05: Trailing
This is the fifth chapter of Part 1: First Mover Advantage, in which Elena realizes she is being followed.
If it’s your first time here, check out the Table of Contents. You’ll probably want to start with the Prologue.
05: Trailing
As a major port and the nexus of the sector, the Gateway Ring is famous for its food scene. Establishments known for serving food and drinks around the clock to comers and goers. Based on her experience at the Cosmic Drift, quality might have gone down a notch, but she’s sure she can find a good breakfast. For now. Once the supplies run out, the situation will be very different, but she doesn’t plan to stick around for that long. It’s breakfast, then off to the docks – meet Jaxon, board the Charon, continue on her mission.
She walks down the street, looking for a place that piques her interest. She’s not picky, and especially now is hungry enough not to bother getting online for an informed decision. There’s a ramen place across the road, with animated noodle neons dancing up and down, a bar & grill next to it. On her side of the street, there’s a Hydroponic Fresh, and a block away an all-day-breakfast restaurant called Star’s End, with an exploding nova as its logo. More diners pepper the street but they’re too far away for her to make out their names. She sees a spinning orange bell pepper, then further down the unmistakable purple comet logo of the Stellar Grub (”Serving the galaxy since 2499”). She picks the breakfast place, Star’s End. Eggs sound good. And caffeine in whatever form they serve it, after last night she needs a booster.
She’s making her way there when she feels a prickle at the back of her neck. She is positive she’s being watched. Before second-guessing herself, before coming up with a rational explanation (maybe I’m paranoid after the conversation with Ingram), she slings her backpack around, reaches in the pocket, and picks up one of the tiny drones, part of her tactical package. She pulls it out of the backpack safely hidden in the palm of her hand, though there isn’t much to hide. The state-of-the-art VoidTech Autonomous Navigation and Tracking (ANT) is less than an inch long, wispy thin, and by design looks like your common flying insect, a galaxy-spanning nuisance.
She pretends to dig some more in her backpack, while at the same time giving instructions to the tiny spy through her graft.
{Play dead for 30 seconds, then follow me at a distance, relay video.}
She pulls out a tissue, pretends to blow her nose, then crumples it around the drone. She throws the balled-up tissue in a recycling pod and keeps walking through thick pedestrian traffic.
The drone comes to life after exactly half a minute has passed, rises out of the recycling pod shaking off the tissue it’s been wrapped in. It’s quiet and close to invisible, its tiny black body absorbing the artificial light simulating early morning on the ring. It hovers about twenty feet above the sidewalk and starts following Elena from a distance.
{Establishing video feed} it sends her.
She connects, can see through the drone’s eyes. The bird’s eye view of the street unfolds in Elena’s mind’s eye. She sees the camping people she just walked by ten seconds ago, she sees people walking behind her. She sees her backpack, herself walking briskly, hopping over a suspicious looking dark red puddle.
Her first thought is another drone. Standard operating procedure. She runs a segmentation algorithm on the feed but finds no other drones between the ANT and herself. She asks the drone to pan around, look behind, up in the sky. Nothing.
She’s either being watched from further away, or she’s being old school followed. Or she’s just paranoid. She’s not paranoid. She’s been in combat – she learned to trust her instincts, and they saved her hide more than once. It’s not magic, it’s lizard brain hardwiring. Struggling to tell the neocortex, unable to articulate the threat, signaling through feelings instead. Certainty. Dread.
If she’s being followed, she needs to figure out by whom. Drones are easier, she has field experience working with drones, working against drones. The spy versus spy shit – that she knows less well. They covered this during Vanguard training, but that was long ago. She’s rusty.
In front of the Star’s End now, she goes inside, walks up to the bar. Her attention is on the video feed. The ANT shows her two people who were walking just a few feet behind her slow down, stop. They look inside The Star’s End. Same back of the neck prickle as before, more intense this time around. Gotcha. They take a few more steps forward so they can’t be seen from inside the restaurant and stop again.
{Warning: low battery.}
The drone is tiny, agile, and packs a spectacular amount of compute for its chassis. This comes at the cost of lifespan. ANTs are very short-lived. This one did its job though. She sends it final instructions. The drone acknowledges, arcs over the Star’s End, and zooms in on the two figures. It takes a burst of pictures, sends Elena a final data dump, and self-immolates before touching the ground.
Adrenaline reduced her appetite, but objectively she needs fuel. And she needs time to think. She orders a protein-rich breakfast, coffee to go with it.
“We’re out of brew, sorry. Would you care for caffeine drops instead?” the server asks her.
“Sure,” she answers without really processing the question. She is distracted now, sifting through the drone’s data.
She’s definitely being followed. They were walking behind her, far enough to be inconspicuous in the crowd, close enough not to lose her, matching her stride. Watch your six. She fast-forwards to the end of the transmission, combines the pictures the drone took into a couple of 3D portraits, rotates them to face her.
While she is sitting at the bar, receiving a plate of fried eggs and synthetic protein strips, in the digital she is staring at two utterly unfamiliar faces. A clean-shaven, middle-aged, tall and muscular guy with graying black hair. A younger, shorter, blond guy, making up for his smaller frame with a lush beard. Who the fuck are these guys? And why are they after her?
A couple of caffeine drops sit next to the eggs on her plate. She eats them first, bitter taste barely registering.
She could use some help from Spark to untangle this, but for all intents and purposes, they’re unreachable. The network backbone is leaky; she can’t message her contact at the Obsidian Holdings branch office with this latest development. Their common vocabulary is severely limited, a handful of codewords, none of which corresponds to this situation. Unplanned for. Nobody thought she would get her cover blown within hours of arriving here. On the other hand, maybe her cover isn’t blown. Maybe it’s just a pair of common thieves taking her for an easy mark.
She ponders next steps. She’s taking off for Verdant in two hours. Should she divert to Nova Prime instead? Is she in danger? Was Ingram threatening her or trying to warn her? In a different situation, she would find the breakfast delicious. The eggs are cooked over easy, just the way she likes them. The synthetic protein strips are engineered to taste and smell heavenly. But her mind is racing, she pecks at the food without enjoying it.
How much of a danger is she in right now? The Gateway Ring is severely overcrowded. Murder rates are climbing, and desperation will only make things worse. They could stab or shoot her, drag her to an alley, lose her body among the crime stats. But she now knows they’re coming, and she won’t go down without a fight. Though she’d much rather avoid causing a ruckus.
Are these some run-of-the-mill criminals, or has she really been compromised? She can easily lose a pair of common muggers, but if they know her identity, that’s far more concerning.
Next set of questions: Is Charon safe? Can she trust Jaxon? Or is she walking into a trap? No certainties in the real world, just probabilities, but she believes Charon is safe. For one, her bid was anonymous – Independent Logistics had no idea who, out of the hundred million people currently packed on the ring, was asking for a ride. Second, if she was going to walk into a trap, they wouldn’t have had to trail her. Third, any ship she gets on has a tiny but non-zero probability of being a trap. If she wants zero risk, she is stuck here. Hell, if she’d wanted zero risk, she would’ve stayed home. She needs to finish her mission.
She forces herself to eat more while thinking through her options. She formulates a plan. Lose the tail, get to Charon, stay alert. Best case scenario, it’s a pair of muggers who’ll lose interest and find another victim. Worst case, her mission just got exponentially more complicated.
She pays for her meal, leaving an egg and a protein strip untouched, glancing outside to see if the goons trailing her are still there. She gets a glimpse of someone quickly ducking away from the window as she turns. They’re still there.
She pretends to go use the restroom. It’s conveniently located in the back, around the counter and out of sight. She walks straight past the door, through the fire exit, into a quiet back alley.
The alley is narrow, made even narrower by an overflowing garbage pod. A couple of vagrants are sleeping next to it on blankets, seemingly unperturbed by the stench. She sprints past them, picking another ANT out of her backpack without breaking stride. She doesn’t have an unlimited supply, but she needs eyes on the alley. She drops it before turning the corner, positioning it to watch the fire exit she just came out of. The drone is stationary, which gives it a longer lifespan. Something to watch her back as she makes her escape.
She pulls up a map of the ring segment, making sure she is headed in the general direction of dock 142. She continues jogging, sticks to back alleys for a while, taking left and right turns as she goes. She’s also keeping an eye on the drone’s video feed. The alley is quiet, vagrants sleeping unperturbed. Nothing moves.
After a few minutes of jogging, Elena slows down, decides she can safely get back to a main street and make her way straight to the docks. The ANT is at 30% power when the back door of the Star’s End slams open. The two goons stomp out and look at each other. She watches them through the video feed, smiles, savoring the small victory. Fuck you!
One of them turns to the other, appears to say something. The other one spits. They walk to the two vagrants, prod one of them with a boot. A short conversation follows, which Elena can’t make out, as her drone doesn’t provide an audio feed. There’s some gesticulation from her followers, shrugs from the rudely awoken alley dwellers.
By now she made it to the docks. She is in front of another heavy cruiser, the Excalibur, anchored at dock 127. Her eyes are drawn to its massive twin railguns and bow-mounted battery of energy weapons. She nods approvingly and keeps walking.
In the digital, she sees the two walk down the alley, out of frame. They’ve passed her ANT. A few seconds later a foot comes back into the frame. The perspective swings as one of them picks up the drone. She sees a close-up view of a wall, the dark sky above, then static.
{Connection lost.}
The drone is flimsy, unarmored, made of light synthetics. Easy to crush between thumb and index finger. It did its job though. She knows she lost her tail, is in the clear. They also know she knows, which suits her just fine. Better luck next time, fuckers! Hopefully, there is no next time. She is out of here.
She keeps moving. Here, the crowds are even thicker than on the streets, but she joins the flow of people and makes good progress. Dock 128, dock 129. Most docks have ships connected to them; most ships are military.
She is on alert now, keeps looking around, glancing back. It’s hard to tell if anyone else is after her, too many people around. But her gut says “no”, which is promising.
She’s by dock 135, in front of an Abyssal Mining transport named Hope Eternal, when she first glimpses the Charon. The silhouette looks unfamiliar, even as she gets closer and its chassis takes shape. Beggars can’t be choosers, she thinks, and presses on towards 142.
Next chapter coming out on 10/24.