Casiella: Running the Threads
NB: As I was thinking about the upcoming Walking in Stations in EVE Online and what it can mean for roleplay, this story nearly wrote itself. I don’t believe that we can reflect this directly in the game, but this does represent the flavor I hope to see. Story continues after the break.
Casi felt like an insect high on boosters. All those facets of the eye… they had to be something like this. She’d already tapped into the surveillance camera drones slowly swarming around the joint. Not much security on them, certainly not for somebody who’d been doing this out in the deep. With their feeds all registered with her implant; she closed her eyes and let herself float in twelve places at once, watching the vaguely erotic holo-projections of sinuous shapes on the walls. Hovering wait-carts bobbed slightly in the air currents as the desperate looked for their last chance at companionship for the night, whether human or chemical.
Silently, the petite woman stood outside in the shadows, barely noticed by the thugs and pushers wending their way down the alley. The dark sky overhead swirled around the tops of the buildings and antennae, as if it had its own secrets to keep. And indeed, in a place like Rens, the night did have its own secrets. The message had come through the usual channels, bounced through countless proxies and anonymizing gateways. Casi had enough hooks into the Hypernet that she might have been able to trace it back, but that didn’t seem like it would accomplish much of anything useful. No, she figured that if her client needed to conceal his identity, that would serve her own purposes as well. Plausible deniability.
A flashing red light in the lower right corner of her vision drew her attention. Her implant told her that the time had arrived. At least two camera drones gave her a good view of the client and his little alcove. One sat right above his bald pate, looking out at the entrance. Her back wouldn’t stay unwatched during the meet. Another, outside the alcove and slightly to the side, mostly just showed one of the bodyguards. The client’s knee, maybe. But this drone revolved slightly and used wideband sensors, so she “saw” in much more detail, all the way from infrared to ultraviolet.
Pushing her way through the crowd, Casi demurred at the suggestions and propositions from some of the more adventurous types in the crowd. She’d long ago given up on that sort of companionship; direct brain stimulation from the implant hooked straight into her own wetware did things for her no lover ever could. Besides, her mind stayed on the business at hand. She needed to build her rep, and getting distracted on the way to the client meet wouldn’t build it the way she wanted.
Approaching the booth, she saw one of the bodyguards step out and hold his hands in front of him, the timeless signal across all cultures to stop. She did. The brutish male grinned slightly and reached out as if to frisk her. As she narrowed her eyes, she felt herself drop into a defensive stance she’d learned in her last gig. “I’m clean.”
“Sorry, lady. My job.”
The drone outside the alcove showed the client leaning a little to his right, so now she had a better view of the expression on his face. Or of his leer, rather. This little intrusion had more to do with intimidation and power than with personal security. Fine, let him think he ran this meet. She touched a seam on the shoulder of her cloak and it fell open, revealing a gossamer dress that clearly could not possibly conceal a weapon. “Still worried?”
The bodyguard grinned and shook his head. “Nice. You’re clean.”
Re-fastening the cloak, she slid sideways into a seat and nodded at the client. “Not a man with a lot to say, is he?”
“I’m not paying him by the word, Casiella Truza. I’m paying him to do a job.”
She smiled slightly before responding, “And I’m here for basically the same reason. Something you need done?” The ambiguity of the message hadn’t detracted from its core point. Somebody needed some encrypted card sliced open, and a colleague had suggested her name. While the identity of the suggester intrigued her a little, the possibility of broadening her circle intrigued her more.
The client nodded before withdrawing a small metallic case and setting it on the table. Nodding at it, he explained, “The card’s inside. Do what you need to do, then contact back to the same address. We’ll send someone to do the pickup.”
“Pay?”, she asked as she reached for the case.
A thin smile. “Well, time counts for a lot, so…”
Just at that moment, her implant pricked her. Time seemed to slow down, at least relative to her actions. In the space of two seconds, she integrated the visuals from the surveillance drones, filtered through the ambient noise, heard the swish of a weapon as its owner pulled it from its holster, and jumped to her left. A wet crumpling sound came from what, until that moment, had been her client’s head, and his face collapsed inward from the energy of the projectiles. The second bodyguard reacted more quickly than she’d ever seen from a non-capsuleer, and so as she continued to roll to her left out of the alcove, he returned fire. Futilely, evidently, as his own torso exploded against the back wall with the now-familiar wet sound, and the wall just next to her exploded. She barely restrained a little cry as a bit of the shrapnel pierced her hip, but that didn’t stop her from popping up inside the crowd and running in a low crouch. Screams of partiers who’d been shocked into sobriety by the sudden violence provided context for the data feed from the drones, as the bodyguard-turned-assassin pushed through the crowd, scanning for her.
Casi tumbled out a side door into the alley and jumped straight up to grasp a railing there, flipping vertically into an impressive handstand. Just in time to see the killer race out the door, weapon drawn. He grunted for a moment before dashing into the shadows. Stealth wasn’t his strong suit, as the garbage receptacles flying out of his path could attest.
After a moment, she let herself rotate back to her normal orientation and dropped down, hard, onto the alley floor. Her implant’s biofeedback display had never flickered this urgently. A temporary neural shunt now prevented her from collapsing in pain, she saw, from the shrapnel in her hip. That didn’t do a lot for the blood gushing from her femoral artery; she only had a short time before the implant would shut the left leg down completely.
She allowed herself another pulse from her adrenal gland, as wired as the rest of her body. The familiar slowing of time allowed her to pick out an approaching food delivery unit and perform a brief man-in-the-middle attack to hijack control of the on-board navigation system. Warehouse orders transformed into new instructions to drop off a load at the nearby shuttle bay. Inelegant but effective.
The cargo unit did have a passenger seat, so Casi didn’t need to wedge herself into any shipping containers. She settled into the seat and let the frantic biofeedback unit do whatever it wanted, short of inducing an emergency coma. Not that she would really feel any different right away; the neural shunt not only blocked all input from her left leg and hip, but also prevented any voluntary muscle movements so she’d not damage things further.
Screaming law enforcement vehicles whipped past the cargo unit, cutting it off briefly before it could enter into the shuttle bay. Not by accident, only drones operated this particular facility. Her craft rested in a docking cradle near enough to the entrance that she could drag herself into it. The pod would keep her alive, of course, once she got in it.
She paused outside and smiled. Reaching inside her now-shredded cloak, she withdrew the case from an interior pocket. Someone evidently felt very strongly that the data on it should stay secret. That just made things more of a challenge.
As the contacts from the pod snapped into her implant, a system-wide security alert blared in her head. The Republic Security Services warned all officials and security enforcement personnel to be on the lookout for a dangerous and armed individual, wanted in connection with the murder of a senior official.
If the pod had let her blanch, she would have done so. The face and ID attached to the alert didn’t show the hulking bodyguard who’d vanished into shadows of the side alley.
They were hers.
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