South of the river and the pens lay tens of meters of dock on which cranes and larger shipping drones labored, hauling stock back and forth between the farm and the facility. The north side of the main building had several enormous dock doors, behind which was probably the packaging operation. Inside the building, who knew? Offices, surely. But with any luck, she wouldn’t have to go inside to find out. There was, of course, the chance the kids had already been caught or worse―she swallowed down the lump of that thought and pushed it away. But she’d best do a thorough search here before moving on to investigate that possibility. If the patrolling guards weren’t up in arms, then the kids were probably still hidden around here somewhere.
She spent a few minutes hovering far above the aquaculture, noting the routines of the drones and guards who manned the place. She spotted the locations of the guard shacks, spaced evenly and sparingly around the grounds.
Movement that didn’t belong to either drones or guards caught her eye. Down below, near the corner of the facility just past the docks, a line of four people moved in a line from under the flatbed of one large truck to another, moving as though they definitely were not supposed to be there. Bingo.
Frostburn slowly floated down to the ground near the cabs of the trucks. Her boots scraped a little gravel underfoot when she landed, and she heard a small choking sound emanate from under the truck, followed by silence.
She took a quick peek in astral space and leaned over to get a better look. Huddled together were four glowing forms of metahumans. Being a skilled magician, she was able to read some information from their auras: they were young; they were two orks, a human, and a dwarf; and they were scared drekless. None of them was Emilia.
“Hey,” Frostburn said in a whisper, and someone let loose a tiny cry that was quickly shushed. They heard her, at least, and they weren’t jumpy enough to shoot at her. So far, so good. She returned her perception to the physical plane.
“I’m Emilia’s aunt,” she said, “and I’m here to get you out.”
Silence greeted her and she waited. After a few seconds, a voice whispered back. “How do we know you’re telling the truth?”
Frostburn snorted. “Well, I haven’t started shooting you, have I?” It came out without much prompting. She was more than ready to be done with today.
After a few heartbeats, a low voice murmured, “Good point.”
Soft scraping sounds preceded the appearance of four young faces under the truck. Two of them had tear tracks running down their faces. All of them looked shell-shocked.
She scanned the vicinity, found it was clear, and motioned for the kids to come out. Then she shook her head at her own stupidity. “I’m invisible, so you can’t see me,” she said. “But you can come out from under there. Do it quietly. The coast is clear for now.”
One by one, they scooted and crawled out from under the flatbed. They were just a bunch of kids. Hell, Emilia was probably the oldest one of the bunch.
“Where’s Emilia?” she said. “What happened?”
The kids exchanged worried glances, and none of them seemed to want to speak up.
The black-haired human boy said tentatively. “We were gonna do the thing, but...”
“But we lost our nerve,” a small, red-haired ork girl offered, her eyes scanning the area for the source of Frostburn’s voice.
“And then we couldn’t get back out,” said the sandy-haired ork boy.
“So Emilia went to look a way for us to get out of here,” said the ork girl.
“But she’s been gone for a while,” added a blond dwarf boy.
Frostburn scowled and pursed her lips in thought. “Have you noticed any activity from security?”
The kids shook their heads.
“Any alarms go off since you showed up?”
They shook their heads again.
Frostburn nodded and sighed. They weren’t far from the wall. She was confident she could get them out that way, so long as they avoided being spotted.
“All right. I can’t make you all invisible, but you were able to get this far without getting spotted. If I can get you to the wall, I trust you can get over without being seen?”
The kids nodded with varying degrees of confidence.
“Good—” Frostburn heard the hiss of a voice over a transceiver from not too far away on the other side of the trucks. She cursed under her breath. “Someone’s coming,” she whispered. “Get back under there and be silent!” she said. The blond dwarf suppressed a sob as they all scrambled back under cover.
Frostburn readied herself for...she didn’t know yet, but she was ready. A pair of guards walked in tandem a couple meters past the ends of the parked vehicles. Frostburn stayed perfectly still, watching them proceed, and examined them in astral space.
Neither was Awakened, and they had a little bit of some kind of ’ware, but not so much that they resembled the cheese with the holes in it. They moved along at a good clip, apparently oblivious to her—and the kids’—presence.
She waited to the count of ten after she lost them around the corner, then returned to the kids and to physical perception. “They’re gone. You can come out again.”
The kids crawled out quietly and quickly.
“I wouldn’t normally do this,” Frostburn said, “but I need to keep this invisibility spell up and I don’t want to have to recast it. So all of you, hold hands now.”
They glanced nervously between themselves, but obeyed. Once they all were holding one anothers’ hands, Frostburn took the hand of the ork boy at the front of the line. He jumped in surprise, then flushed with embarrassment.
“Here’s the plan: I’m going to get you over the wall. You’re going to follow the wall to your left and find a car on the road. You’re going to get into the car. You will stay put. You will stay quiet. Any questions?”
The kids shook their heads.
“Good. Come on.” A last glance around, and Frostburn led them straight to the wall. One by one, she helped to hoist each kid over the wall. The last one in line was the dwarf boy. Frostburn wasn’t the strongest ork in the world, but she could hold her own. Still, the kid was stocky and heavier than he looked. It was a challenge just to help him reach the top of the wall. She tried to get him to put his foot in her clasped hands, but it was impossible. With heavy regret and a sigh, Frostburn dropped her invisibility spell. Now that he could see her, she was able to help him up to the top of the wall.
The boy struggled, looking like he was doing an army crawl on his belly on the top of the wall. As he teetered at the top, barely out of Frostburn’s reach, she heard a voice shout, “Stop!”
Frostburn cursed, jumped as high as she could, and literally shoved the boy’s ass over the wall. She heard him land with a loud thud. She hoped he wasn’t hurt, but even if he were, it was better than getting shot.
The two guards who had passed just a little while ago were running back toward her from the left.
She dashed back between the trucks and slithered over a couple of spots, between the wall and the cab of the truck the kids had been hiding under. Just as the guards came into view, Frostburn let loose a spell on them.
Her street name, Frostburn, was not her choice of names. That’s just the way street names work; it’s generally a nickname someone else gives you. However, it was an appropriate name for the ork for a couple of reasons. The first reason—and something she’d only noticed about herself recently—was that she tended to run hot when frustrated, but frosty under real pressure. The second reason—and the real reason behind her street name—was her trademark spells of Flame Strike, Fireball, and Ice Spear. Combat spells were showy, sure, and tended to get people’s attention, but her preference actually lay with quieter effects, such as the Mass Confusion she imposed on these two guards.
Both men stopped in their tracks. The taller of the two yanked off his helmet and dropped his mouth open in awe. The shorter opened his visor and raised his eyebrows so high, they disappeared beneath
it. Taller started to spin slowly in a circle, gaping at the world around him. Shorter scowled in consternation and shook his head vigorously.
She didn’t know what they were reacting to, but that was part of the fun of this spell. As she watched them warily, she drew her Ceska and attached the silencer. Although the spell was meant to get them off her back, it was sometimes just as likely that they’d get confused enough to view her as some mutant monstrosity that they needed to kill, like, right the hell now.
Shorter said, “Wait...what were we doing? Focus!” He rapped his knuckles on his forehead. “There’s an intruder. No, there’s an escapee? One of the animals got out of its enclosure!”
Taller gazed at Shorter lovingly. “I never noticed it before, but your voice has a lovely aroma of blue.”
Frostburn shook her head in amusement, double-checked she’d loaded stick-and-shock ammunition, then fired a burst into each guard. They grimaced, grunted, and shook as the electricity coursed through their systems, and then both fell to the ground.
Frostburn slunk forward, grabbed each of them in turn, and dragged their prone forms underneath the trucks. That should buy her a little time.
She reached out and tried to contact her spirit of kin. It responded that it was near. The spirit transmitted a telepathic impression of Emilia: her form in astral space glowed, and she huddled in the midst of grey tech. That didn’t help much.
Frostburn sneaked deeper into the facility grounds. It wasn’t well-guarded, as she’d surmised. She made a mental note to avoid consuming Ingersoll products in the future, though. There had been no sign at all of any uproar from security. Either they hadn’t found Emilia yet, or they already had her in custody. The kids said they hadn’t heard any alarms, but that didn’t mean Emilia couldn’t have been grabbed and either brought inside or sent away with the cops already.
She had just about finished a lap around the place by now. To her right was a tall, pale gray set of stairs leading to a landing and a metal door set a story or two up. One set of stairs stretched up before her; the other went down in the direction she was headed.
The door slammed open. Frostburn leaped forward out of sight and tried to become one with the wall underneath the metal landing.
Boots stomped overhead.
Can I risk another spell?
The sound passed over, then ahead and behind. She could see their black-clad elbows coming down the railing ahead.
They’re coming down both ways—where can I go?
Frostburn whipped her head back and forth. The ones behind her were closer. She spun to face them and stared as they descended the last few steps and hurried around the corner at the bottom.
She turned. The other group headed away from her, too. Straight away. Not one of them turned to check their six. She gawked, unbelieving, then darted after them.
Looking the guards over in the astral, she noted how all of them weren’t more than kids. Fresh-faced, the lot of them. And not a little bit scared. No cyberware or bioware. And, most importantly to her, none of them appeared magically active. Appeared being the operative word here, because there were ways to mask the aura, or just plain project false information: make yourself look like a badass when you’re just a little newbie, or vice versa. Extrapolating from the rest of what she gleaned off this bunch, though, she doubted any of them were Awakened, let alone advanced enough to know masking.
Frostburn returned her perception to matters of the physical plane, and followed in the guards’ wake. She yearned to move past them, to see what had kicked the hornet’s nest, but she didn’t trust herself to move unnoticed ahead of their line.
Instead, she waited until they turned a corner, then leaped and caught hold of the top of the shipping container and pulled herself up on top. Here she crouched, so as not to be spotted from the ground. The guards appeared not to notice, and hurried away toward the docks. There, near the furthest pens, a ghostly dog growled, ran a few meters away from, stopped and growled again at the approaching guards.
Frostburn scowled—this seemed too familiar—and scanned the rest of the piers. Far on the opposite end of the docks from the guards, enormous tanks cast deep shadows that the mid-morning sun had not yet scrubbed out. From the shadows, a glint of light. Movement where it should not be. Frostburn glanced around and behind her, but all the guards had run off toward the dog on the docks. She scrambled down and crossed the distance to investigate the movement in the shadows.
As she approached, a shift to astral perception revealed a figure crouched in the shadows, metahumanoid in shape, magically Awakened, and directly beside the figure, Frostburn’s spirit of kin floated.
“Emilia!” she said as loudly as she dared.
The figure’s head whipped around at her approach.
When Frostburn reached the sharp edge of the shadows, she practically dove head-first to get her eyes adjusted to the dark and verified her aura reading.
“Was that your distraction?” she said and hitched a thumb in the direction of the ghost dog
But before Emilia could reply, a voice shouted from nearby, “Stop right there!”
“Come on!” Frostburn shouted and reached a hand toward Emilia, who clasped her hand. Together they ran, out of the shadows and back toward the facility where they would be less in the open. The guard who had shouted started shooting, which alerted the guards on the opposite end of the docks, which brought bullets whizzing past them on either side. Frostburn and Emilia rounded a corner to break line of sight from the guards, and dashed up the ramps that led them back above water level and behind some semblance of cover.
They closed the distance toward the portion of wall over which Frostburn had dropped the others, and the door from which the guards had poured earlier crashed open again. Several more black-clad Ingersoll guards sped down the stairs.
Frostburn grabbed Emilia by the back of her jacket. Her cousin squawked and nearly fell, but regained her balance in short order. Frostburn heaved Emilia back the way they’d come, but instead of turning one way, she turned the other direction and stuffed herself and Emilia behind a large electrical box. She didn’t know whether the guards had seen them, but she’d find out soon enough. She stabbed her elbow into Emilia’s side, put her finger to her lips, and pointed in the direction they’d come.
“Commlink,” Emilia whispered and made some kind of motion with her hand that Frostburn did not recognize.
Frostburn shook her head, confused. “I don’t know what that is,” she said mimicking the gesture, “but I don’t have one; the elf—your fixer—took it. Where’s yours?”
Emilia frowned. “I, uh, think I left it in your car.”
Frostburn sighed. She was about to dive in to her planned tirade against her cousin when she caught a glimpse of movement over Emilia’s shoulder. She pulled her cousin back toward her while she tried to make herself smaller and shuffle back a little herself.
The movement Frostburn had noticed was another patrol. They crept forward, but neither their eyes nor their barrels pointed their direction, though the helmets they wore made it tough to know what they were really looking at. Considering advances in audio engineering, she could bet on them hearing anything she or Emilia said. Maybe they didn’t have ’ware, but chances were good their uniform helmets were outfitted with all sorts of fun toys.
They waited and watched: Emilia growing ever more bored; Frostburn growing ever more anxious. The patrol made its way around the corner they were approaching. Seeing no threat and having not been suddenly killed, the guards’ postures relaxed a little and they continued on their path, which lead directly away from the two orks.
Frostburn let out a long, slow breath.
Emilia whispered, “It’s a commlink. I’m answering a call?”
“What?”
“This?” Emilia made the odd gesture from earlier.
“Are we seriously discussing the latest trends in hand gestures now?” Frostburn said and craned her neck to get a good look around bef
ore she stood up from their hiding spot.
“You’re just an old fart. What are you going to do when they do away with keyboards altogether?” Emilia said.
Frostburn shrugged and straightened her jacket. “Complain about it, probably. I’m sure as hell not getting a datajack installed.” She rapped her knuckles on her temple. “No entry.”
“You ever hear of ’trodes?” Emilia said. “I hear they’re the latest new thing.”
Frostburn screwed her face up and mocked Emilia’s tone in a singsong voice. “Naw neh naw neh naw nee naw.”
“How old are you?” Emilia said with a scowl.
“Old enough to know better not to run off on your own like that, at least!” Frostburn said.
“Oh really?” Emilia said and tipped her head to one side, deeply doubtful.
Four guards rounded the corner ahead, rifles at the ready. Both women jumped in surprise, and Frostburn launched a fireball.
The massive ball of roiling fire careened toward the guards, who valiantly attempted to leap out of its path, but the spell caught most of them, if only on their pant legs. They screamed and rolled on the ground, trying to put out the flames.
Only one of the guards avoided the blast. She lifted her rifle after having leaped clear. Emilia pointed at the guard, and a Power Bolt seized the woman. She cried out, her body seized up, and she fell in a heap.
Emilia grabbed a wobbly Frostburn by the elbow and led her away as fast as they could run. They darted around corners, momentarily moving into doorways and behind cover, and successfully eluded the guards long enough to briefly catch their breath.
“What the frag are you doing out here, anyway?” Emilia said in mid-evasion.
“I’m saving your ass. What did you think I was doing here?” Frostburn shot back.
“Although I appreciate your stupidity, I certainly don’t need you coming in here like some great, holy savior. I can take care of myself.”
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