Starfall: A LitRPG Adventure (Tower of Somnus Book 3), page 7
“Did you get a chance to see what it was?” Kat asked with a frown.
“Nope.” Whippoorwill shook her head. “It had enough security that I wasn’t going to risk it with a tenuous wireless connection. That said—”
“If it was secure and his system wasn’t,” Kat finished for her, “that means that the client is probably a real player even if Spook is just a nobody.”
Whip just nodded and drove as Kat chewed her lip and thought the situation over. Every instinct in her body was warning her about this job, but at the same time, she needed to re-establish herself in the industry. Pretty much everyone had seen the video of Xander and her fighting their way through Field Tower, but she still didn’t have the contacts and support team that she would need to become a full solo operator.
Whippoorwill was a start, but if she was going to do this on her own, Kat would need to program several more names into her smartglass. For one, she needed someone trustworthy that she could use as an intermediary with the corporate world. She’d had hopes for the Copper Spook, but this mission assured her that he would be a stepping stone to a more competent broker at best.
Other than that, she was still sorely lacking. Kat would need a source for equipment that might not be available legally, a fence for stolen information, a team of associates that could provide trustworthy backup on bigger jobs, the list ran on and on.
Without Xander, she was in a bit of a tailspin. Kat had the skills and experience needed to complete a job, but the logistics of running a team were beyond her. She didn’t even have proper contacts, let alone anyone she could trust. The entire situation was aggravating, but there wasn’t anything she could do but take a risk or walk away from the underworld entirely.
The only real alternatives to establishing her own network were Belle, retiring from the game, or joining one of the smaller crews that the ChromeDogs had splintered into. Crews that would only remind her of Xander’s sacrifice while frantically exploiting his and her reputation to earn a couple of extra credits.
“We’re here.” Whip’s words jerked Kat out of her reverie.
She willed her eyes to switch into Nightvision. The dark park brightened until Kat could see everything while Whippoorwill slowly drove her car past. On a park bench across from a statue of Friedrich Hayek, a man nervously rustled a newspaper, the glint of a metal handgun in his lap.
They kept moving, and Kat’s mouth thinned into a line. A trio of men and a woman huddled behind a nearby public bathroom. All of them were armed, and the woman’s face was over half chrome. Twice while the car circled, one of the men peeked his head around the corner, checking in on the ‘handler’ with a newspaper.
Finally, after almost circumventing the park, they drove past a van, pulled over by the side of the road with its rear doors open. Inside, a slim man in a green windbreaker and a baseball cap was smoking a cigarette while chatting with another heavily chromed individual.
Kat shook her head, motioning for Whip to keep driving as she turned grimly to her companion.
“You said that Spook had an e-mail with my name on it waiting when I walked into that shithole of his?”
Whippoorwill nodded, brushing a couple strands of pink hair from her forehead as she pulled them away from the street that circled the park.
“Fuck it.” Kat shrugged. “I’m amped and ready to go for a mission and this is an insultingly bad set up. What do you say we go and ask Mister Spook who put him up to it?”
“Honestly?” Whip asked. “My only real concern is that this is some sort of double play. The e-mail was only the biggest of the red flags that he was flying.”
“I’ll keep it in mind.” Kat settled back into her seat, letting her eyes return to normal. “Still, I haven’t publicly announced that you’re working with me, and I don’t think I actually used Nightvision on the Field Tower broadcast. It’s entirely possible that he just didn’t know that you would dismantle his network from the car and that I would be able to make the goons he sent to ‘disrupt’ the exchange.”
“Regardless.” She grinned at Whip. “I can’t think of anything more fun than letting you tear his network apart again so that we can download all of those ‘super elite secrets’ he claims to have. Bet we can auction those off for more than the two thousand credits he used to bait this entire farce.”
“Just be careful.” Whippoorwill sighed, a long, suffering smile on her face. “I know better than to hope that you’ll keep this quiet, but at least keep it safe.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Kat grinned through the nylon pulled over her face. The improvised mask wasn’t much, but then again, neither was Copper Spook. It would keep anyone monitoring Spook’s video feed from making out her features before Whippoorwill could delete the evidence.
She touched the earpiece to her smart panel, eyes not moving from the pawnshop that Copper Spook used as his headquarters from her vantage point, one store over.
“Is our friend still there, Chiffon?”
“He’s in his bedroom wasting time on a message board right now,” Whip replied, her voice distracted. “Give me a second and I’ll have the store’s security disabled.”
“Is there anything I need to worry about beyond the automatic lock on the front door and some cameras?” she asked, creeping toward the edge of the rooftop
“Not that I can—wait.” Whippoorwill caught herself. “I’m seeing receipts for explosives in the windowsills and it looks like he installed a pressure-triggered shotgun trap just inside the door to the back stairwell. Give me a moment and…”
Her companion trailed off, too focused on her work to carry on the conversation. Honestly? It was a blessing. Even after Kat had managed to pry Whippoorwill away from the hotel in the Shell where the girl had been drinking away their sorrows, she’d been a shade of her normal self. Withdrawn, morose, and depressed, it tore at Kat to see her friend struggling like that.
Dorrik had a point. There was nothing for grief like throwing yourself into your work. Distractions might not solve everything, but it sure beat wallowing in misery. Pulling Whippoorwill out of the Shell had been the right choice. It was slow, but day by day, she was starting to seem more like her old self.
“Got it,” Whip continued, satisfied. “The pressure plates need a trickle of electricity to work. Copper Spook has them running on the utility circuit, but he doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing. His lights and air conditioner are tied into the electrical grid, all I had to do—”
“I hate to interrupt,” Kat chuckled, “but yes or no, are the traps disabled?”
“Yes, Erinyes.” Whippoorwill sniffed. “If you want to simplify all of my work down to just one word. Yes.”
“So,” Kat continued. “I’m good to go, and he’s alone upstairs wasting time on the internet, right?”
“You’re a philistine, but yes.” Whip chuckled. “I’ll save the lecture for when you’ve secured the building.”
“Looking forward to it,” Kat finished, pouring mana into Levitation as she dropped off of the roof and into the alley behind Spook’s pawn shop.
A second later, she activated Shadow, bending what little light there was around herself as she slipped around the side of the house. Kat reached out to open the door, catching herself at the last second. No infiltration suit meant fingerprints.
Muttering quietly to herself, Kat put her shoulder into the door instead, pushing it open without a sound. Her eyes switched to Nightvision as she stepped into the building. Once again, she took in the barred cages filled with firearms and cyberware, this time taking a mental tally of which looked valuable. Above her, cameras were immobile, their red lights dark as she crept past.
At the back of the store, Kat reached into her pocket, pulling out a paper napkin to use it to turn the knob, revealing a dark and empty stairwell. She activated Cat Step, deadening her footfalls as she ascended to the second level.
She froze in the narrow hallway. At the far end was a bathroom, its door ajar, four rooms opening off of the walkway, two per side. She squinted, holding her breath as she surveyed the floor.
For a moment, nothing happened. The dingy and trash strewn hallway sat there in absolute darkness, the hum of poorly installed wiring the only sound to disturb the silence.
Then a male voice quietly, but heatedly muttering to itself.
“That’s what I thought. There’s no way that Agthorn is an S-tier striker. Without Tallarass at healer, he wouldn’t have made it out of the octafinals.”
Far room. Right side. She activated Cat Step once again, sneaking closer to the room. The door was open a crack and she could see a skinny twenty-something man reclining on a torn and stained couch.
The room was mostly dark. Without Nightvision, the man would have been almost completely invisible, the only source of illumination revealing his smirk the backlight from the smartpanel display in front of his face. The man’s pupils moved rapidly, composing some message through the ocular keyboard built into the smartpanel.
“Agthorn is a fucking piece of shit and his fans are worse,” he rambled. “Grand Prix champion, my ass.”
Kat pushed the door open, napkin in hand.
It creaked.
Hinges that likely hadn’t been maintained since their installation screamed. In the almost complete silence of the empty building, it might as well have been an alarm.
Spook lurched up from the couch, his eyes widening. She slammed her shoulder into the door, no longer worried about being quiet, slamming it open and bolting into the room even as the information broker shoved his hand under the couch’s cushion, frantically feeling around for something.
Dazzle ignited the room, a cone of intensely bright white and yellow strobes directed at Spook’s face just as one of Kat’s throwing knives slammed into his forearm.
He screamed, falling off of the couch even as a compact pistol fell from under the couch cushion, thudding onto the cheap wooden floor next to him. Without taking her eyes off of the injured man, Kat kicked the pistol away, crouching over him a second later with her knife to his throat.
Without saying a word, she yanked the smartpanel from his face, throwing it contemptuously onto the nearby couch.
“What the fuck, man?” Spook choked out between sobs as he clutched his hurt arm at the elbow, as if he were willing the blood to stop leaking from the ruined appendage.
“Seriously, what the hell?” He tried to scoot back only for Kat to press her knife into the side of his throat, drawing a bead of blood. “I need to get to a portadoc, man. I think I’m starting to feel a bit lightheaded.”
“We can talk about doctors once you answer a couple questions.” Kat’s voice was wintery cold as she stared down at his squirming body.
“Who even are you?” He whimpered. “I didn’t do anything to anyone. You must have the wrong guy.”
“I don’t know ‘Copper Spook.’” She spat the words out. “You tell me if I have the wrong guy? You must have the memory of a goldfish if you forgot setting me up literally a half hour ago.”
“Erinyes.” His face blanched. “That wasn’t me! There must have been other people already at the site when the exchange went down, I didn’t have anything to do with it.”
She pressed the knife against his throat, silencing the babbling man.
“Shut up.” Kat’s voice was impassive. “Yes or no. Do you have any security on this building beyond mines in the windows, and the trap on the downstairs stairwell.”
“No.” Spook squirmed under her, face twisted in pain. “That’s everything.”
“Great,” Kat replied with false cheer. “Chiffon, coast is clear. He says you’ve identified all of the traps, and Spook is a smart boy that knows I will gut him like a fish if he tries to pull a fast one.”
He stopped thrashing under Kat, his eyes widening as the full realization of his situation crashed down on the young man.
“Wait,” he began, lower lip trembling. “You might actually kill me? I’m just a middle man! I didn’t do anything! I just took money and did what I was told.”
“You also attempted to have me killed in the course of a fairly negotiated contract,” she responded with a shake of her head. “I hope you can understand why I might be a little bit cranky right now. If you’re lucky, you’re only going to lose your name over this. No one sane will work with an information broker that sells out the other half of a partnership.”
“You don’t understand!” There was definite panic on his pale face. Kat tried to ignore the blood pooling around her knees from his bleeding arm. “The Millennium guys would have killed me. They reached out to everyone in Chiwaukee and let us know that if you were seen on the streets, that they needed to know first. Some guy made me sign a contract forcing me to send you on that mission. I would have argued but—”
Spook winced. “It’s hard discussing terms with a chromed out psychopath with a gun in your mouth. The barrel impairs your ability to speak.”
“Millennium?” Kat scoffed. “They’ve been broken up since the Field Tower raid. I think that’s the only time I’ve seen every megacorporation jointly issue a ‘kill on sight’ order for a crew. You’re going to need something more than rumors of ghosts and ghouls to get you out of this one.”
“Maybe some ghosts aren’t quite as dead as we thought,” Whippoorwill said thoughtfully from behind Kat, sliding past her en route to the information broker’s network hub.
“Looking through our friend’s e-mails here.” She nodded casually toward Copper Spook’s pinned and bleeding form. “Whoever he was talking to sure brought up Mr. Jackson’s name a lot.”
“What do you mean, Chiffon?” Kat asked, frowning.
“This isn’t a one-off transaction.” Whip reached up to the back of her head, moving the back of her face covering aside just enough for her to pull out the direct hookup from her cranial jack and plug it into the hub. “His e-mails are littered with jobs from contacts that identify themselves with Millennium. In fact, I don’t think I’ve actually seen anything from a corporate source.”
“Wait.” Spook squinted at Whippoorwill. “Chiffon? Like that anime cat?”
Whip glared at the prone man, leaning over and placing her foot on top of his injured arm. Without shifting her gaze, she growled at Kat.
“I swear by everything holy, Erinyes. When you least expect it, I will get revenge for this. It might be ten seconds from now, it might be tomorrow, it might even be next year, but your time is coming.”
“Oh, come on.” Kat snorted. “Chiffon was the cutest of the princess cats. It’s a good name for you, and you know it.”
“Jesus.” Spook looked from Kat to Whippoorwill and back again. “Are you two going to kill me, or are you just going to keep flirting with each other like I’m not here? Because even though I can’t see you, it’s really hot and—”
“First option, actually,” Whippoorwill cut him off, drawing her pistol and putting it against the man’s forehead. His eyes went wide a moment before the dull thump of the pistol report, muffled by his skull, caved Copper Spook’s face in.
Kat jumped back, sputtering as she tried to wipe blood and brain matter off of herself. Whip just grinned at her and holstered her pistol.
“He had an entire file on you, Erinyes,” she shrugged. “It looked like he was trying to use Millennium’s money to hire informants to track you down and he was getting close. If we let him walk, he’d just become a liability.”
Kat glanced at the body on the floor. Blood pooled around him, staining the cheap wooden floor as it cooled.
“You could have held off on shooting him until we dragged some answers out of him,” she replied, trying ineffectually to wipe the gore from her outfit with a miffed tone to her voice. “It’s a bit difficult to get an answer from a corpse.”
“I have the answers we need already.” Whippoorwill shrugged. “He thought he was a superspy or something. There’s literally a drive labeled ‘blackmail’ where he’s archived every interaction with his handlers from Millennium. I have names, communication logs, faces, missions, and intelligence. Hell, he even had some samurai birth names rather than their street handles stored away in a folder marked ‘just in case.’”
“Was he working for Millennium?” Kat asked, a frown on her face. “They got caught siding with aliens against humanity itself. They aren’t supposed to exist anymore.”
“They exist,” Whip replied, unplugging herself from the network. “I mean, they don’t publicly call themselves Millennium anymore. There are a number of splinter organizations such as Phoenix Operations, Knights of Lazarus, and C.D. Ward Ltd, all of whom absorbed ‘refugees’ from Millennium when it broke up. From these files, it looks like they’re all still loyal to Mr. Jackson.”
“Erinyes,” Whippoorwill continued with a frown. “There’s no way the megacorporations don’t know. They’ve turned a blind eye because it’s too much of a hassle to root out Millennium’s remnants. Now that everyone has rebranded, they’re perfectly happy returning to business as usual.”
“Is that why you shot Spook?” Kat asked, sighing. “Because he was involved with Millennium?”
“He was more than involved with them.” Whip toed his cooling body. “It sure seems like he was a regional coordinator for their Chiwaukee operations. There’s still a lot of data that I need to sort through, including some encrypted files associated with an ongoing observation mission in Chiwaukee, but Copper Spook was far from innocent. He might’ve been forced into his position initially, but he performed his role as their local organizer with a fair amount of glee.”
“I get that we probably needed to finish him off.” Kat gave up on trying to wipe the blood out of her clothes, chalking them up as a total loss. “I still don’t see why you needed to shoot him mid-interrogation. It was messy and wasteful.”
“What?” Whippoorwill snorted, stepping over the body and walking past Kat to the bedroom door. “Ask him questions and let him squirm trying to justify why he set us up? We never would have gotten anything useful out of him. He would have just lied to us over and over again while I fact checked him from his own archives.”
