched- she knew him, especially. She didn’t know him, but she did know who he was, and it made old aches apparent. She numbed them, drove them down deep, and put her mind back to business.

“Especially not with them,” she said, making the change in her life final: no more wandering; back to work.