Binding Foxgirls III

by Simon Archer

  “He’s the best there is, remember?” I reminded everyone. “No one’s been able to crack our system yet, even Achilles. The only intel he had on TelCorp was from Elias Berg’s time. Malthe’s the difference between the two security systems. We’re airtight.”

  “Okay,” Semra said, seeming only a little satisfied by this. She leaned back in her chair and relaxed a bit.

  “Here it is,” Malthe said after another moment where the only sound in the room was him tapping away on his keyboard. The holoscreen at the center of the boardroom table flared to life, showing a digital reconstruction of the list in question.

  #12: The project is going well. Targets are adapting well. Should be on schedule. Will update you next week at the same time.

  #13: Project took a turn. Should be back on schedule soon. Minor setback. Will update you sooner this time, just in case.

  #14: Still a setback, but minor. Have a plan to revert to original schedule.

  “See, it’s just like that over and over again,” Malthe added. “No specifics, nothing. Just vague words and details.”

  “Do we have dates to link to those numbers?” I asked.

  “No,” Malthe said with a shake of his head. “I mean, I don’t think so. There are some weird numbers at the bottom that kind of look like dates, but they’re not. At least I don’t think they are. They’re not the dates we normally use, anyway. See?” With a few more taps, the hologram shifted to a series of numbers at the bottom of the file.

  “You’re right,” I said, after examining it for a moment. “But look, the numbers are sequential as we go down the line. Not sequential as in one, two, three, four, five, but more like each number is bigger than the one before. See? So this is an eight, then a nine, then a ten. But then this second set of numbers starts at two, then jumps to seven, then eleven, then twenty-two, and so on. And then they reset at a certain point, kind of like days of the month, months, years, that kind of thing. So they could be dates, just coded somehow.”

  “Yeah, I noticed that, too,” Malthe said, pulling the laptop back over to himself and squinting at the screen. “Hold on, let me see if I can work something out. I have a theory.”

  “Go for it,” I said, and just like that he was tapping away at his computer all over again.

  I went back to my plate at that and motioned for the others to do the same. We had a busy day ahead, no matter what happened. I could feel it. Who knew when we’d get a chance to eat and relax again? I smothered some pancakes with fresh strawberries and chocolate and poured myself some coffee. As I took a deep sip, the caffeine began to work its magic, waking me up. While I’d been getting up way earlier than I used to before I was CEO, my internal rhythms hadn’t exactly caught up with my new schedule yet, so I was burning the candle at both ends, so to speak. And I had a feeling I would be for a while yet, at least until Achilles was found. Not to mention keeping up with all three of the foxgirls at all hours of the night.

  Then Malthe held a finger in the air and whipped his head up.

  “Got it!” he cried, and Kira, who disliked sudden noises, jumped in her seat.

  “Sorry,” he mumbled to her before continuing. “So Nic, I think you were right about the dates. It is a dating system, and these logs line up with certain events in Termina.”

  “How do you mean?” I asked, narrowing my eyebrows.

  “So here, the first line that said everything was going well was the week before Cindra escaped,” Malthe explained.

  I raised my eyebrows again. “What makes you think that?”

  “Well,” Malthe continued, “it’s a hypothesis, to see if the dates would line up. If I assume the day where the log says there was a setback was the day she disappeared is the day you broke her free from that slimeball client’s house, the numerical progression makes all the other dates line up perfectly.”

  Cindra flinched and scoffed at the mention of the whole affair. She’d fucking hated that guy, and so had I. I mean, most of the clients I had worked for in the bad old days of non-consensual binding were real pieces of work, but Cindra’s had been something else entirely. His hair, hands, and pretty much everything about him were greasy. Plus, his house in the south side suburbs had looked like a fucking little old grandma’s, full of lace and shit. He even collected these little ceramic foxes. And he’d dressed Cindra, the fittest, strongest foxgirl I had ever seen, in a frilly little tutu.

  It was all way too creepy.

  “Maybe you’re right…” My voice trailed off as I tried to figure all the right dates in my head. The last few months had all been a bit of a blur, with so much happening all the time that I wasn’t quite sure when what happened and where.

  “Here,” Malthe said, practically reading my mind as he brought up another hologramatic window with a list of dates matching the crazy events of the past few months. “Does this help, boss?”

  “Yeah, thanks, Malthe.” And as I scanned over the two, I saw it. “You’re right! They do line up. So this is when I broke out Cindra, and this is the week before, and then this is the day we broke out Kira, and then this is Kinley. And this is the takeover. Oh, that’s an interesting message, even if we can’t understand it much.”

  Malthe grinned at me. “Well, we can understand it better now.”

  “Oh!” Kinley piped in. “This one looks interesting!” She waved her tail at Malthe eagerly. “Focus on that one.”

  It took him a moment to realize what she meant, but when he did, he nodded. “Right.” The holo projection focused on the entry Kinley pointed at.

  There has been a major setback in the project. We’ve lost our main portal, but we have a plan to regain it. It will take time, however. I wager we will lose about three months.

  “Good find, Kinley!” I nodded to the foxgirl with a smile. “That’s the day we killed Elias Berg if we’re correct.”

  “And it was three months almost to the day before Halit and the others got blackmailed by these people and jumped ship from our original plan to start working for Achilles instead,” Malthe finished for me.

  “What does it say on that day?” Cindra asked sharply. “Anything?”

  “Let me see,” Malthe said, scrolling through the pages. “Here.”

  The main sequence to recommence control has gone as planned. We expect full control in a week’s time.

  “Well, that didn’t happen,” Kinley snorted, chomping down on some pretzels.

  “No, it didn’t,” I agreed before reading through the messages in the days following the one Malthe had just read. “And they’re not happy about it. Looks like they tried to hide it for a while, but then it just got to be too much to keep under wraps.”

  “Yeah, he just keeps reporting that the plan is going well until the last one,” Malthe continued as we all read onward.

  The project has not gone according to plan, we must admit. We’ve lost our main source of power, but we are confident that we will manage to regroup and commence on another plan. Will update accordingly.

  “Some final report,” Clem chortled. “Well, that didn’t go so hot for them either, did it?”

  “Nope, not at all,” Malthe confirmed. “From then on, nothing.”

  “But there don’t seem to be any return messages,” I noted as I glanced over at the hacker. “These are just outgoing messages. Anything in the backlog that are replies?”

  Malthe shook his head. “Not a thing. Either they didn’t keep records of the incoming messages, or they were just reporting out. Either one’s plausible, I guess.”

  “Yeah, I guess so,” I agreed. “It’s weird. While I think we’re right on that date theory, why are they using a different dating system from us? That doesn’t make any sense?”

  “Didn’t you say that Achilles said something to you about the rest of the world when you captured him?” Cindra asked helpfully. “Maybe his organization uses a foreign dating system.”

  “Maybe,” I said, mulling this over. “It’s possible but unlikely. He was probably jus
t trying to scare me or something. After all, we know for a fact that the rest of the world is sparsely populated and relies on Termina for pretty much everything. We supply them with goods, entertainment, the works, so they use our dating system to be compatible with business.”

  “Yeah, you’re right,” Cindra said, frowning and slumping back in her chair. “I just can’t make heads or tails of it.”

  “Neither can I.” I frowned at the holographic display, then looking back over at Malthe. “Can you send these to me?”

  “Will do, boss.” He tapped away at his laptop for a moment, then my E-pad pinged, no doubt with a notification from Malthe containing the pages.

  “Thanks.” I turned to the rest of the board, “So, we go back into the tunnels. Are there any more records? Anything we might’ve missed?”

  Clem shook his head glumly. “A lot of stuff was destroyed in the fires. Those records are most of what we found, and they were in the bunker with Achilles.”

  “The messages were probably sent by him, then,” I reasoned, “but who was he reporting to? He acts like he’s in charge, but he tried to hide how much he and his guys fucked up at the end.”

  “Good question,” Lin said, furrowing her brows together as she thought about this, “and what is the ‘project’ he keeps referring to in the logs? What does that mean? His organization's whole attempt to control the city? Or something else?”

  “It has to be that,” Clem said with a shrug. “What else could it be? The dates line up perfectly if Nic and Malthe’s theory is correct. So it has to be that.”

  “Yeah, that was my first thought…” I leaned forward on the table again and took another needed sip from my coffee cup. “But something about it all still just feels off to me…” My voice trailed off as I tried to pinpoint this feeling.

  “I know,” Lin agreed, locking eyes with me. “Me too, but I can’t quite place why.”

  Clem clapped his hands together. “So we should just get down there, then. The best thing is to get moving, try to get on top of things, find this guy before he does something we can’t fix.”

  “Who broke him out, though?” Lin asked, continuing as if Clem hadn’t spoken, and he shot her a slightly annoyed expression. “He had to have help, and we killed all of his people or threw them in the Void with him. So who’s behind that? None of it quite adds up.”

  “Agreed,” I said, giving her a grim nod. “But Clem’s right, too. We won’t answer any of these questions sitting around unless Malthe has some kind of breakthrough. And he can keep working on his own. A group of us needs to get down in the tunnels.”

  “Alright, I’ll go,” Semra volunteered.

  “Me too,” Clem said quickly, not wanting to miss the opportunity as if I would let him sit this one out when he was the one who’d spent the most time down in the tunnels.

  “Good,” I said, nodding in their direction. “The three of us and the foxgirls, then, just like it was the last time.”

  Clem, Semra, the foxgirls, and I had all gone down into the tunnels to find Achilles and fight off his goons what felt like a lifetime ago. In reality, it was only around a week and a half. Due to our soulbond, the foxgirls and I could move in tandem, fighting together as one. It was an excellent advantage, though I hated putting them in danger. Even so, if I was in danger, that meant they were too, as they always pointed out. As the primary in the soulbond, if I died, they would, too.

  “Wait, how did your last interrogation session with him go?” Lin asked, turning back to me. “Did you get anything out of him?”

  “Oh,” I said, sighing and running a weary hand across my forehead. “Not well. It was… just as unproductive as all the other times, unfortunately. And he was more combative. And snide. Now I think it’s probably because he knew he was getting out soon. The cheeky bastard.”

  My sessions with Achilles in the binding room at the Void were… not fun, to put it mildly. I’d gone every single day to get information out of him, to put him in the chair and look into his soul, attempt to bind him to me so he would have to give me information, anything. But he was resistant to pretty much everything I tried on him.

  Sometimes, I was able to just barely scratch the surface like I had when I first tried to perform a soul gaze down in the tunnels. But it wore me out, to say the least, and even then, I couldn’t see anything but that he was practically gloating at me, confident I wouldn’t get anywhere with him. All I could pick up were surface-level emotions, nothing deeper than that. Sometimes, I could even tell if he was lying to me or not. But that didn’t really matter because I always assumed he was lying, anyway.

  “Damn,” Lin said, shaking her head. “If you can’t get anything out of him, no one can.”

  “No kidding,” Clem snorted. “How do you figure it, Nic? I’ve never met anyone who could resist us. Is he naturally immune? Or does he have a special ability somehow?”

  “I don’t know,” I shrugged. “How would I, the guy won’t tell me anything? I’ve never seen or even heard of anything like it, either. Makes our job way harder, to say the least.”

  “Have you found anything?” Cindra asked Malthe, whose face was back to being buried in his computer.

  “Huh?” he asked again, whipping his head up. “About what?”

  “The breakout,” she clarified. “Anything? Any footage?” He shook his head glumly.

  “No,” he said. “Everything’s completely fried. There’s no footage dating back to yesterday, so I’ve just been going through that old footage, trying to see if there’s any indication of a problem, a break-in, anything. I thought maybe someone came in to scope out the place beforehand, but I can’t see a damn thing. It all looks totally normal. Well, normal for a prison, anyway. I’ll send the footage to a guard who’s on day shift and ask him what he thinks.”

  “Why not night shift?” Kira asked. “Wouldn’t that be better? That’s when it happened.”

  “Yeah, but they’re all dead,” Malthe said bluntly. “And they were all working that night. No one was out. The day shift guys are all we’ve got. Warden’s dead, too.”

  “Awesome,” Kinley said, her voice dripping with sarcasm.

  “What about Achilles?” I asked him. “Is he doing anything in the footage? Can you see his cell?”

  “Yeah, but he just sleeps and paces around a lot,” Malthe shrugged. “Nothing weird.”

  “Nothing to indicate he’s communicating with anyone on the outside?” I asked. Malthe shook his head.

  “So maybe it was an inside job,” Lin suggested. “There’s nothing saying someone broke him out. We don’t have any footage or witnesses.”

  “That’s true,” I said, considering this. “But I can’t imagine he could’ve done it himself. Although who the hell knows. That’s why the first priority needs to be finding him, not figuring out how he got out in the first place. That can come later. Speaking of which, Malthe, can you look around the city, see if there’s anything on his whereabouts?”

  “Already on it, boss,” Malthe said, biting his lip. “I’ve been keeping tabs on that since I heard this morning. And there’s no sign of him anywhere.” Cindra shook her head in disbelief.

  “How could no cameras catch him? He has to be somewhere in the city,” she wondered. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “We didn’t leave a trail when we broke you three out,” I reminded her and the other foxgirls.

  “Yeah, but we had Malthe,” Kinley said, pointing at the hacker. “He kept wiping our digital trail.”

  “Which means Achilles must have someone doing the same,” Cindra finished before her. “But no one’s better than Malthe. Wouldn’t he see it if someone was wiping vids and other footage like that?”

  “I would,” Malthe said definitively. Then, scrunching his face up a bit, “Or at least I think I would. Who the fuck knows with these people. They’re fucking crazy. And we don’t know much about them.”

  “We know they hate tech,” Lin pointed out. “So I doubt they’d
have someone with those skills.”

  “They had someone who managed to break him out of the most secure facility on the planet in the first place,” Clem reminded her.

  “Fair point,” she said, shrugging.

  “Yeah, that’s true,” I said, biting my lip as I thought this over. Then, shaking my head vigorously to clear it, “Enough of all this talk. We need to act. If anything, the city needs to see us act. Otherwise, they’ll get even more freaked out than they already are. We have to go down in the tunnels.”

  “So you, me, the foxgirls, and Semra?” Clem asked, leaning forward in his chair and looking more than a little excited at the prospect of getting the hell out of there.

  “Yep,” I said. “Lin, you’re in charge here while we’re gone. Malthe, keep doing your thing and help us out if we need it while we’re in the tunnels. The rest of you, keep working on a solution to how he escaped, and more importantly, where he is now. But don’t make any major moves without clearing it with me. Understood?”

  They all nodded.

  “What do we do if we need to get in contact with you?” Lin asked. She looked to be a strange combination of confident and nervous. But she was wrong to be nervous. I put her in charge because she was the most capable of those of us not going into the tunnels, after all.

  “The connection should be better in the tunnels now, right Malthe?” I asked, turning to the hacker who was back at work on his laptop.

  “What? Oh yeah,” he said, returning his attention to me. “We put some routers and shit down there to boost the signal. You should be in contact with us the whole time. You have the new earpiece I made for you, right?” I nodded and pulled the small earbud out of my pocket, showing it to him.

  “Yeah, I’ve got it,” I said. “Fits even better than the last one.” The last one had gotten lost in an explosion in the tunnels during our final battle with Achilles’s goons. Not that it had done us much good at the time, given that Malthe’s signal shorted out soon after we got down there, anyway. Hopefully, that wouldn’t be a problem this time around.