📘The Star Pirate's Folly | 20: Blitz
Overlook City's foundation contains a complex system of bombardment shelters, water treatment systems, maintenance tunnels, and a vast network of gravplates which simulate Earth-normal gravity.
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📘The Star Pirate’s Folly — 18 | 19 | … | 21 | 22
Chapter 20: Blitz
“Stop whining, Pluck,” Gruce said.
“But it burns,” mewled Pluck.
Pluck tried in vain to paw at the blackened meat on his left thigh through the neat hole in the armor, but couldn’t reach. He’d been tagged by a laser the day before, which left Gruce with no choice but to carry him on his back. On top of that they both had to conserve energy, so Pluck couldn’t just float along using his gravity nodes.
The little man weighed nothing in the suit, but carrying him made Gruce even more exposed as they crept through the tunnels underneath the city—their armor had long since lost the power to maintain the taxing cloak system. Gruce had to assume since he hadn’t been caught yet that the bombardment had knocked out at least some of the city’s surveillance system. Either that, or Jensen’s scrambling programs hadn’t been stopped yet.
Fatigue had his old body dragging. He could barely think straight after so many sleepless nights on the run. Pluck and himself were all that remained of his command—the others did their part well, allowing Gruce and his squad to slip into the city undetected. The trouble didn’t start until after that.
Starhawk’s armors outside the city bolted before the counterattacking Overlook City troopers could reach them, feigning retreat, and led the troopers away. Then the orbital bombardment slammed the dome, caving in the southern edge. Most of the troopers and drones went down in the initial barrage, so Starhawk’s armors doubled back to mop up while Gruce and his squad cloaked their way through the jagged gap in the dome.
With so much smoke, heat, and rubble infiltration was easy. After they’d successfully breached the city’s walls, his squad split into two teams of five with the same objective: find Jensen’s suit. They had the physical location of it in the police station at the center of the city but expected it to be under heavy guard and would need to strategize before using up the advantage of stealth. Pluck had access codes to get inside.
The city swarmed guards like a busted hornet’s nest. A drone patrol sniffed out Whistler’s squad on the way in. They lost two men and scattered. The rest of the squad went on a frantic chase but got picked off one by one in the streets. Ever since then patrols had been scouring the city for the rest of the pirates.
Upon seeing their plan shot to pieces, Gruce opted for self-preservation. The map was a lost cause, so he grabbed Pluck and took off for the tunnels. That was where Jensen Lee spent most of his time hiding out, so Gruce figured he stood a better chance in there than out in the open. The rest of his squad panicked without him and bought it trying to flee. Gruce didn’t expect to last long—even Jensen Lee ended up a corpse.
But if there was one thing Gruce knew about Lee, it was his tendency to leave himself a back door. He would never have put himself in that bombardment shelter if he didn’t have a plan for when they came knocking. Maybe he’d left something behind. Anything would help.
“We’re here,” Gruce said. “Can you open it?”
He propped Pluck against the wall outside the locked shelter where Lee died. Groaning, Pluck accessed the hardlight screen on his suit, issued several commands, and stopped, hovering his gauntleted finger over the screen.
“They’ll come for us, dearest,” Pluck said. “They’ll know.”
“We’re lucky to have lived this long, Pluck. If there’s nothing in here we’re humped anyway.”
Another flurry of input to Pluck’s screen caused the shelter’s thick door to swing open. Gruce grabbed his subordinate by the arm and pulled him along behind as he went inside.
“We’re trying our best, Harry,” Robert626 said. “This is where you asked us to take you. What more can we do?”
Hargrove’s bushy eyebrows descended in a sharp glare as he glowered at the earnest-eyed recruiter. He’d been cooped up with the chipper man for days inside the Midtown Hotel. The two men sat across from each other, each on the edge of his own bed.
“Stop calling me that. It’s Hargrove. And I want to go up there myself. I’ve been telling you from the start I never wanted anyone to hold my hand for this.”
“You can’t just go up to the station with all this going on, the military won’t let you. And besides, there are still pirates on the loose and you killed one of their best. You need protection.”
Hargrove stood and paced the room.
“I should have stayed here from the beginning,” he said. “I could have done all of this on my own.”
“Hargrove, the only reason you’re in one of your nice hotel rooms instead of that musty holding cell underground is because of what we’ve done for you. The very first day you joined up our team discovered exactly where Bee went! If you don’t call that progress, I don’t know what is.”
Hargrove snorted. “Yes, using information I could have gotten myself! The footage from our cameras here got us on her trail, and her bank records showed her tickets at the station. All you did was get me out.”
Robert626 raised a pointed forefinger. “But would you have known to look for either of those things? You had plenty of time after her disappearance to check in both places, but you didn’t.”
Hargrove crossed his arms. The tight fabric on the white one-piece jumpsuit he wore hindered his movement and he looked down at the overly fashionable outfit with distaste.
“Maybe you’re right. But you’re asking me to work for you before you’ve delivered on your end of the deal. We find her first. Until then I won’t be your mouthpiece. No more video shoots, no more statements. I’ve given you enough already by agreeing to wear these ridiculous suits the whole time.”
The vertical black and red stripes on his outfit matched the one Robert626 wore. So far the recruiter was still the only Volunteer Hargrove had actually met face to face. Every other VCM he’d seen was a trooper. Their armor matched the white-black-red color scheme as well, with white as the base and black and red stripes slashed across the joints. The troopers never spoke or acknowledged him since all communication between them happened inside their helmets. He wondered if Robert626 talked to them with his uplink.
Hargrove had plenty of time to study his silent guardians during their stay. At all times, an armored Volunteer with a laser rifle kept watch. Over the course of the week, the guards rotated on twelve-hour shifts. Hargrove never stayed in the same room for more than one day and some days even moved two or three times to different random rooms. Robert626 explained that his safety was the primary objective. Assassination was not out of the question so they took his protection seriously.
“You don’t like the suits?” the recruiter said, wounded. “Our focus groups said they look dashing. Plus, they can disperse a few laser blasts. You should see some of the ads they’re sending out, you look great.”
“Ads?”
“Yes, that’s what we were recording for. We advertise all over the system for more Volunteers. Always room for new recruits in the VCM!”
“You mean more privateers. More people to get killed for you. Ugh. I need to take a shower,” Hargrove said, unzipping the jumpsuit.
Gruce took a marble-sized scanner drone from a concealed compartment near his waist, clicked it with his thumb, and tossed it into the air. It hovered in front of him and bathed the area with red beams before zooming off to another section of the shelter, leaving glowing hardlight markers in its wake which flagged potentially useful data.
A red marker bobbed in the air over a faint stain on the floor in front of him. Blood, the words said. Lee, Jensen. Lee got stupid, let himself get snuck up on. Damn civvy bludgeoned his skull in with his own helmet. Don’t get stupid, he reminded himself.
With Pluck working on keeping the shelter’s door shut, Gruce followed the drone as it surveyed the entrance to the shelter. If Jensen had hidden anything nearby he wasn’t sure the drone would be able to find it, so he kept a sharp eye out for anything it might miss. It was only a matter of time before the troopers found him and Pluck.
Gruce’s bulky shadow danced on the wall as Pluck welded the door shut. Starhawk would be furious if he knew they weren’t going after the map, but he probably assumed Two-Gut died with the rest of his crew in the city. If they didn’t find anything inside the bunker that’s how he’d end up. But there had to be something—Lee was a legend among smugglers.
The drone returned to Gruce and he snatched it out of the air. It projected a screen in front of him with the scan’s results. Chemical residues, bodily fluids, garbage—nothing, nothing, nothing. He clicked the drone off and returned it to its compartment as he resumed his own search. It would have surprised him if the little sniffer drone found anything Lee stashed so easily.
📘The Star Pirate’s Folly — 18 | 19 | … | 21 | 22
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