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Stepping out onto the commercial loading/unloading tarmac beside the Markov spaceport, Raph Hannigan maintained a carefully neutral expression.
The city smelled of exhaust, dust, and hot asphalt, street food, far too many living bodies and the sour scent of ancient concrete infused with runoff from decades of garbage. For a man used to the filtered and climate-controlled atmosphere of the hub it was an unwelcome assault on the senses - almost as unwelcome as the reminder it provided of how far he had fallen in the Kaalakiota corporate hierarchy.
The lawyer hadn’t been demoted. Not officially. But the fact that he was here at all, this far from the Hub without an escort, a blank check for bribery, or even a pre-arranged company car was as good as an all-caps e-mail that this was his last chance to salvage this mess.
The massive subterranean biological remains, with all of the promise for new products and technologies they had held were… unrecoverable. The site and the associated infrastructure the corporation had installed were a total loss.
The experimental programs the Kaalakiota corporation had established, under Dr. Shrank’s purview, to investigate the recovered bio-samples had all come to a screeching halt when those self-same samples had responded, violently, to certain events on the surface of Inverxe; some of the best biologists in the Crossroads had needed to be restored from backup, and the entire experimental stock was, with the help of some very well-armed security personnel, eventually destroyed.
Out of the whole increasingly expensive boondoggle, only one potential for profitability remained.
Raph needed to find Jewels.
Dr. Eliza Shrank, the woman Raph blamed for at least half his recent woes, emerged from the building behind him, discharged by the space-port’s mirrored-glass automatic doors like a product from a vending machine. The stout redhead, staggering beneath the weight of a reinforced black briefcase, sidled up behind him and set the case down on the curb.
“Okay,” she gasped, doubling over with her hands on her knees. “Give me a second. Did I mention I hate field-work? Because… I hate fieldwork. Fuck’s sake.”
Raph adjusted his tie. He checked his cufflinks. He tried not to be bothered by the fact that his navy-blue suit was in last year’s cut.
“Well then you shouldn’t have lost your test-subject,” he said.
She glared angrily at the lawyer. “You’re the one who let her out of the damn hospital!”
Raph sighed. He hadn’t ‘let her out’ of the hospital. The terms of Jewels’ contract with Kaalakiota re: the repair job on the Hub’s power distribution systems and associated benefits/ remuneration had simply superseded the by-then-defunct work-contract which Dr. Shrank’s gaggle of rabid researchers had, in their hurry to acquire test-subjects, bought out. Legally speaking, Jewels should never have been a part of Shrank’s experiment in the first place; But with the technological and subsequent bureaucratic issues still plaguing the Hub slowing things down, by the time the paperwork was all updated and processed it was already too late.
Which would have been fine, from the point of view of the company, if the surveyor had simply died horribly like everyone else who participated in Shrank’s experiment. However, according to Kaalakiota’s back-channels with Cytokine Industries, Jewels was not only alive and a person of interest, but showing early signs of significant post-human accession.
That power-load, as far as the masters of the CRVIII space-station were concerned, was the rightful property of the Kaalakiota corporation - and Jewels was, depending on her willingness to return to the station, either a wayward employee who owed them a considerable amount of money for unique biological enhancements not covered by her health-plan (but payable through Kaalakiota’s generous Indentured Service Compensation Program) or just a fucking thief.
It was a legal claim unlikely to be accepted by a Markovian court, especially considering the particulars of the case - which was where Raph Hannigan came into the picture.
It was his job to bring Jewels back to Inverxe, or die trying.
“Well. Arguing about who’s at fault isn’t going to change anything,” the Lawyer said, closing one eye for a better perspective on the internal display superimposed on his visual-field.
The public networks here, while not as bad as what you got in an Inverxian mining camp, weren’t as robust as he was used to, and ordering a private car was proving a bit of a pain: He may have been on the company’s shit-list at the moment, but Raph hadn’t spent ten subjective years, over the course of a long-ago afternoon, in Kaalakiota’s Corporate and Tactical Law Vocational Academy Creche just to ride around in a Markovian rickshaw or a commercial sky-taxi.
“Can you get a read on her location?”
Dr. Shrank rooted around in the pockets of her denim jacket until she produced a tricorder with a number of obviously-homebrew and possibly-illegal modifications; It had two extra holo-display nodes. There was a sensor suite from a completely different model bolted onto the front. It had a collapsible antenna, and there was a coil of copper wire sticking out of one side of the casing with a perfectly cut gem floating in the center, glowing a soft sapphire blue which looked distressingly like Cherenkov radiation.
The mad biologist poked at it for a moment. A detailed series of graphs and maps flickered a rapid-fire barrage of information in the air between them.
Eliza laughed nervously, then sighed and frowned. “Well, she’s outside the city for sure, which fits with what Cytokines people told us. I can’t get a positive fix because of the barriers, but uh…it’s kind of crazy actually. Just give me a minute to re-calibrate this thing. I’m pretty sure this can’t possibly be right.”
Raph had finally managed to hire a car for their private use. He blinked hard to clear the network-display from his vision and turned to regard his unlikely partner.
“Explain, please.”
A crowd emerged from the space-port, flowing around them, boarding taxis and rickshaws and shuttle-busses, diffusing out into the city. The lawyer positioned himself next to the scientist’s briefcase, his calculated demeanor of corporate threat successfully dissuading all but a single aspiring baggage-thief.
Raph tazed him, revealing in the process that his cuff-links were both stylish and functional. The two of them watched the man twitch while Shrank elaborated on their problem.
“See, I designed this detector to be very sensitive. The hypothesis was that if 36-H has survived this long then something must have significantly weakened the treatment, allowing it to overtake her biology in a controlled and survivable way. So I was expecting a weak signal.”
Raph kicked the would-be thief lightly in the buttocks. The man was starting to seize less violently, rolling over onto his side and making some initial efforts at crawling away. “But the signal isn’t weak,” Raph said.
Eliza fiddled with and poked at the custom sensor-array. “If my initial readings aren’t wrong? She’s peaking at almost fifteen percent.”
The lawyer could tell this was supposed to be significant. He hefted the briefcase as a sleek black sky-car touched down in front of them. “Fifteen percent of what?”
“You know that planetside monster-fight that had the monitor-creche all falling all over themselves a little bit ago? And checking the station’s readiness for strategic sub-orbital bombardment? 36-H has the same energy signature as the non-Unmade xeno-draco-gigamorph participant. The yellow one. Ghidorah, I think they called it. She’s peaking at fifteen percent of that.”
The city smelled of exhaust, dust, and hot asphalt, street food, far too many living bodies and the sour scent of ancient concrete infused with runoff from decades of garbage. For a man used to the filtered and climate-controlled atmosphere of the hub it was an unwelcome assault on the senses - almost as unwelcome as the reminder it provided of how far he had fallen in the Kaalakiota corporate hierarchy.
The lawyer hadn’t been demoted. Not officially. But the fact that he was here at all, this far from the Hub without an escort, a blank check for bribery, or even a pre-arranged company car was as good as an all-caps e-mail that this was his last chance to salvage this mess.
The massive subterranean biological remains, with all of the promise for new products and technologies they had held were… unrecoverable. The site and the associated infrastructure the corporation had installed were a total loss.
The experimental programs the Kaalakiota corporation had established, under Dr. Shrank’s purview, to investigate the recovered bio-samples had all come to a screeching halt when those self-same samples had responded, violently, to certain events on the surface of Inverxe; some of the best biologists in the Crossroads had needed to be restored from backup, and the entire experimental stock was, with the help of some very well-armed security personnel, eventually destroyed.
Out of the whole increasingly expensive boondoggle, only one potential for profitability remained.
Raph needed to find Jewels.
Dr. Eliza Shrank, the woman Raph blamed for at least half his recent woes, emerged from the building behind him, discharged by the space-port’s mirrored-glass automatic doors like a product from a vending machine. The stout redhead, staggering beneath the weight of a reinforced black briefcase, sidled up behind him and set the case down on the curb.
“Okay,” she gasped, doubling over with her hands on her knees. “Give me a second. Did I mention I hate field-work? Because… I hate fieldwork. Fuck’s sake.”
Raph adjusted his tie. He checked his cufflinks. He tried not to be bothered by the fact that his navy-blue suit was in last year’s cut.
“Well then you shouldn’t have lost your test-subject,” he said.
She glared angrily at the lawyer. “You’re the one who let her out of the damn hospital!”
Raph sighed. He hadn’t ‘let her out’ of the hospital. The terms of Jewels’ contract with Kaalakiota re: the repair job on the Hub’s power distribution systems and associated benefits/ remuneration had simply superseded the by-then-defunct work-contract which Dr. Shrank’s gaggle of rabid researchers had, in their hurry to acquire test-subjects, bought out. Legally speaking, Jewels should never have been a part of Shrank’s experiment in the first place; But with the technological and subsequent bureaucratic issues still plaguing the Hub slowing things down, by the time the paperwork was all updated and processed it was already too late.
Which would have been fine, from the point of view of the company, if the surveyor had simply died horribly like everyone else who participated in Shrank’s experiment. However, according to Kaalakiota’s back-channels with Cytokine Industries, Jewels was not only alive and a person of interest, but showing early signs of significant post-human accession.
That power-load, as far as the masters of the CRVIII space-station were concerned, was the rightful property of the Kaalakiota corporation - and Jewels was, depending on her willingness to return to the station, either a wayward employee who owed them a considerable amount of money for unique biological enhancements not covered by her health-plan (but payable through Kaalakiota’s generous Indentured Service Compensation Program) or just a fucking thief.
It was a legal claim unlikely to be accepted by a Markovian court, especially considering the particulars of the case - which was where Raph Hannigan came into the picture.
It was his job to bring Jewels back to Inverxe, or die trying.
“Well. Arguing about who’s at fault isn’t going to change anything,” the Lawyer said, closing one eye for a better perspective on the internal display superimposed on his visual-field.
The public networks here, while not as bad as what you got in an Inverxian mining camp, weren’t as robust as he was used to, and ordering a private car was proving a bit of a pain: He may have been on the company’s shit-list at the moment, but Raph hadn’t spent ten subjective years, over the course of a long-ago afternoon, in Kaalakiota’s Corporate and Tactical Law Vocational Academy Creche just to ride around in a Markovian rickshaw or a commercial sky-taxi.
“Can you get a read on her location?”
Dr. Shrank rooted around in the pockets of her denim jacket until she produced a tricorder with a number of obviously-homebrew and possibly-illegal modifications; It had two extra holo-display nodes. There was a sensor suite from a completely different model bolted onto the front. It had a collapsible antenna, and there was a coil of copper wire sticking out of one side of the casing with a perfectly cut gem floating in the center, glowing a soft sapphire blue which looked distressingly like Cherenkov radiation.
The mad biologist poked at it for a moment. A detailed series of graphs and maps flickered a rapid-fire barrage of information in the air between them.
Eliza laughed nervously, then sighed and frowned. “Well, she’s outside the city for sure, which fits with what Cytokines people told us. I can’t get a positive fix because of the barriers, but uh…it’s kind of crazy actually. Just give me a minute to re-calibrate this thing. I’m pretty sure this can’t possibly be right.”
Raph had finally managed to hire a car for their private use. He blinked hard to clear the network-display from his vision and turned to regard his unlikely partner.
“Explain, please.”
A crowd emerged from the space-port, flowing around them, boarding taxis and rickshaws and shuttle-busses, diffusing out into the city. The lawyer positioned himself next to the scientist’s briefcase, his calculated demeanor of corporate threat successfully dissuading all but a single aspiring baggage-thief.
Raph tazed him, revealing in the process that his cuff-links were both stylish and functional. The two of them watched the man twitch while Shrank elaborated on their problem.
“See, I designed this detector to be very sensitive. The hypothesis was that if 36-H has survived this long then something must have significantly weakened the treatment, allowing it to overtake her biology in a controlled and survivable way. So I was expecting a weak signal.”
Raph kicked the would-be thief lightly in the buttocks. The man was starting to seize less violently, rolling over onto his side and making some initial efforts at crawling away. “But the signal isn’t weak,” Raph said.
Eliza fiddled with and poked at the custom sensor-array. “If my initial readings aren’t wrong? She’s peaking at almost fifteen percent.”
The lawyer could tell this was supposed to be significant. He hefted the briefcase as a sleek black sky-car touched down in front of them. “Fifteen percent of what?”
“You know that planetside monster-fight that had the monitor-creche all falling all over themselves a little bit ago? And checking the station’s readiness for strategic sub-orbital bombardment? 36-H has the same energy signature as the non-Unmade xeno-draco-gigamorph participant. The yellow one. Ghidorah, I think they called it. She’s peaking at fifteen percent of that.”
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