And on we go...
Hopefully nobody looks like a moron here. Though the reference to Agatha still feels a little thrown in... whole conversation really could do with being smoothed over.
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--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?
Quote:----
Teela and Cally were sitting in their quarters, getting ready for the day. Cally lounged around in her underwear for a bit after her shower, tweaking a few little things on her leg before getting dressed. They’d survived the night, that was the main thing. There were a few things that had to be taken care of. Cally had to get to work repairing the truck, while Teela was making final checks that her collar’s mapping program would work.
“Hey, they said you could get to your truck today when they finished their examination... and I am pretty sure they did not find any damned Patrol toys on it, otherwise they would have taken it apart completely.” Teela said, hoping to raise Cally’s mood a little bit. “You will get it up and running within no time at all, I am sure.”
They just had to wait for Sato’s team to finish. Wait and hope they found nothing. Cally forced herself to focus on her truck. She had an OBD diagnostic checker in the truck, and the toolbox was in the cabin, not in the cargobay. Still, there was always the chance somebody else had bugged them.... or somebody would be clever enough to plant a bug to fake evidence, or any number of a hundred things.
They gnawed at the back of her mind as she paced around the room. A small console besides the door began to beep in time with a blinking yellow light.
“Cally, I think you got a phone call.” Teela purred. “What do you think, do we have won the Christmas lottery and willl get one million small toys for your brave and nice catgirl?” she said, curling up happily into herself, not even bothering to get up.
“Lazy beast” Cally snorted, throwing a pillow at the catgirl. She stood herself up, muttering dark things about lady Garfield, and activated the comlink. “Cally Auron here...”
Sato’s face appeared.
“Good morning Miss Auron... you might want to know that we finished the examination of your truck this morning.” Sato said with a cheery smile.
“Assuming it came up clean,” Cally said, archly.
“Well...” Sato answered, sucking air through her teeth like a mechanic about to give a big bill. “Define clean?. We didn’t find any bugs... at least, not the electronic kind anyway,” she giggled.
Cally could’ve throttled her. Those few moments had scared the hell out of her. “Oh Ha hah,” She blew a draft of frustration through her lips and opened the door.
Naoko was there, waiting like she was her best friend. Cally felt oddly ill.,
“I think now you can get started on fixing your truck, while we have a chat on the way,”
“About what?”
“A little job offer,”
-----
Teela kept laying on the pillow, even after Cally had left the room to get to her truck. She was bored, but they both could not afford that anyone on the station got even more suspicious about them. She had work to do.
She waited for at least ten minutes, then raised her head and looked through the room. With a big grin she jumped up and hurried over to a small box in the ‘luggage’ they had brought here from the truck. She opened it and looked over the small collection of cat toys, then took out a small piece of glass. She quickly put the box back where it had been and hurried back to her pillow and began to play a little bit with the glass. Then she yawned and pulled the blanket over her head.
Both she and Cally had agreed that it was unlikely that the apartments were watched, but Teela liked to be careful. She put the glass over her left eye and activated the small display for the collar, quickly opening the current map of the asteroid.
Even if someone had been watching her, they would have just seen something like ‘cat sleeps, cat plays, cat sleeps’ and hopefully never realizing she was looking through the acquired data, inspecting the video recordings, looking into details and creating a more solid map of this place.
Building this disguised computer system had been really fun, now was the time to make good use of it.
‘Somewhere here must be their working place for the Ghosthack’ she thought, ‘I just have to find it. The sooner we find what we were looking for, the faster we can leave again...’
There was nearly an hour of video to work through, looking for evidence of the working place of the hacker.
-----
“Oh, Agatha left her behind,”
Sato spoke so offhand, it nearly made Cally faint. She’d just asked about Quattro. She was just poking for a little info on the madgirl. And that was the explanation. Went fishing for minnow, caught a bluefin tuna.
“I see you’ve heard of her,”
“Agatha Clay?” Cally blurted out. Her eyes had golfballed.
Sato seemed to inflate. “Unh. She left a few months ago, and Quattro stayed behind. Two Mads on one base was a little too crazy.”
Two Mads on her base. Agatha Clay had been on her base.
“...wow.” Cally said.
Which meant, chances were, there’d be information on where Agatha had gone on her base. Cally’s skin began to prickle with excited static electricity.
“Where’d she go?” she asked, trying to sound as offhand and nonchalant as possible.
“She did not say,” Sato answered, her tone turning just that little bit sour.
Maybe it hadn’t been a pleasant parting? An acrimonious divorce? Cally tried her best to remember Clay’s profile, given on her bounty card. It was one of the big bounties, the kind every hunter knew about, but only the bigshot professionals ever thought about going after. From what she recalled, she gathered it wasn’t Sato who’d ordered Clay off the base,
She doubted Quattro had forced Agatha off...something about that just didn’t feel right. She wondered if maybe Agatha hadn’t seen what they were planning, and bailed out early before it blew up in everyone’s face.
Cally kept it in the back of her mind, even as she made small talk with Naoko. The other option was that Naoko was happily playing her as the fool, and Quattro was far more deadly than even Agatha.
“Have you been to Crystal Paris recently?” Sato asked her, taking a sudden left swerve in things. It seemed to be just a curiosity of hers.
“Don’t go in to Venus,” Cally answered. “But Kiko goes there...” a bitter pause. Cally forced herself to snarl. “Used to go there from time to time,” she corrected herself.
Naoko thought. Her brow creased as she tried to match the name to a face. She brought her hand to her chin. “I don’t remember her,”
Cally dismissed it with a shrug. “She ran from Titusville mostly. Paris was her vacation spot.”
“I see,” She looked at Cally, then at floor. “I was wondering if Café à la place du Café was still open.”
Cally shrugged again. “Never been there,” She didn’t dare fall for that old trap.
They walked through a few corridors Cally found herself starting to recognise. A pair of the locals rushed by pushing a trolley, being yelled at by some random courier. He made a pass at Cally. Gold teeth, what a dick. He sounded Russian.
She told him where he could stick it. Bastard probably had a Catgirl anyway.
“It is getting busy here. Especially since most other waystations have been hit in the last few months. Most of what went there now goes through here.”
“What’re you getting at?” Cally asked her.
“How about you start working for us?” Sato suggested, wearing a oily smile that reminded Cally of so many used car salesmen who made you feel like they were doing you a favour selling you that lemon of a Buick.
She made a show of thinking about it.
Sato continued with the pitch. “I am sure we could come to an agreement, especially if you have trouble getting the money,”
“I won’t,” Cally said, firmly.
Sato appeared unperturbed “Yes, Quattro told me you wouldn’t sell your catgirl to her. If you’re not interested in that, maybe we could renegotiate the rate of interest.”
Cally looked thoughtful. “What sort of renegotiation?”
“Work for me, and each job you do for me, also counts towards your debt,”
Oh, that old game. Cally’s eyes narrowed.
“Do I look like a moron?”
“Oh no,” Sato assured her. “I doubt we would be talking here if you were. I’ll drop the interest rate to below 5 percent for one thing, even if you can pay it back next week. All you have to do is agree to take a few simple jobs.”
“And if I agree, pay at the 5 percent and then run off into the wild black yonder?”
Sato’s smile broadened into an almost malicious grin “ Somehow I doubt you will. I am sure couriers like yourself pride themselves on keeping their word, and sticking to a deal. You depend so much on your reputations.”
The threat implied was that she’d badmouth Cally across the system so she’d never get a job again, and had more than enough influence and standing to pull it off. Any other Zwilnik would probably just have threatened her with either a catgirling machine or an industrial deep-fat frier. Or both...
“Seems fair,” Cally said. “I’ll take jobs from you on two conditions.”
“Those are?”
“No runs down into the ‘danelaw. And I get to veto pickups within 2 light minutes of Atalante, Prometheus, Heimdal or any other Space Patrol or OGJ base if I think it’s too dangerous.”
Sato shook her head. “No way... ‘any other Space patrol or OGJ base’ is a term for ‘everywhere worth going to’. Do you really think I would throw my couriers away by sending them to a certain death ? Atalante, Prometheus and Heimdal is okay as a veto list... but no wildcards.”
Cally crossed her arms, “Do you think I’ve been a courier for this long without knowing when to spot which jobs are good, and which will get me arrested or worse?”
Maybe she was playing the part too much? Maybe it’d be better to just get on Naoko’s good side and play the idiot. Something in her pride refused to let her...
Naoko’s expression darkened. “Do you think I have kept my operation here safe by throwing people away to get arrested?. One person arrested, is one person who can talk.”
“Good point,” Cally was forced to admit. “I’ll have to think about it.”
Naoko didn’t seem to be happy about the answer, but her mood seemed to be improving again.
“Do. The offer is good until you leave the station. And after this last incident, I doubt there are many who would give you as good terms as I am doing. We’ll talk later.”
Naoko left her with that, making damned sure she didn’t get the last word in. The landing bay itself was pressurised at the time, with another truck parked up and loading. That was where all the trolleys were going.
There was something she wanted in her toolbox, but first she had to make a show of getting about repairing the truck. She had to repair the truck anyway unless they wanted to get caught in the crossfire of the upcoming attack
She crossed the bay doing her best to go unnoticed, opening the passenger door of her truck before pulling out the seat. It wasn’t hard, the passenger seat was designed to be removed easy, so Jet could sit in the back in comfort.
Now it helped her get her toolbox out. She opened it, a basic key lock deterring casual thieves, checked to see if what she really wanted was still hidden in its proper place... it was... before removing her engine diagnostic kit.
It was literally just an ordinary OBD-II diagnostic unit and connection leads, a fault code reader... nothing more or less. It had a simple LED display. She hooked it up to the trucks ECU, now waved.... but still working much the same as it usually did.
It took a few moments to make the connection. The truck’s own minor AI smiled recognising the touch of it’s owner. Poor thing really was like a loyal dog, did she have to have it shot up so bad?
“Hey! Vot de hell iz dat?”
She snapped around, turning to face that same gold-toothed zwilnik she’d passed in the corridor. He was bearing down on her wearing an almost dog-like snarl, big ice-coloured eyes focused on the device in her hand.
-----
Teela had worked for hours on the data of the collar, slowly creating an annotated map of 3D images, looking for hints about the general design of the station and other interesting things. She was sure that the designers of this place had planned the asteroid for a high security facility, but there were some noticeable different areas.
A large area was a combined living and working area, a place where people spent most of the day.
The spaceport was another separated area, connected to the rest of the asteroid station by long and winding corridors.
‘Will not be that easy to break into for Jet and his group’ Teela thought, looking at the color marked area.
But there was a third part of the station she and Cally had wandered into accidentally. One that Naoko had said it was ‘forbidden’ or ‘restricted’ for them. They had not been able to move far into it, but this area had a different kind of layout than the living area of the station. There had been less people moving around, and nearly none of them had been chatting with each other. The few pieces of conversation the collar had recorded had even some technical content.
‘This must be some kind of construction or research area... but unless this place has a second starport, it looks like a place to build small things... or maybe to do research!’ Teela thought with a curious look.
Teela stretched herself and yawned, then she got up and moved over to Callys luggage again. She put her ‘toy’ back into the small box and took out a standard computer tablet. It took her a few moments to find the rooms network plug, but then she leaned back on the bed of the room and began to surf the internal web of the asteroid. She was not really doing something forbidden, but just randomly surfing the internal web was sometimes enough to gather useful information about a network.
Somewhere in there should be some evidence that this ‘restricted’ area was really the one they were looking for.
----
Hopefully nobody looks like a moron here. Though the reference to Agatha still feels a little thrown in... whole conversation really could do with being smoothed over.
________________________________
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?