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Mirrorsmoke Company
- Chapter 12 -[]
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Albany City
New Oslo, Draconis Combine
October, 3018
[22:12] LOCAL TIME
"Logan, you're not actually considering ignoring this, are you?" Ed asked quietly into his dataplating. To the guy gagged with his own tie, it must have looked like he was just standing there, trying to look menacing. "This could be huge. Is huge."
"Hell yes! It's obviously a trap." Logan was practically panicking. I haven't heard him in this state in a long time. Not since his first days of training. It was apparent in the way he was speaking, nearly hyperventilating as he spoke. "I'm contacting the rest of your fireteam. What you need to do is leave the city. Now."
"But meant for who, us or them?" I asked, ignoring his last order. A part of me agreed. We might have just been caught, that any second we wasted in this ward would be a second closer to us getting nailed in the wall.
But a part of me needed to know if there were actually more of us out there.
More orphans. More siblings.
"I refuse to call this a coincidence," he huffed. "But fine, if you're going to stay there, we need more information. Question him again."
I turned to the man, hands and legs tied and left wriggling on the ground. I took off the tie.
"Run it by us again," we demanded, "Why were you spying on us?"
He was rather open about a lot of our questions. Suspiciously so, like how he'd managed to know we were going to the Ashi-gumi, or how all the guns we had lost had somehow ended up in their hands.
"And like I told you the last time, I wasn't spying, I was trying to make contact!" He shouted, but I couldn't take his anger seriously. Not when we folded him so easily as if we just tripped him over to a nearby alley. "I'm with the Resistance! I'm one of you, damnit!"
Ed and I looked at each other.
The man seemed like a numbers sort of person; body more used to hunching over an office table crunching datasheets and bills, rather than crawling through barbed wires and mud while a live machine gun fired from above. He wasn't overweight, but it looked like he wasn't the type to move around intensely either. Chiseled cheekbones and a sleek nose over a wide jaw that wouldn't be out of place for somebody who'd turn a few heads from the ladies. Late twenties maybe?
His brown eyes met my now-green. He kept talking. "We have people from the gangs, and they've been talking about you guys trading weapons for information. It's gotten them all spooked. I'm just here to send a message!"
"You don't become a messenger by trying to tail us," I growled. "And what you just said doesn't exactly answer my question!"
"The Resistance, kid!" He hissed again, as if just saying the word too often would magically have his teeth yanked out. "We're rebels on the same side! Why won't you believe me?"
Because you either had to be stupid or desperate enough to pop yourself out in the open like this. That we could nail all this as a honeypot also went unsaid.
Ed scoffed, ignoring his question. "And what makes you think we're rebels too? We might just be gunrunners."
"Come on, kid," he argued. "A massive attack up there in Nordmarka, and then a few weeks later you guys show up out of nowhere trying to start shit? Don't tell me that it's all a big coincidence!"
The man struggled some more under his bindings. "Look, I'm actually a journalist. Seeing you guys–what you did to me? Pretty much all the confirmation I need. You're all some kind of cell members from the rebel group up north. Trainees, maybe."
"He's fishing. Don't fall for it," Logan warned. "Say nothing about who we are."
"The newscasts say it was a pirate raid up north," I claimed.
"The official story. All complete lies!" The man made a mocking face. "Don't even try to spin this, it was a strategic hit to try and turn the military up north so that the real shit happens here. Your mission is to arm the people with your guns, isn't it?!"
The man was only partly correct.
"Well, he's got you there, Watcher," Ed muttered in his Dataplating.
We heard him sigh. "...Ask him what he knows about those kids. Why he specifically came to us for them."
"Those kids," Ed started, "What's so special about them?"
"And why come to us?" I added.
"Look, I know as much as I was told, that they were orphans for some fucked up military project!" He said, "I just got sent here to make contact and see if you can deal, because we want to join forces, man! If we can coordinate with your cell to spread all the messed up shit those Kuritans have been doing behind closed doors, the city will freak!"
"Join over my dead body."
The journalist wiggled around the ground some more. "We have more, kid. More intel on a lot of places. We just need more men. Those children are being treated like they're goddamn prisoners!"
The skepticism must have shown on our faces, when he continued. "Look, I have proof, okay?! Proof!" His chin jutted down towards his chest. "Look inside my camera! In the memory card, there's a folder–access it. I'd have given it to you if you hadn't just hogtied me like this from the get go."
Underneath his jacket was a compact camera, sleek and maybe ill suited for somebody who claimed to take pictures for a living. The back screen lit up as I picked it up, allowing me to swipe across the many images that contained inside.
My hand balled into a fist.
"We have somebody on the inside of the city garrison, one of our leaders," I heard him say, but my eyes were glued to the camera. "He's sent a lot of us to snoop around all sorts of places we shouldn't be. That compound of theirs being one of them."
"You're seeing what we're seeing, Logan?" I asked him, quietly.
Ed had been beside me, equally as furious as he saw the pictures. He wasn't the type to show it, but I knew from the way his breath hitched.
I kept swiping. All the little tents, all the batons. I even recognized the minders. Not in the way they looked but in the way they stood, the way they moved. No doubt in my mind that these kids were being trained the same as us.
"I certainly would like to be wrong for once," he snarked, sourly. "...I see them."
"Well, I've seen enough," I said, and then nodded at Ed. "Let's get him up."
As soon as we untied him, he sprang up. I flipped his camera over, taking out its memory card and then tossing his camera back to him.
"Don't follow us," Ed warned. "We'll know."
"And keep the guns," I added. We might not be able to track those lost weapons, but their mechanisms and electronics could easily be deactivated if they were to be turned on us. "If you are what you say you are."
"Wait, you're just going to leave?" the man asked. "We need to coordinate this, plan out a way to spread the word. You don't even know where the place is!"
I narrowed my eyes. "Who said anything about working with you?"
The journalist made a face as if we had just left him there to die.
What in the hell would uncovering the Combine's dirty laundry even do for the city?
Albany City, Outskirts
[22:57] LOCAL TIME
As we feared, the images weren't doctored.
The data pulled from the card was all we needed to find the location of those kids. Fifty kilometers south east of Albany City was a large subterranean lake that formed near the middle of Asker, flowing into webs of rivers that stretched across the continent itself.
One of these rivers was Verja, essentially the cutaway point between the green fields above the equator, and the arid south.
Whoever took these images had to travel far and wide just to get a couple pictures of an abandoned research facility, now turned into a training area for orphan soldiers.
Logan was a hologram this time, his likeness flickering in and out of the COMP/CON. He sat on a chair, backrest front first as he mulled over the data and report he had just received.
"We're coming after them, Stray," I declared. "Come hell or high water, on foot if we have to, we're rescuing those kids, with or without your approval."
My fireteam was with me, all of them already suited up and ready for the raid. Lisbeth and Kristin were busy loading bullets into magazines, Ed was calibrating the sights on his bullpup, while Mack was happily defacing her helmet with a monomolecular knife, carving a skull face and the snarling fangs of a hannya demon over the visor.
Logan, for his part, simply held up his hands to his chest in defeat.
"No arguments from me, Dav," he finally said, "Much as I disagree with this course of action, there's not a whole lot I can do to stop all of you. You're in the field; it's your call. Always has been."
A wave of relief washed over me, my shoulders relaxing. My team and I had been too goddamned ready to be declared AWOL.
All for the sake of those kids.
"Just give me some time while I settle things there in the city," he continued. "You'll be needing support, as well as transport coming to pick all of our new siblings up."
"You should know that we don't intend on keeping things quiet," I said, crossing my arms. "An Op as time sensitive as this? This will be a direct action."
We would be stretched thin, and there was just no time for any more precise planning. If I knew Logan, he'd be busy eyeing the city like a hawk at all times, keeping him occupied putting Trident's nose to the ground as they verify this so-called Resistance.
And with Bjorna still recuperating from her injury, Arrowhead was relegated to building relations in Vesterby, helping to train their budding armed forces in the north.
Speartip would be on our own for the time being.
"Which is why I'm putting Bjorna as tactical command for this operation, as well as bringing you your Everests. You'll need it."
That had gotten everybody's full attention. That much firepower?
Logan's hologram disappeared, replaced by a video. It was combat footage from one of our subalterns, but it must have been from a mission we weren't involved in, as the video played no comms chatter, or showed any other human interaction–just the rain of tracer fire over the dark tree line.
They were fighting a BattleMech we couldn't quite see, and were getting eliminated by the dozen as they desperately fired the mounted machine guns on their vans.
A thunderous bolt from a PPC struck the van, obliterating its front half along with the driver, and throwing the surviving subaltern seizing down to the ground, writhing as if in pain from the lingering effects of weaponized ions on its electronic systems.
But it recovered somehow, and immediately began stumbling its way towards the enemy without hesitation or fear. In one of its hands was a satchel charge, held tightly as the subaltern started to quicken its stride, then to a full sprint straight towards its certain end.
The idea wasn't exclusive to this subaltern, as we watched in rapt attention more of its kind converging straight to the enemy BattleMech, explosions illuminating giant digitigrade legs as each drone set off their charges in an effort to try and down it. With a wide arc, the BattleMech fired a lance of its medium lasers in response, destroying the drones completely before they could damage its legs any further. The laser had severed the recording subaltern by the torso, resorting to crawling forward in order to fulfill its mission.
The surviving subaltern never made it far. The BattleMech approached it. The last few moments before the video had ended came the light of a muzzle flash from the autocannon mounted on its side, fully showing what had been stalking in the dark.
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Marauder Heavy 'Mech
A Marauder.
Then it dawned on me–
"On the night of your rescue, that came skulking out of nowhere," Logan explained, now standing with his arms behind his back as he addressed us. "I couldn't even hurt it worth a damn when it showed up. It was more focused on trying to bury all of you in the rubble than a full on fight, so be prepared for the same scenario when you're there."
"Well, that's not ominous at all," Lisbeth said. "You think that 'Mech is going to be there for asset denial?"
"Count on it, and it might not be alone," Logan said, deadly serious. "There are questions about our… recruitment that sometimes keep me up at night, Speartip. Did you know that any mention about our old orphanage has been scrubbed clean from any registries I could find? Or how a BattleMech of that size blasting everything to pieces close to the city that night would have had the media swarming the place for days, but instead all I could find was a passing mention in a talk show about a false alarm the day after?"
"So they're minimizing panic from the city, what's the big deal?" Mack asked. "Pretty standard tactic the snakes use, downplaying their losses or the heinous shit they do."
"What I'm saying is to be careful, Mackenzie," Logan chided. "I can't shake the feeling that there's something out there pushing us to do a certain way, siccing us like attack dogs onto something we shouldn't. I refuse to believe this is all a coincidence. One of these days they'll eventually catch us unaware. Only a matter of time."
"We'll be careful, Logan," I assured him. I then pointed to myself with a thumb. "First in, last out. I promise."
Logan looked at me, neither looking relieved or relaxed. His holographic eyes narrowed.
"Stack the deck, Speartip. You'll need it."