Play 2 Wage: Linked

Raschel caught up to me by the time I made it to the stairs that went up to the main basement. I heard her make a shocked noise as we crossed through the aftermath of the battle that took place in the hallway and she stepped around bodies and bloodstains.

“What happened to the others?” She asked as I clomped up the wooden steps. “I mean… not these fatherless choda. I, uh, I saw… Tevin.”

“They’re fine, Tevin’s fine.” I shot back angrily, willing my words to be true. Max said he would recover, he had to be okay.

“Okay,” was all she replied with, in a small and meek voice. We spent the rest of the walk out of the house in silence that was only broken when we approached the quietly idling van. I first saw Rin, who gave me an annoyed look as he stood to the side of the wide driveway. He had backed away from the van where Jorn and Ali seemed to be locked in some kind of staring contest. Next, I noticed Tevin’s armored form, still locked in his stiff pose, but now laying on a mid-sized flatbed trailer they had managed to hook up to the vehicle.

Ali was still seated in the van, while Jorn was standing next to her with his rifle up. Of the pair, Jorn saw me first as I walked up with Raschel trailing nervously behind me.

“Everyone pack in, we’re getting out of here.” I ordered as I approached the trailer. I frowned when I noticed that Tevin was just laying down on the trailer and not strapped or tied down or at all.

“Have any of you ever actually loaded a trailer?” I asked Rin as he stepped up next to me. “He’s not tied down or anything.”

Rin glanced over at Raschel, who had hidden behind me and was nervously glancing at Jorn around my shoulder. “Tevin is secured, his suit has magnets.” His eyes glanced towards Jorn before returning to mine, signaling to me that something was wrong.

I finally turned to the captain, “What's your problem? Here I am, my ten minutes were up, what…” I reached for my mobile comm to check the time, and found that it had been crushed in my pocket at some point. The screen was cracked, blank, and none of the buttons seemed to have an effect. A little timer flashed over top of it anyways, the numbers were bright orange and blinked with each second that was added.

“-00:01:28.618”

“A minute and a half ago, so let's get out of here.” I finished.

“Your servant has threatened both myself and the CLE.” Jorn said through gritted teeth, never taking his eyes off of Ali, who was still sitting calmly in the driverseat of the van. She looked over to me and gave a little smile, which was still weird to see on her.

“I don’t care, she probably had a good reason.” I answered back.

“”Welcome back, sir.” She said with a noticeable delay between her movements and her reaction.

“There is no excuse! She should be charged as a terrorist right alongside your prisoner.” He spat back, jamming a finger over my shoulder and pointing at Raschel.

I glanced over to Ali, wondering what she had done. She gave no sign of stress, pain, or anything really, and was simply smiling back at me from the seat. As I watched, her hand came up from the steering wheel and she gave me another little wave as her smile slightly widened.

I looked back to Jorn, unsure what to make of Ali’s drugged actions, and was about to say something when Rin stepped in.

“Alianora has legal authority to make decisions in the consuls name, captain. Your intel is old, she is his personal assistant, no longer his attendant. With Katie out of contact, Nick’s orders stand. You can attempt to seize command and justify it to the court, but do you really think the mediators will take a soldier's word over a noble’s?”

Jorn shot a glance over to Rin, and then his burning eye focused back on me through his broken faceplate. He physically shook with anger as I watched the gears turn in his head. I could hear the motors in his suit whir as the rifle creaked under his frustrated grip.

While he simmered over his decision, I glanced back over at Ali. She still had her hand held awkwardly up and waved at me again, and this time I noticed she had something. Something small that was wrapped around the inside of her palm, whatever it was blinked with twin-pulsed flashes of green light at a steady pace.

I looked away from her and back to Jorn and Rin, seeing that Rin had stopped paying attention to Jorn and was eying Raschel with his puzzle-solving face.

“Make up your mind, captain.” I said, taking back over the negotiation. “Either get with the program or get out of the way, we don’t have time for this bullshit. We’re all going to leave, isn't that what you want?”

I thought he might start shooting for a moment. His rifle jerked up an inch and I actually heard him clamp his jaw with a clack in response to my words. He stared back at me for a second longer, before banging his rifle into his chest plate with solid clang, letting out a frustrated grunt, and turning to climb into the back of the van next to the cocooned Katie and the Link. He slammed the door behind him, giving me one last frustrated look before he was hidden from view.

Rin let out a single chuckle. “Heh, man… soldiers. Did you see his face?”

I looked back over at him, confused. “Yeah, he looked pissed. What even happened?”

Rin gave a sardonic smile and shook his head before starting towards the passenger door to the cab of the van. “Your assistant threatened to blow up the whole van with Katie inside of it if he tried to remove her from the driver's seat, set a deadman switch and everything. She refused, he yelled and ordered- started right at it too, as soon as you left. She refused some more, then it died down into the stalemate you walked in on.” As he passed by, he nodded to Raschel and abruptly changed subjects.

“You’re going to tell me absolutely every detail of how you met the rest of your friends, and everything that happened between the shooting starting and Nick dragging you back here, understood?” He said, his usual monotone voice sounding almost casual amongst the chaos of the day.

Raschel simply nodded back, her eyes wide as she looked over to me as if for permission, which nearly made me laugh. This whole thing was bordering on ridiculous, and I had been through too much to see it as anything but that.

I ushered the traumatized, timid, and possibly traitorous prisoner ahead of me and we all piled into the cramped cab of the van next to a cheerful seeming Ali. She worked the gear and pulled us out of the driveway towards the gate we had come in through, while we sorted out who sat where.

Rin and Raschel ended up sort of crammed into the area between the two front seats. Rin actually made the argument for the seating arrangement himself, pointing out that since I had the gun, I should have the window seat in case we ran into more trouble.

I looked over my ragtag group as we pulled away from the house. Ali’s actions were worrying, I wasn't even sure that her threat against Katie was possible. Would a large enough explosion punch through the shield item she was using? What kind of explosives did she even have that would give Jorn pause? I was just glad we didn’t have to find out. While the van was important, it was far less important to me than my friends.

On the other hand, It was good seeing Rin acting more like his normal self, no longer huddled and reeling from the shock of everything happening too close and too fast. He even seemed to be growing a little. Maybe a little chaos, combat, and fleeing for his life was tempering his rigid personality.

As we finished shuffling into the cab and prepared to leave, he gave me a look I couldn’t decipher. We had been roommates, and something close to friends for a few years now, but I couldn’t read him quite as well as I could Tevin. It was a mix of amusement and concern, or what passed for those emotions on his expression starved features, like he had discovered a possibly problematic joke I was playing and was now in on the fun.

I glanced from his eyes to Raschel, and then back, wordlessly asking him if it was something about her. He gave a slight shake of his head and then nodded to the back of the van before shaking his head again and looking back to his laptop. Did that mean it was something with Jorn and Katie, that he didn’t want to talk about aloud? Hopefully it also meant it was something he was working on.

“I could tell you what he’s working on. He’s been scanning for connections to anything, kind of like I have been doing, all he’s really able to see are Jorn and Tevin’s suits though. His little laptop’s antenna is laughably weak and inefficient, and can’t even detect the exchange between Jorn’s suit and the bubble bitch’s tablet, and I’ve been intercepting the drone signals before he has a chance to get to them.” Max laughed and popped into existence as a bobblehead-sized version of himself on the dash in front of me. He stood there with his hands on his hips, oddly stiff and rooted in place as he stood unaffected by the car leaning into its turn, or bumping down from the pavement onto the long gravel driveway.

“He’s also looking over and using a few tools to sift through some data from the warehouse fight, the uh, taking over vehicles and running over the dingbat rebel’s thing was sort of his idea. I saw him breaking into a few of their cameras and ran with it, and he may have, um, managed to scrape some of the code I was using out of their systems during the attack. He’s trying to sort out where the connection came from now, and I think he suspects it was some tech gadget Katie is using from within her shield. Jorn knows better though, him and Katie are trying to figure that out too. Luckily they’re blaming each other and are not likely to share notes.”

I looked ahead, settling the rifle near the open window into a more comfortable rest position as Max filled me in. Hearing Rin had actually gotten some of whatever Max used was a little worrying, but overall it sounded like it was something I could put off and worry about later. I needed to focus on getting us out of here before I could let myself worry about something that wouldn’t have any immediate effects.

For now, I hoped we could avoid trouble, make tracks, and get a moment to recover and regroup while we gained some distance from the occupied city. Some of the feeling that Max had dulled was starting to come back, and I could feel the back of my neck and a few places across my shoulders growing stiff and crackly with dried blood. I reached a still tingly and fuzzy hand towards the back of my neck, and it came away with a half coagulated scab smeared across my fingers.

“That should leave a scar even Tevin might be jealous of.” Rin said from where he was wedged partially between the back of my seat and the thin metal divider wall that separated the cab from the back of the van, somehow seeing what I was doing even as he tapped away at his computer. “It looks almost like someone tried to cut your head off from behind, but only scratched the surface.”

“It doesn't hurt.” I replied automatically, before I used the same hand to point and direct Ali as we approached the gate. “We need to keep going North North-west.”

She gave a grunt in reply while I looked back to the bloody half formed scab on my hand, wondering when that had happened. I started to replay the whole firefight in my mind to try to remember what had caused the injury, when Ali stepped down hard on the gas pedal and rocked us all back in our seats. I glanced first at her, and then at the path she was guiding the van down and saw the looming metal bars of the gate rushing towards us.

“Brace!” Ali said through clenched teeth a second before the van crashed into the gate. The metal bars buckled, the windshield cracked, all of the headlights were shattered and broken, but we made it through and fishtailed out onto the gravel road. Ali somehow kept us from sliding off into the ditch, pulling the wheel hand-over-hand in one direction and then the other, and we all took a moment of silence to recover from the decisive action from our drugged up driver. We stared at her, but she didn’t seem to notice our collective gaze and only accelerated, sending up a plume of dust behind us as we bumped along the winding and hilly road.

Ali was focused on the road, her knuckles white as she guided the van and trailer down the country road. Rin, despite his big talk about getting information out of Raschel, was instead absorbed back into his laptop. I glanced at what he was doing and the mess of windows and boxes he had spread over the small screen, but despite Max having already told me what he was doing, I couldn’t understand the masses of text and tables that opened and closed rapidly under his quick taps and clicks.

We made it a few hundred yards down the gravel road before the world rumbled, loose branches and leaves were blown from the trees all around us, and dust was kicked up into a dense cloud from the dry road as the whole compound exploded behind us. A towering mushroom cloud slowly roiled up to darken the sky. A number of smaller and muffled secondary explosions went off a second after the shockwave passed us, and Ali slammed on the brakes skidding us to a halt as the cab filled with blinding dust.

Coughing and blinking, it took a moment for me to realize what had happened. In the confusion of the moment I felt something touch my arm and recoiled, only to realize it was the van's window rolling up automatically as the interior fans kicked into overdrive. I tried to rub the grit from my eyes and ended up just smearing blood across my face, but managed to clear my eyes as the cab filtered out the dust from the inside of the van.

“Nice.” Was all Rin had to say as he used his ragged shirt to clear the dust from his own face.

“You should have said something, sir.” Ali said through her coughing as she gave me a rather pouty look.

I just stared back for a moment, at a total loss for what to say. Had a survivor from the gunfight triggered a bomb of their own? Max had said that he was relatively certain they did not have a stock of explosives, Max had said… he could blow the whole house up.

The bobblehead sized Max, who was now sitting cross legged on the dash, flashed me a thumbs up. “Bingo! No way I was letting any of those bastards slink away, just because you’re soft doesn't mean I have to be too.”

I narrowed my eyes on him. I really wanted to tear into him, to cuss him out for overwriting my own decisions without warning, but was limited to a few angry thoughts and expressions as everyone in the cramped cab what-the-fucked over the surprise explosion.