Marko Colton Sat back in his office chair, sipping his tea. It was a particularly good blend, today; if he remembered correctly it was the new stuff from Goliad the supply ship captain he met yesterday had given him. He scanned the headers of the sizable list of emails his assistant, Amy, had forwarded to him and sighed; administering the Arcadia Bay station was tedious, more often than not. He felt like a zookeeper, sometimes.
One was flagged, "Urgent". looking at the header, it was about the radio broadcasts coming out of Cronaal, the ones purportedly by Laura Kray. Some of the former residents of the erstwhile island nation that had fled to the sanctuary Sadakoyama had so generously provided them were becoming a little... agitated by the broadcasts. The email contained suggestions from DIS on handling the situation, some more extreme than others, but so far the situation was contained.
He was so engrossed in thinking through some of the possible scenarios each suggestion would set in motion, when he became aware of a presence in the room with him. Thinking it was Amy, he checked to see if he needed a refill, but looking up he saw a shock of messy dark mane perched on top of a filthy, patched Cronaal military jacket at least two sizes too large for the person wearing it. For a moment he thought one of the refugees had somehow found their way past hospital security, until the figure ran a pale, fragile-looking hand through the thick tangle of hair. He shivered involuntarily; like most Sadakhan, he was conditioned against irrational fear, but there was something deeply disturbing about the person's expression. Superficially, it was a young feminine face, almost pretty despite the bruises and dirt; the girl could have been anywhere from twelve to twenty; the eyes, though . . . there was a cold, reptilian look in her eyes. It was the way she stared with laser focus on his face, except for brief, almost imperceptible flickers where she scanned the room.
She was an agent, she must be. He knew there had to be several operating in the Cronaal wastelands, but like most Sadakhan he'd never knowingly met one. With this new context, his assessment of the rust-brown stains speckling her coat was silently revised.
"What can I help you with, miss?" he said, unsure of what was expected of him. One of the great things about Sadakoyama, in his opinion and long experience with the outsiders, was the consistency. Despite sometimes contentious professional or personal differences, thanks to Sadakoyama's robust and unparalleled education system, one could always count on a certain consistent level of respect and civilized behaviour. Even the outsiders were predictable, ruled by their unchecked emotions and unprincipled desires. Agents were raised outside of all that, raised to be completely unfettered by the norms he took for granted.
She smiled at him with broken teeth, and croaked out "Professional courtesy," in a strange accent. She removed a small battered, torn and soiled cardboard box from one of the voluminous pockets of the coat and placed it on his desk. The box used to contain a sugary snack cake once popular in a better, long gone Cronaal. Whatever it contained now was leaking a watery, dark fluid. Gingerly he opened it; inside was a human eyeball. He knew instantly who it had belonged to; he couldn't possible have recognised a particular eyeball, but the tiny implants clustered on the optic nerve were unique.
He spoke a Cronaali word that roughly translated to 'Lord Tremendous'. "You killed him?"
"Yes."
"I'm sure you had your reasons, but even with his . . . barbaric excesses, we found his power base was actually a stabilizing force in his sector . . ."
"He ate babies."
"That's just one of the rumours people like that spread, to rule by fear . . ."
"I have seen this. He ate baby, while I watch. So . . ." She smiled a creepy, childlike smile. "You hear broadcast?"
"Yes. We're already scaling back our operations drastically. This is going to bring international attention we don't need."
She gestured at the implant. "How many like this still in play?"
"Six. We've got recovery teams tracking them down, but these people . . . they tend to move around a lot."
She sniffed, and looked at the ground. When she looked up, she shrugged and said "I am recovery team."
"Okay." This was going to make his job a lot easier; he'd lost too many people out there already. "Let me give you the information you'll need."
* * *
Connor Johnson belly-crawled up the ridge just high enough to get the heavy optical imager in place for a view of the encampment below him. It was a marvelous device, and he was grateful to the Sadakhan captain that had given it to him-even if he did have to wrap it's snow-white casing in dirty rags to camouflage it. As he began spotting and targeting the cannibals moving around the old steel mill, he heard the rest of his squad move into position to either side of him. Behind them droned the steady hum of their greatest advantage in their crusade against the thugs and monsters that had taken over his town.
Years ago, he had worked a tech support phone line, so when the condescending scientists showed up in their white helicopters saying they wanted to help their cause, he was assigned to operate the targeting computer. This had the effect of making him a de-facto leader of the group, which was beginning to cause friction with Gary. Gary was a hero to most of them, the one who had first organised the Rangers. It was regrettable; Connor didn't want to take anything away from Gary, but the fact was no one could make a move until he gave the signal and the autonomous little flying robots he controlled flew into action.
He finished painting the last of the visible guards with the invisible laser or infrared or whatever the unit used to track his targets when he heard the insectile hum fading away behind him. "Connor! What the hell is going on!?" someone whispered loudly. He had no idea - but the drones were rapidly streaking away into the distance, heading away from the battlefield.
Someone in the encampment shouted a warning. This was going to be bad . . .
* * *
Miles away, deep within Cronaal Hope hospital in Arcadia Bay, little Amelia lay in her hospital bed, dispiritedly watching a cartoon show she didn't really follow. The language was strange and she didn't have the energy or will to pick it up, despite all the lessons she was forced to sit through. Sitting was pretty much all she could do anymore; she didn't know, couldn't remember exactly why or how, but she was paralyzed from the neck down. Her life since being scooped up from her mother's hovel by the hospital men had been in this bed or the electric wheelchair they gave her. The chair was fun, at first, because it had a special hat that let her drive it just by thinking, but the chair got boring once they let her play The Game.
The Game was where she really lived. It was what she was waiting for now.
It was never soon enough, but shortly the nurses and orderlies came in and took her to the little pod, strapping her in and connecting her to wires and tubes (one of the tubes was for food, they said, and the others were for pee and poo. She giggled when they told her that.) She was almost seven, the youngest one to play the game, they said, but she was also the best. They said maybe because she was paralyzed, but she . . . well, she didn't understand all the words they used to explain it but she was just better at it. Better at being a little flying elf. Better at moving through the brightly colorful landscape of the Game and throwing the little magic pots of paint at the ugly grey and white and black shapes that the Game pointed out for her to color; she must have painted hundreds of them, by now.
The nurses were just about to turn on the pod, take her out of her boring, awful world and into her real world, the land of color and movement and fun, when a red light flashed in the room. The nurse apologized to her, trying to explain something, but a loud woman's voice on the intercom kept saying "Abort" and "Recall".
A few minutes later, she was back in her room, crying. The nurses didn't know when she'd get to play again.
This was going to be bad . . .
* * *
In the gathering dusk, a solitary figure wandered on the ridge. Its silhouette was outlined by the burning industrial plant below, where white helicopters were circling, occasionally firing into the conflagration. The girl on the ridge, coat splattered with fresh stains, stepped gingerly around the corpses scattered there. A savage looking knife dripping blood dangled in her left hand, while she moved a beeping signal finder back and forth in the other. Finally, she shoved the device into a coat pocket and reached down to pick up a bundle of rags lying in the blood and muck. It was hard to distinguish details in the dim light, but she smiled at a glimpse of gleaming white plastic poking through the cloth.
