Dark Rising, pt 2

Sorry this is a bit late. Had a bit of a schedule shift at work that made it necessary to push this post back by a day. If you haven’t already, you should read Part 1.

“Does anybody know where the hell we’re at?” Milosh glanced around the dirty brown landscape pocked with the occasional green field or herd of hulking desdemodu slowly making their way through the valley.

Kezz snorted. “You know, for a pilot, you really suck at being a navigator.”

Milosh extended his middle finger in her direction, his other hand steering the rented gravcraft haphazardly along the dirt road. “You wanna drive?”

An exasperated voice broke in, “Do you two ever stop?” Vasili looked less than amused, even behind his darkened tactical glasses with his kufiya drawn up over his nose to block the dust, his carbine gripped muzzle down next to his leg. For her part, Kezz had her own rifle perched on the edge of the open gravcraft, periodically using the scope to get an up-close-and-personal look at their surroundings. She shrugged apologetically and went back to observing the landscape.

The directions they’d been given were less than precise. Kezz guessed it had something to do with the Consortium trying to keep everything as hush-hush as possible. The scuttlebutt they’d gathered from the native Dabaran citizens on the transport was that the Consortium equipment wasn’t for the farms and fields; that was all just a cover. Rumor had it that the Consortium was trying to find another way into the Wound since the Foundation had yet to have a team return from using the front door.

The Wound was vast, looking almost like it could be a natural landmass feature, but had enough structure to it to make it certain it was manmade. Or at least portal builder-made. It was old. A few teams of xeno-archaeologists had been sent in. Not a single one had made their way out. The last one went in just a month previous, according to Lieutenant Rakim, the Legion officer at the Dar Bahri space port. All radio traffic had just stopped a couple of days after they’d gone in. They’d simply checked in the second night they were down there and then didn’t make their next check-in four hours later. The LT had informed them that the Consortium was offering a reward of 50,000 birr for confirmation of their fate, dead or alive. It had started as 10,000 birr, but at this point nobody wanted to risk it for such a paltry sum. Vasili had said they’d keep it in mind, but hadn’t committed to anything.

Kezz squinted ahead, then took her rifle and perched it right over Milosh’s shoulder in the driver’s seat and looked through the scope. “There!” she exclaimed, pointing firmly with her arm angled slightly to the right. “Between those two hills.” She could see one of the massive crawlers as it started moving and kicked up a heavy cloud of dust.

Milosh nodded and followed a faintly visible path over the sand and rocks in the direction Kezz had pointed. Their path took them close to a herd of desdemodu. The massive creatures seemed uninterested in their passing. Kezz hadn’t realized she was holding her breath until the urge to breath pushed its way to the front of her senses. The desdemodu weren’t known for being particularly aggressive, but you never wanted to let your guard down when it came to something that big.

The crawler loomed larger the closer they got. It kicked up enough dust that Kezz would have thought it was a sandstorm if she hadn’t seen its source. It wasn’t easy to farm here; even with pumping stations and surprisingly rich soil, sand from the iron storms in the highlands always seemed to make its way down to coat everything in the lowlands. It was omnipresent, no matter where you went. Kezz was beginning to understand why Vasili hated being here.

They passed the first crawler and noticed another farther ahead. But this one wasn’t moving. Small shapes moved around its massive base. The closer they got, the more evident it was that this crawler wasn’t just stopped for digging out the soil; the blackened, ragged edges around its engine compartment and the metal pieces littering the charred field surrounding it told them everything they needed to know. This rig had been sabotaged, and by the looks of it, it was headed for the scrap pile.

One man off to the side furiously scribbled on a pad, shook his head, and wiped his hand across the screen like he was erasing what he had written. More scribbling, more wiping. It was obvious he was frustrated and flustered. Milosh stopped the gravcraft and all four of them piled out, trying to look as unthreatening as four heavily-armed mercs could.

The man turned around and with a fair bit of irritation belted out, “Wha-” before he realized it wasn’t another engineer walking over. He nervously took a greasy rag from his right rear overall pocket and wiped his already grease-streaked face. “Sorry ‘bout that. Hasn’t exactly been a good day.” He motioned at the destroyed crawler. “This thing’ll never work again. Frame’s twisted all to hell and the engine’s just gone.”

Kezz looked up at the hulking metal crawler with her trained engineer’s eye and had to agree with his assessment. Even if the engine compartment was cleaned up, machined, and refitted, there was no way the entire frame was not out of alignment, whether by inches or to a degree not perceptible to the naked eye. And that alone would cause a host of problems that would haunt this machine as long as it was made to function. It would be in constant need of repair.

She turned back to the engineer. “What do you think happened here?”

His face darkened even more and he threw his hands up in the air (though he kept a firm grip on his tablet). “A week ago I’d have said it was a disgruntled worker messin’ with the equipment, but after this…” He stopped for a moment and wiped his hand over his face. “This took some know-how. These things are built tough. They’re meant to take a beatin’ and keep goin’. Even an engine blowout shouldn’t be able to do this much damage. Whoever did this knows at least the basics ‘bout crawler workin’s and had access to one helluva explosive device.” He squinted over at Kezz as if really seeing her and her companions for the first time and narrowed his eyes even more, suddenly suspicious. “Who are you, anyway? Why you so interested in a busted-up crawler?”

Vasili stepped forward. “We’ve been hired to solve your little problem.” He gestured at the metal-strewn field.

The engineer nodded his head thoughtfully. “You must be the team Mr. Halaby was talkin’ ‘bout. He’ll be in his office back at the pumping station,” he said, motioning back toward a building in the distance, its lines distorted by the heated air and dust.

Vasili nodded and thanked the man. Kezz smiled and turned to follow the team back to the gravcraft. Once they were all seated Milosh flipped the small craft around and punched it in the direction of the indicated building. Kezz looked back and watched the engineer go back to scratching his head as he frustratedly continued trying to write a report that wouldn’t make him look like an incompetent idiot. She felt sorry for the guy; more than once she’d been in a similar position and there was no way around it, it sucked.

Within minutes they had arrived at the pumping station building. What had looked like a small building in the distance was in reality a large rectangular building with several large cylindrical water tanks connected to each other and the main building by a series of pipes topped by thin scaffolds and handrails. One side of the building looked like a silo, circular and taller than the rest. Kezz knew the pumping operations and equipment itself was most likely housed in that area of the building. It was a fair bet the rest of the building held offices and warehouse space for spare parts, as well as the large garage space needed to service the massive crawlers. In the distance the Wound’s maw gaped large, as if it was going to swallow the entire facility from behind.

The front doors and surrounding windows of the boring but modern-looking building were a fading greyish color. Dimmer glass. It darkened or lightened depending on the amount of sunlight. It was expensive as hell. No wonder the Consortium was involved; they clearly had a lot of money tied up here. Kezz was developing an unsettling feeling about this whole thing. Something was off. She didn’t know what it was, but her sixth sense had been right too many times for her to ignore it now. Looking over at Milosh she realized by the set of his jaw and the way he kept looking around, he felt it too. Vasili was a blank slate. The man had no tells. It was a maddening process trying to read him at all. Yaffed was again buried in a book and seemingly oblivious to everything going on around him.

They had just begun walking toward the entrance when the doors opened and a tall thin man who looked a little too young but wore a well-appointed kurta stepped out, blinked in the dying but still bright sunlight, and opened his arms in what was almost assuredly a false welcome. Nobody liked it when mercs showed up; it meant something was awry… and probably getting blown up.

“Welcome, welcome, my friends! I am Khalid Halaby, the director of this site. Please, please, follow me.” He turned and led them past the woman manning the small but opulent reception area through the only door, which had a bio-lock, into a hallway.

The hallway itself was sterile, with no indications of the type of work a building like this in this region performed. Kezz’s discomfort jumped a couple of notches. Pumping stations and maintenance depots were dirty places, with dust being an unavoidable nuisance everywhere. Even the administrative areas of the buildings tended to have a slight dusting of whatever made up the top layer of the planet and the pervasive smell of old oil and grease from mechanical maintenance. And while needing some security, they certainly didn’t need to be tucked behind a 10,000 birr, top-of-the-line bio-lock from the Nyala Corporation.

When she thought about it, Kezz realized this place looked a lot like the Consortium offices on Coriolis. This did not sit well. There was only one reason for that: Consortium big-wigs visited here. A lot. And there’s no way they would be coming here to talk about water output and crawler maintenance.

She memorized every turn they took, noting the doors with the expensive bio-locks along the way. Vasili was chatting amiably with their host as they went. He may have been big, hard as nails, and intimidating, but he knew when to use that to his advantage and when to play it down.

When they finally stopped, it was at a tasteful but minimally decorated conference room. Mr. Halaby motioned for them to be seated. “Please, have a seat. May I get you anything? Tea? Coffee?”

Kezz almost shook her head, then though better of it. “I’ll take a qahwa.” Yaffed asked for an Arabic tea. Vasili and Milosh asked for water. Mr. Halaby nodded and spoke softly into his com unit, nodding his head when he finished.

He looked at the mercenaries seated around the table. “Thank you for being here. I trust your journey was uneventful.” He took a seat at the head of the table as a man in a light green gallabeya and soft, slipper-like shoes entered with the drinks and a small selection of tea cakes and cookies. “Thank you, Davood,” he said, absently waving his hand to shoo the man out of the room.

When the door clicked shut again, his face took on a more serious cast. “Do you know why you are here?”

Vasili sipped at his water. “You’ve got a bit of a two-legged pest problem.” He set the water down. “From the looks of the crawler we just saw, a very smart, very destructive pest.” He looked at Mr. Halaby blankly.

For his part, Khalid Halaby tried to look unperturbed… and failed miserably. He nervously smoothed the front of his jacket down, then clutched his hands behind his lower back as if to start pacing in thought. “Ah, yes, I guess you could put it that way. The Consortium has high visibility on this and they are quite eager to bring it to an end.”

Kezz watched the thin man closely. He was nervous, that much was clear. His slight fidgeting, the barely noticeable flush of his face under the redness bestowed by the Dabaran sun, even the way his voice inflections quivered here and there told her there was something he wasn’t telling them. If Kezz was in a gambling hall, she’d lay bets on this guy being a member of a locally important family. The son of a successful businessman with some political pull, if she wanted to be more specific. His mannerisms did not speak to a man well-versed in politics or business negotiations; he had far too many tells. This was a political posting, that much was clear. What wasn’t clear was why anybody would consider it politically advantageous to be posted at a water pumping station in the middle of nowhere on a semi-desert planet. She filed away the information to broach with the others at a later time.

Vasili was absently tapping the table. “The problem we were sent to solve sounded a lot more like some possibly drunk disgruntled former employees. The wreck we just saw out in your field tells me while we’re not dealing with a pro, we’re also not dealing with an amateur. Now, either you haven’t told the Consortium just how bad this problem is, or you’re dealing with people who have a vested interest in shutting you down for good. And the money to make that happen.”

Milosh piped in, “Just how bad does the Consortium want this to go away?” His perfect teeth flashed through a deceptively disarming smile.

Khalid suddenly looked very pale. No authority to “adjust” the contracted amount, Kezz realized. Daddy must have pulled in a lot of favors to get him this position.

“Ah, um.” He cleared his throat and tugged at the edge of the neck of his tailored kurta with a finger. “Well, they certainly want to see it disappear, but 20,000 birr is a more than fair offer for the services we are asking you to provide.” He looked momentarily pleased with himself for his recovery. It didn’t last long.

“You’ve got multiple 10,000 birr bio-locks on doors throughout this building. It’s a maintenance depot and pumping station, but there’s not a speck of dust anywhere in here. You’ve got some fairly fancy refreshments on hand. And you’re dressed like a politician’s lackey.” Khalid visibly blanched. Bingo, Kezz thought.

“You- you don’t understand!” Khalid was losing what little control he had over his nerves. “I just do what they tell me to do! They told me my job was to make sure this place ran as smoothly as possible and greet the Consortium officials when they came to visit! That’s all I do! They occasionally disappear into the lower levels, but I don’t even have access to-“ His eyes widened and he shut his mouth tight, realizing he’d given too much away.

Yaffed looked mildly amused. Milosh was positively giddy. With the hint of intimidation poking around the edges, Vasili calmly said, “Here’s how this is going to go down: We won’t say a thing to the Consortium or send the Bulletin some interesting tidbits about a fake water pumping operation. Frankly, I don’t give a rat’s ass about what you’ve got in your basement. But I want an extra 30,000 birr. I don’t care where you get it from. I don’t care who you’ll have to owe. Just get me the money, we’ll take care of your problem, and then we’ll leave, never to return.”

Kezz found the entire exchange fascinating. From the stricken look in Khalid’s suddenly gaunt face to the way Vasili picked up his glass of water and nonchalantly sipped from the edge, she knew she was watching an overmatched man crumble. Whatever higher political aspirations Khalid may have had were now completely crushed. He wasn’t smart enough to feed this expense – little more than a rounding error – back into the Consortium’s considerable accounts without some evidence pointing straight at him. If this guy was still alive in a week, Kezz would be impressed.

Thinking better of pressing further, Khalid left the room for a moment and returned with a small tag. Vasili tapped it to his tactical glasses and nodded. “It’s been a pleasure doing business with you. Now if you’ll just direct us to our quarters, we’ll be out of your hair and have your problem fixed before the week is out.” Khalid was quiet and reserved as he directed the group to the small dormitory hidden behind the pumping station. Vasili’s smile was almost genuine as they filed out of the room, Kezz stopping to grab a couple of extra cakes and down the rest of her qahwa.

Once in the dorms, they swept the small room and private bathroom for bugs, then posted a small lens on a secure frequency broadcasting back to their glasses outside the door.

Kezz relayed her suspicions about Mr. Khalid Halamby to the group and was met with nods of agreement.

Yaffed rarely talked, but when he did it was often important, so when he entered the conversation, the other three went immediately silent. “I know we all want to get out of here as soon as possible and get our ship back. But something about this whole situation is just… wrong. The Consortium doesn’t take an interest in something unless it has tremendous value. Just north of here is a restricted zone manned by Parr-Nestera shock troops.” Vasili drew in a sharp breath at the mention of one of the Consortium’s most deadly private army units. Yaffed nodded. “We know nobody has ever returned from a trip into the Wound through the normal avenues, but they just sent another group in. We know rumor has it they haven’t been answering their coms for the past few weeks. And we know the locals are convinced that this place isn’t just here to pump water.” He stopped as a figure in a greasy jumpsuit walked down the hall and past their door. When he was a few steps away, Yaffed continued.

“I want to know what is so important that the Consortium would build a pumping station in the least logical spot to pump water from a reservoir with the deepest reserves several miles east of here,” he finished.

Kezz was not surprised Yaffed had pulled up so much information on the area. He was nothing if not thorough. She nodded. “Something here isn’t right and I’m not gonna lie, I’m curious to see what the Consortium wants so bad.”

Milosh looked like he was barely holding back from bouncing around on his toes. “I bet whatever it is, it’s worth a fortune!”

Vasili looked like he was heavily considering the pros and cons. He was still a little rattled at the mention of the Parr-Nestera shock troops, which unsettled Kezz; Vasili never rattled. “As much as I would like to do the job and be done with it, I want to know why there are PN soldiers in this area. And why they weren’t the ones called to take care of the situation. We’ll do what we’ve been contracted to do, but while we’re doing that, we’ll quietly gather as much information as we can. Kezz, you figure out how to get into the sub-levels of this facility. Yaffed, you research everything you can find on the Wound, what’s up north of here, and anything else that seems like it might be connected, no matter how tenuously. Milosh, you do what you do best: be the ladies’ man.” Yaffed was buried in his tablet before Vasili finished giving him his task. Milosh cracked his knuckles and passed a hand through his light hair. Kezz watched the display and rolled her eyes, but nodded at Vasili. She had a lot of research on bio-locks ahead of her.

She retired to her bunk with her tablet and started setting up a proxy path through multiple servers throughout Dabaran to quietly look for all the information she could find on the Nyala Corporation’s bio-lock technology and its weak points. She had stripped off her armor and hung it at the end of the bed. Similarly stripped of his own armor, Yaffed and his tablet found their way to a bed where he had shoved his massive machine gun and bag underneath and he was now flicking his way through various sites that had any information about the Wound and exactly when the Consortium took more than a passing interest in it and the surrounding area. Milosh spent a good 30 minutes freshening up in the bathroom, then left the others to find where the workers hung out when the work shift was over and they wanted to drink and socialize. Vasili was reaching out to contacts for any information regarding the PN troops and their orders. Kezz sighed. This was going to be a long night.