J4: ouch job 56 recvd i blm h2.
L1: m 2
H2: m 2 wat
Aorin needed her bears.
A1: ppl w r dumpg 2da n i wnt z mch z posbl
J4: crp gt t
H2: undrstd
L1: on t
J4: mystri solvd
She shrunk the window and placed it in the lower right corner so she could focus on her current project: following up on the changes to the Human database. Her task was worse than finding a needle in a haystack, because at least there you knew you were looking for a needle. She was just looking for anything suspicious that might be related to the terrorist activities. She had redefined her search thirty-five times so far…
The scent hit her from behind, blowing away her thoughts like a hat caught in an unexpected wind.
“Aorin,” said a voice she recognized immediately even though she hadn’t seen him in over two years. She turned around, completely thrown by his appearance.
“Scythe! I thought you were in the field…”
“Change in plans, but I’d like it if people continued to think that…”
“Sure. Here, come in.” She got up, closed the door and offered him her seat, but he waved it away and sat on the short filing cabinet next to her desk. Her office was extremely small, which was typical for the type of workspace allotted to her position. Even so, she had tried to make it comfortable since she was often putting in extra hours on special assignments like this one. Pictures of her family lined the walls, along with framed treasures she had found on her many hiking trips: leaves, flowers, seed pods, etc.
In less obvious places, she had pinned up small pieces of papers featuring jokes and comic strips; these were strategically hidden from the casual observer because some of them had been recently banned by an interoffice memorandum. The newest comic strip from one of her favorite underground artists even featured the memorandum that prohibited them shooting out of the back of a nightcrawler. Since the term ‘nightcrawler’ had become a popular way to refer to any administrator who issued ridiculous, redundant or outright asinine directives, it was one of the major themes in her collection.
It hadn’t taken her long to get curious enough to research the origin of the nickname, 'nightcrawler.' A low level data tech, one of her own brethren in the Scere, ran across the term while transcribing notes for a meeting years ago. It had been used by an irritated young man the Eler had failed to recruit, something that in itself was noteworthy. An amateur artist, the tech made a little doodle featuring his boss as a nightcrawler and sent it to all of his buddies. Due to the popularity of that first comic, as well as a few others that sprang up right afterwards, the term caught on like wildfire. After finding out who the rebellious young man was, she made sure to collect them all. It tickled her all the way to her toes to personally know the very thorn that continued to stick in the side of the Eler.
Ignoring the comics like he always did, Scythe picked up the one picture that she had room for on her desk: she and her brother in a cheerful hug in front of a waterfall.
Aorin smiled, “He’s apprenticed already as a physical therapist.”
“Congratulations,” he said and then added, “he really grew up fast.”
Aorin nodded, “Thanks to you.”
Scythe shrugged.
The last time she had seen him, he had said something like, “It was my assignment.” That was a typical response for him. However, her brother had told her what had happened and she knew that, after tracking down the kidnappers and completing his given assignment, he had gone out on his own to follow up on a lead. That had led him to where her brother and five others were being held. After that, she researched for herself the details of the incident and found that he had, using what was recorded as a 'special ability' on a money launderer, identified connections to four other operations. Each one of those gave him information about at least one and sometimes several more illegal outfits.
After the last one was shut down, he was promoted to Special Agent and was given security access and high level services such as those she provided as a tech. So when she saw a request from him in the assignment queue, she volunteered for it; they had worked together many times since then. Each time, she worked her hardest to help him, putting in whatever hours were necessary, making whatever accommodations she had to, because she knew that with him she wasn’t just gathering data, she might be finding someone’s brother. They had helped dozens of people and that had impacted hundreds of people, when one considered the effect that harm to one member had on the entire family.
What had surprised and impressed her from the beginning was the way he treated his own successes. He never sought recognition or compensation beyond his salary. His habit was to humbly redirect attention to the next assignment.
“I’m kind of in a rush and have a lot to do, so can we start?”
She nodded, smiling. “What do you need first?”
“I haven’t been able to access a few feeds, so I'd like to check them.”
“Okay, get me the locations,” she said and turned to face her screen.
She shook her head when he started naming them off immediately, “Hold on, I thought I’d have time for you to get them out.” Her hands flew across the keyboard, occasionally reaching up and moving something on the display. She should have known he’d have memorized them, even though they were made up of twenty-four digit addresses. “Your memory is incredible.”
“Ready?”
“Yes.”
He gave her the information and soon they found themselves staring at...nothing. “It’s been disabled.”
“I need the stored data.”
“You stored it remotely?” She entered the command to access the data from what she now knew was a camera of some type.
“Yes,” he saw that she had arrived at the security protocol and gave her the password, “TE8S853O.”
“Wow, that’s a beautiful device. Here we go.” A list of files came up, videos broken into ten minute segments for what looked like about a week. “That’s a lot. Okies. Since it was disabled, let’s start with the final frames. You’re looking for someone in particular, right?”
He nodded and leaned forward, intent on the screen. She straightened up, catching his excitement. This was someone important.
“I’ll play it from the end, backwards, to save time.”
The screen remained black for a second, and then it glowed orange. The orange faded to cream and then a hand came into focus as it moved away from a camera. The hand fell down out of the screen to reveal a living room. The room was very plain, definitely part of a Human house or maybe an apartment. There was a short couch and a coffee table, some pictures on the wall, and a plant that didn’t look remotely real. Then a head backed away from the camera in the lower right corner, and soon the whole face appeared, retreating from the camera it was frowning at.
She smiled, freezing the frame and copying, cropping and saving the picture. “Gotcha, Snuggums.”
“Grab the whole clip, will you?” He pulled his backpack off his back and started rummaging through it. He always had that thing with him. Someday she’d ask him what was inside. She liked to imagine that it contained all kinds of ingenious devices, like the extremely expensive camera that had just been crushed by Snuggums. It wouldn't surprise her a bit to find that he had some intricate and deadly weapons in there.
“Sure,” she saved a copy of the video from its remote location to both her network and her workspace drives. “Searching?” She pulled up her face recognition and search applications and loaded the picture. The program started mapping the face and extrapolating a three dimensional image that it would then try to match with existing faces in the database. An exhaustive search would take hours, maybe days if they were unlucky, so they were going to need to narrow the search. She started setting the parameters.
“Here, I know you like these.” She smelled them first, the terrible mind control weapons that he had stashed in his myste
rious bag of doom: gourmet jelly bears. “Sorry I forgot to…”
“Yay! Thanks! You are a true hero,” she said, ripping open the bag and just barely finding the willpower to offer him some before she dug into them.
He smiled, grabbing a few and eating one. Orange: her favorite by a ten percent margin.
“You are the greatest!” She downed three and put the bag on the desk sideways so that quite a few spilled out. That way she could get to them quickly.
“I want to try Yawning Valley first.”
“Good. One second.” The search showed nothing, so they widened it to include all the bordertowns and the one Human city in the region. It took several minutes, during which time she updated him on some of the other searches that they were working on. When the identity search program quacked three times to indicate that it had finished, they viewed the results. They were the same. “Nope.”
“Is it a good picture?”
“Yes, I think so. It has 88% of the total mapping points configured, and that’s fairly high.”
“Okay, include the areas of terrorist activity next.” He ate a yellow one. Third favorite.
While she worked, he commented blandly, “Your computer quacks.”
“Yeah, it’s great. Had to fix that up myself, because, unbelievably, that function is not in demand.”
He smiled.
After a few more quacks, they had still discovered nothing.
“Spread the search to the surrounding regions, and while we wait, let me see the video, as far as it goes.”
She scrolled back through the video, making the screen as large as she could, and started the clip from the beginning.
Aorin saw a seriously ugly Human sitting on his stumpy couch watching television, something loud and obnoxious that involved eggs and lobsters, according to the screams. Even he didn’t think it was very good. When the visitor bell rang, he got up and disappeared from the screen. There was a muffled, distant discussion, and then Snuggums came into the room, stood there about three seconds, and then turned and headed straight for the camera.
“Wow, he’s good,” she said, nodding her head appreciatively. Scythe didn’t answer right away, so she glanced up at him.
Scythe was as still as a statue. He was staring at the orange glow with his mouth stuck in an endless, What? Then he blinked, and his face was back to normal.
“Again, please,” he said without taking his eyes off the screen.
It looked the same to her. Blah, blah...obnoxious. Run along and get the door...Heya, come on in and trash a couple thousand in cool equipment…show me the hand.
“He’s not...he’s not Human,” he said as if he still didn’t believe it and wanted her to tell him differently.
She frowned and backed it up to his face. “He looks Human. What does he smell like?”
“I don’t know. He does look Human...Holy crap, but he’s not. He’s got to be a halfblood.”
“What?” She looked closer. He looked nothing like Scythe.
“He’s a halfblood that passes for Human. That’s why he stays near Humans, because they can’t tell the difference. The Kin would smell it right away.”
“How can you tell?”
“He heard the camera. No Human can do that.”
“Maybe he’s just a good…”
“No. Not possible. Aside from that, one other time I watched him leave because he heard people coming to the door. I didn’t understand then why it bothered me, but I do now. He couldn’t have heard them from where he was, but he did. He’s not Human. He’s a halfblood.”
“If you saw him, why couldn’t you smell him?”
“I wasn’t there. Grab that search. You’ve got it limited to Humans, right?”
“Of course. We can do a wide search for halfbloods, because there are so few.” She finished resetting the parameters and started the search. “That will do the whole continent in about ten minutes. Why don’t you let me show you what else I have while we wait?” she suggested.
“Good.” He pulled a small device from his pocket, looked at it, and then put it away again.
“How much time do you have? Should I just start the dump?”
“I’m good for a bit. Can you show me the updates on the Huran incident?”
“Yeah, let’s take a look.” She accessed Scere Operations and tapped the icon for “Terrorist Activity: Juniper.” Inside they scanned the latest entries.
“Here is the report of the damages...No, you want before that, right? Okay. Here is Captain Reave’s updated entry that occurred just before the incident…”
“Check the responses. I want to see if an inquiry was made regarding the decision to post the unit at Huran.”
“Here’s one. Looks like Huran volunteered, according to this.”
Following the Huran incident of 5-4-3-7, an inquiry by officer Anvil was made for Captain Reave, who was on medical, regarding the decision to station the Scere unit and later Human border patrol unit at Huran instead of at Border Patrol Station in Juniper. The following was found.
Siting recent terrorist activity in the area, Huran’s lead supervisor, Yoiger contacted the Scere on 13-3-3-7, petitioning that soldiers be stationed at the Huran offices to provide a stable base as well as to provide protection for the facility. It was determined that the facilities were adequate and the danger to civilian employees was minimal and acceptable. The request was approved on 17-3-3-7.
As the terrorist faction could not have known of the Huran request before the sabotage was completed, it was determined by the Scere commissioner that the Huran incident was intended as an attack on Huran, planned before military placement there, and not as an attack on Human or Kin military units.
Huran incident will be catalogued as a terrorist action against a civilian target.
“Find the primaries,” Scythe said.
“Let’s see. Of course they aren’t listed. Lazy. That’s why you didn’t make the cut to tech, loser.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The intel aides. Bunch of slackers. It isn’t that hard to link the primary to your doc when it’s right there in front of you. It’s like a two second operation.” She moved to another frame. “Here it is.”
They looked over the standard letter written by supervisor Yoiger in which he outlined the recent attacks in the area and highlighted that the targets were similar in size and function to his own business. He requested further military presence in the area and commented that the search for the terrorists by the Humans seemed futile. He requested a Kin investigation and volunteered to assist by offering his location as a base of operations.
“Hm...” Scythe murmured after finishing it. “Where did he get the idea…”
“He saw other places getting attacked.”
“Yeah, but it is still a bit of a jump from being scared of an attack to offering to let a military unit upset your business indefinitely. Why not just beef up security? Can you access his personal correspondence for a week or two before the request?”
“Easy.” She made a quick amendment to one of the screens and then began to navigate through the database.
“What was that?”
“What?”
“What did you do to the document?”
“Oh, I just added the primary link.”
“You changed it.”
“Yeah. I can do that from here, remember?”
“So, who knows, right now, that you changed it?”
“Hm...here’s his stuff…” she displayed a list of Yoiger’s personal communications, most of which were obviously from family members. “Who can tell? Well, anyone monitoring me, but the Red Eye hasn’t shown me anything. The link itself will have my identification on it, but you’ve been looking for things deleted, not added, right? I guess they could flag the document and have a program running that checks it periodically and notifies them when it is changed. Then, if they can access the changes log, which again, we can’t do easily, but if they could access
the data log, they could see that I did it.”
“This one,” he said, reaching out and touching the screen, which pulled up a letter addressed to Yoiger two days after an attack in the area and one day before he wrote his letter. “Can we see if a document is flagged?”
“No, because the program is in their computer and it is just accessing the document...wait…we could see who is accessing the document multiple times. That would tell us.”
“Can you keep this up while you do that?” He asked, reading the letter.
She made both panes fit on her screen and went to work.
“This is it,” Scythe said, but he didn’t sound pleased about it. “We found it. Can you make me a copy of this letter and save one for yourself, too?”
She switched screens and did as he asked, turning around and getting the paper as it left the machine. She glanced at it. “Kelreig? The minister?” she asked Scythe worriedly, thinking, Personal security issues.
Just then, the search duck started quacking and didn’t stop.
Chapter 23
Hur-ry, hur-ry, hur-ry, hur-ry, hur-ry, hur-ry, hur-ry.
“...so Lena said, ‘Time to go,’ and we packed up our things, which wasn’t much, and left. Those were a few rough months on our own. In the city, there are places you can go if you need food or a room for a while, especially for kids, but there was nothing like that in the bordertown…” Ian explained.
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