Blurred Weaponry (Saints of the Void, Book 1)

by Michael Valdez

Chapter 4

  Effective Saviors

  On the west wall of the embassy was a side door meant for volunteers to go in and out, which was how Dastou and Hays got out of the building without being seen; this wasn’t exactly a time for maintaining regular work schedules. Once outside, Dastou used a screwdriver to jam the deadbolt so he could get back inside using the same door, and placed the tool inside so he wouldn’t have it on him. The men nodded at each other

  “Alright,” whispered Captain Hays. “See you soon.”

  “Don’t trip on anything,” Dastou joked in the same low voice.

  The captain smirked at the comment before he turned to head toward the rear of the building. Hays would make his way around the circular block the Diplomatic Center was built on without being spotted and soon reach the other corner of the front wall where Dastou was about to go. The Saint looked in the direction he was to go and saw the big mess of wrecked concrete wall on the sidewalk in front of the office he was in earlier, where he only avoided being murdered by sheer luck. Dastou moved ahead, crouch-walking until he was near the fat, ugly hole the bomb made and its accompanying detritus. There was a plastic curtain temporarily taped in place and he sidled up to it, shifting around big chunks of debris and tip-toeing around lots and lots of light-gray pebbles that might give him away with crunching-crackling sounds if he stepped on them carelessly

  “I don’t care,” came Constable Renker’s voice from behind the plastic curtain and inside the bombed office, “you have to leave.”

  “Fine, fine,” Nes said from near the constable. “Can I have just one minute, though? That pin was a gift and I lost it in here, I’m sure I did.”

  Dastou had guessed that Renker, dedicated as she was, would be scouring the office for clues after escorting Tryst to the safety of the councilor’s office, and he was right. Nes was sent to be as annoying as he usually was to women who didn’t know him very well.

  “Then I’m sure I’ll see it soon,” Renker said, sounding like she was practically talking through her teeth. “Or possibly one of my people will find it while they clean up. Now get out, for all I know you’re trampling on something important.”

  “Great! I really hope you find it, it’s very precious.”

  “Precious” was the code word for “hurry up she’s not looking at that giant freaking hole in the wall.” The Saint quietly jogged past the office and saw Renker through a sliver of a gap in the curtain as she shooed Nes out of the room and closed the door on him.

  Dastou reached the northwest corner of the embassy and waited, knowing it would take Captain Hays another minute to go all the way around to the other side. In the meantime, he was almost overwhelmed by how busy the street heading north of the building was. There were at least thirty taken people here, all with bright sky-blue eyes, the most prominent feature of the systematically hypnotized. The injured had been moved away already, and now all of these worker bees were taking care of every tiny problem imaginable. They were checking on damage to vehicles from debris, cleaning up blown apart concrete, and erecting scaffolding to fix windows shattered by shockwaves from the explosives. With at least twice the number of workers here as was needed for the job, it meant that the Social Cypher classified this as some kind of industrial accident, wherein the number of taken was justified by the need to check on and rebuild whatever caused the event to begin with.

  The only thing these blue-eyes were avoiding were three bodies. Two were from the fight Dastou had in front of the building, the remainder of the group that ran off. The rest of them would have scrammed after waking from the forced nap-time to realize the street was full of workers who, at best, would treat them like animals getting in the way of a job. Those two remaining raggedly-dressed attackers were up the street on the right sidewalk, near the alley they ran out of to join the fray. Dastou couldn’t tell from here if they were alive, and up-shifting to see if they were breathing wasn’t worth it.

  Finally, around the corner and only six meters from the Saint, much closer than the other two and far from where there was any combat at all, was a lot of debris from another blown-apart wall and one more body. This girl was his target, and thankfully not in view of any window on the front wall of the Diplomatic Center. She could be snatched up as long as they don’t make too much of a scene near her. As that thought ended, Captain Hays peeked out of the corner of the building past this girl and waved at Dastou.

  Dastou thumbed a knob on the transceiver hooked to his belt and under one side of his untucked shirt. “We’re ready here,” he said at a low volume, the wireless throat mic picking up the sound via vibration. “Lobby?”

  “We are in place,” Saan whispered. She was in the lobby with Privates Nudrenmbe and Melk in order to continue providing medical assistance to those that escaped the chaos. That entry space would still be filled with people who could not leave until the street was clear.

  “Good to go,” said Nes at a regular volume. He’d be with Private-First Class Zhedani in a hallway adjacent to the lobby, hiding and waiting for a signal.

  With everyone in position, it was time to start this. Right on cue, a heavy supply truck rumbled around a corner a few blocks ahead and began to make its heavy way down the street. That’s why the Cypher was always protective in this stage of a cleanup; those trucks contained an abundance of supplies that might include dangerous chemicals, and until the workers were done with what was in there and the truck away from here, they blue-eyes would be on heavy guard.

  Dastou made eye-contact with Hays from across the length of the building.

  “Looking good,” said Dastou about their situation. “Move up the block and make some noise.”

  Captain Hays responded with a simple thumbs-up and ran in a crouch past some workers that were looking in another direction. He was quick about the movement and was hidden behind a vehicle in a blink. Hays waited a few seconds, peered over the hood of the car to see where the worker bees were facing, then went up another half a block. The truck was still headed south along the trolley rail in the middle of the three-lane road, and Hays was close to it. Momentarily, the truck reached where the captain had stopped.

  Hays put a single hand in the air from behind a car, three fingers high. Then two fingers. Then one, and his hand came back down. The quiet air was then suddenly and completely filled with the deep whump of an explosion and the sound of glass shattering as the car the captain was hiding behind was blown away from its parking spot and into the street. The passenger vehicle spun laterally and its tires squealed in complaint as it was forced violently into the street, it’s axles bending awkwardly, and came right into the big truck’s path. Screams filled the Blackbrick Diplomatic Center’s lobby after the explosion and could be heard outside.

  Dastou up-shifted to look into a reflection on the chrome of a vehicle directly in front of him and back into the embassy with full focus. The people in the lobby were in a panic over the new explosion. They were terrified, again, but there was nothing to be done about that. Saan and a young dark-skinned girl and pimple faced boy – Nudrenmbe and Melk, respectively – were now helping the newly frightened people evacuate further into the building.

  The Saint down-shifted, returning his brain to non-enhanced, and sprinted for the knocked-out girl’s position now that he had no chance of someone catching a glimpse of him from inside. He had been looking only at the awkwardly positioned body near some rubble when two small forms rushed into his path then came to a skidding halt.

  “Shit!” Dastou exclaimed as two little boys stopped on a dime at the same time he did, the three of them almost slamming into each other. “What are you doing!?” the Saint damn near yelled.

  The taller kid stammered through a high-speed response, “I, uh, we, we were looking around at, at uh, we wanted to see...”

  “Get your dumb asses inside the building now!” Dastou ordered.

  Neither boy said anything more as they both ran away, nearly tripping over the unconscious girl as they pumped
their feet to get inside the embassy doors several meters away from the body.

  Looking in that direction, Dastou’s every nerve sighed and he saw fourteen worker bees turn their creepy shiny blue eyes in his direction, attracted by his unfortunate yelling at those idiot kids.

  “Oh, come on,” Dastou lamented as those enslaved people walked casually in his direction.

  It was rare that the systematically hypnotized spoke, and when they did it was in an unforgettable, frightening unison. When they talked to him now, the Saint had to force himself not to shiver.

  “This area is in a state of emergency,” said the group of fourteen walking toward Dastou. All their differing voices were synced up to an impressive degree, with one or two lagging behind by a fraction of a second. “All citizens of this land must return to their homes or places of employment,” the nightmare-inducing chorus added. “This area is in a state of emergency.”

  The voices were going to repeat that again and again, but that wasn’t the biggest problem. With Hays further up the block and half the worker bees going to check on what he did, this other half wasn’t going to let Dastou go anywhere. They were closing in, and at least two were practically on top of the girl that was his target, meaning the Saint wouldn’t be able to get her away from these freakishly territorial workers without hurting someone.

  There were only a few hard rules Dastou made himself adhere to. The two most important were to never hurt a hypnotized worker if it could be helped and to never, ever again have sex near a cactus. The latter was more of a personal decree that didn’t apply here at all, but the former, the important and relevant rule, forced him to start looking for a way to move his accidental distraction elsewhere.

  Dastou changed his direction and began to run north on this side of the street while he kept an eye on that supply truck. Some of the worker bees that were closer to those supplies changed their heading to make sure the intruder wouldn’t get close. The Saint kept going, running fast on the sidewalk, and the worker bees continued to shift their angle of casual approach try and cut off his movement. He was parallel to the car that was blown into the street by Captain Hays and had no idea what to do next.

  “This area is in a state of emergency,” said several of the nearby workers at the same time others stated “the supplies in this vehicle are dangerous to citizens, please keep your distance.”

  Before he could make a decision on his next course of action, Dastou saw a glass bottle fly in the air in front of the truck’s hood, a flaming piece of fabric hanging out of one end. The bottle hit the windshield and shattered, sending burning splashing away in all directions. A few of the workers caught drops of the liquid on their clothes and calmly, quickly dabbed out the flames. Others, ones that were blocking Dastou’s path to the truck, turned around to focus on the alcohol-fueled flames covering the hood.

  Before any progress could be made on that first fire, the light from a brighter explosion of flames lit the area in the white-blue hue of siopane-fueled ordnance. In the direction of that second blast, the roof of a passenger vehicle further up the street was completely covered in blue, high-temperature flames. Hays was going all out, Dastou noted.

  Both sources of fire flickered bright, shifting and reflecting off of metal on cars, intact glass in storefronts and apartment windows, and shattered glass shards on the ground. The combination of blue and orange flames and all the distorted or broken reflections were mesmerizing in their own dangerous way.

  The two fires were also confusing to the Social Cypher. In a freakish situation Dastou had never experienced, the thirty worker bees had no idea what to do. The bombing that started it all, the triage and cleanup, then Hays’ car-moving shockwave, fiery cocktail, and flame grenade. The system was overwhelmed by it all. The Saint took that in for the few seconds it happened, enchanted. Then those creepy blue-eyes moved toward him, continuing their advance and attempt to isolate, but they weren’t going very fast, their speed at best a brisk walking pace with excellent posture.

  “Big deal,” Dastou said dismissively.

  All he had to do was avoid these people for long enough to be able to rush back to that unconscious girl. As if reading Dastou’s dismissal of the danger he was in, shadows and colors moved in the clean paint of the truck’s passenger side, reflections from behind and to the side. Dastou looked at where the hints of movement came from and saw more blue-eyed people walking out of the closest apartment building to the north. He faced the direction he came from with a heavy sigh, and another few were coming out of the building he ran by most recently and the one he was in front of. Resigned to knowing what he was going to see, he also looked across the street to find blue-eyes coming from that apartment building, too. Worker bees were being taken from their homes, where they were sequestered after the bombing and hypnotically-communicated cancellation of work duties. They weren’t going to simply block his path as expected, they were going to surround him on all sides, isolate him to keep him from interfering further. Captain Hays was no longer in hiding, backing away from these new, abundant taken.

  As they came out to stop the threat against their duties, the chorus of warnings got louder through sheer number. The differences in their voices caused by age, gender, and all the other natural qualities of these poor people’s normal speaking tones, echoed and reverberated farther, wider. It was a haunting scene, and the occasionally off-time repetition created a mono-tonal ocean of letters and words that could at best be described as sad, and at worst poisonous.

  While Dastou had never seen anything like this, he didn’t have time to figure it out. If he allowed all these worker bees to get too close he’d have no choice but to fight his way out and hurt many of them in the process. The apartment building next to him only had four blue-eyes walking out to block his path, the lowest number coming from anywhere, but they were still not outdoors. He hopped on his feet a few times like he was getting ready for a fight, and rolled his shoulders.

  “Get to it, sir!” Hays called from across the street.

  “Insubordination,” Dastou yelled at him loud enough to get above the continuing, not-quite-deadpan chorus of Social Cypher warnings.

  And the moment the word was out of his mouth, the Saint bolted at top speed for that building in front of him with the fewest blue-eyes. He shoved open the glass-paned door, entered this first-floor hallway, and was instantly within arm’s reach of the closest worker bee. To his surprise, that man extended an arm to try and grab him, and Dastou juked to the side to avoid it, hitting the wall with his shoulder. He didn’t let the shock of a hypnotized man actively trying to grab him slow his pace, and the Saint slid against the wall for a second and was back to the middle of the hallway, where the three other blue-eyes lunged for him.

  Some woman clutched at his jacket, all the while saying “this area is in a state of emergency.”

  She continued the warning as Dastou countered the grapple quickly and shoved her behind him, toward the first man. The pair collided and tumbled onto the carpeted floor, but were already trying to get up before the Saint looked away. The remaining two blue-eyes were a man and woman in their fifties, nearly retirement age, and they went after him like confused animals, mumbling the warning. Dastou blocked the woman’s arm as she went for his shirt at chest level, and pushed her as hard as he dared against the wall. Her back hit first, but her head snapped backwards on impact and knocked her out, which made Dastou’s stomach sink.

  The old man was able to get both hands on Dastou in that tiny second of guilt-ridden hesitation, and tried to push the taller Saint against the wall and hold him there. Dastou broke the hold easily, but stopped himself from doing much else and took off again, heading for the stairs that would be up ahead and to the left in the recognizable architecture.

  Dastou ran and was almost at the stairwell when another worker bee walked directly into his path. As the Saint reached him, the man reached out and the Saint was forced to shove him out of the way, then immediately turn for th
e stairs. Dastou leapt up the first three steps in a single hurdle, but his other foot got caught on something and that hurdle turned into him falling chest-first into the stairs. He broke the fall with his forearms, which hit the lip of a step and pain surged from there and up to his elbows. He grunted, sucked air in with the pain, and looked back to see what happened. The man he shoved had grabbed his ankle, tripping him. With no time and expecting more trouble on the second floor, Dastou turned onto his back and kicked at the guy’s forearm, which was extended through rungs in the banister. It took two good hits, and the worker bee let go.

  The Saint got up and rushed up the rest of the way to the second floor. He turned and ran into that short hallway, then into a longer one that crossed the length of the building, the two doors he passed opening as he went by. These buildings didn’t have that many units – the top two floors were two-story apartments and all others were fairly spacious – and it seemed like pretty much everyone had been activated to stop him. Dastou almost felt special as he turned into another short hallway that featured a window at the end which faced the street, and stopped. One final door was also in this short corridor, and it was starting to open.

  “Shoot the windows at...” Dastou rushed to say for the sake of his throat mic and didn’t have time to finish before a semi-automatic burst of gunfire hit the glass ahead.

  The bullets popped through the window without breaking it and caused big spider webs of damage to spread on the glass before slamming into the stone ceiling. Dastou ran for the window and up-shifted on the way there. In his slow-motion movement, he focused mostly on the cracked window, but he was able to see a woman’s shining blue eyes through a crack in the opening apartment door. Behind her was toddler, barely able to stand, with a pink bow on her head and a desperate, fearful, look in her cute, chubby face. The girl’s father was coming to her from outside Dastou’s view, only an arm and his head visible. The Cypher took the closest adult to the door, the mother, and made her into a slave meant to try and stop Dastou; the child and father were left to watch.

  In his hastened mind, for a shaved-off portion of a second, the Saint’s thoughts were overtaken by a righteous anger for the sake of that bow-headed, adorable little girl, and the intensity of the emotion threatened to kick his brain back to normal. He let it go, as best he could anyway, and focused on the window for the last two running steps it took to reach it. On that second step, he jumped shoulder-first at the window, the bullet-made damage having weakened it.

  Dastou crashed through the spider-webbed glass, shattered it completely. He was mid-air, encircled by shards from the window he shattered, and took note of the worker bees that meant to trap him standing very near the apartment building’s entrance directly below. The path to the truck was clear from this side of the street as soon as he passed those blue-eyes from above. He calculated his speed, trajectory, necessary movements, and knew he had to down-shift. It wasn’t because he couldn’t stay in his heightened state for longer, it was because if he constantly did that, his natural reflexes would dull. More than one Saint had essentially neutered their reflexes to nearly nothing with overuse.

  Dastou twisted slightly in the air, looked at the street lamp pole ahead, got himself ready, and down-shifted. Before, thanks to the slow-motion intake of all information, it was like he was floating. The sudden change to normal speed, after hurtling out of a second story window, made his heart pound incredibly in a reflexive reaction to his perceived change in gravity, and he almost forgot what he was doing. As broken glass twinkled all around him, he finished his change in position and grabbed the lamp pole on his way down with one palm. The action arrested most of his momentum instantly, and his body swung around the pole while his other reached for it quickly to get a grip. He pulled himself in, his forearms, biceps, and chest aflame from the effort of working against physics, and got his upper and lower body in contact with the steel. Dastou wrapped his legs around the metal before he could no longer hang on as glass showered the blue-eyes, forcing them to look down and protect their faces.

  Dastou slid down the pole and put his boots on concrete again, then ran for the nearby supply truck. The Saint reached the vehicle, ignored the alcohol burning itself down to nothing on this side of the truck’s hood, and opened the passenger door. He looked to the driver seat to find the operator sitting there quietly. The blank-faced man turned to face intruder, opened his mouth to spout a warning, and then door on that side opened and the driver got yanked out of the vehicle hard. Captain Hays was at the open door and knocked the poor operator out with a single punch, then let the body drop to the street.

  “Punctual as ever, sir,” Hays said. “Plan?”

  “Get inside as soon as you can,” Dastou ordered. “I’ll go get...”

  “...It,” said a female voice into Dastou’s earpiece, the end of a popular piece of profanity. It was Evara, who was told to watch the street from above by camping on the embassy roof. “Sir, there are Counterbalance people coming from the west, and running fast to find out what all the new noise is.”

  Counterbalance? There were always five or six IC officers on daytime duty in Blackbrick while the other twenty or so slept, and those few kept track of Social Cypher occurrences to report on later. No surprise they were on their way here, whether Renker called for them or not.

  “How far?” Dastou asked.

  “Six blocks, and the way they’re moving, that’s a minute away,” Evara said.

  “Damn. We’re out of time out here.”

  “Mr. Dastou,” Evara started, talking fast to save time, “we can get the girl from here.”

  “What do you mean?” Dastou asked, also speaking quickly. “You’re on a roof.”

  “Yeah, right above her. We have grappling hooks, rope, and are very athletic.”

  Dastou didn’t doubt that. Despite their status as first-years, Evara and her twin brother were far better trained than most graduates thanks to their background. If they say they could do something, it wasn’t usually bragging – they simply knew they could. And the Saint had no time to argue the point.

  “Go ahead, Evara,” Dastou ordered. “Hays, get in.”

  The captain didn’t hesitate and climbed into the driver’s seat as Dastou got fully into the passenger’s side. They both buckled up.

  “Make it spectacular,” the Saint said.

  Captain Hays pushed down the pedal hard, and the rear wheels squealed in protest. The truck took off with a jerk, rolling over a small alcohol-fueled flames. The car that Hays blew into the street with a shockwave grenade hadn’t moved, and the truck’s bigger body smacked into it and shoved it violently to the side, a long metal on metal scream filling the air on impact. The sturdy supply vehicle kept going, Dastou waiting for the captain to make his move. They were two blocks from the embassy and speeding up.

  One block from the embassy. Half-a-block.

  On the north wall of the Diplomatic Center, it was easy to spot two figures disguised in black cloaks rappelling down the side of the building with practiced speed – where had the Stroffs learned that? While Dastou stared at those twins quickly coming down to reach that unconscious girl, Captain Hays suddenly shouted.

  “Hold on!”

  The captain pulled the wheel to one side in a fast, continuous motion, and the abrupt turning of the truck made Dastou’s hands instinctively grip his arm rests with a probably unnecessary ferocity. The vehicle lunged to one side, two of the wheels still on concrete and two losing contact with the ground. Dastou’s eyes went wider and wider as his passenger window view shifted from apartment building to embassy front wall to the road as the truck got rolled. Dastou’s side of the truck slammed into the street, forcing his whole body violently to that side and he blinked hard when his face was half a meter from the ground. Then his body shifted again, back to center in the seat as the truck finished the roll, landing on its roof and sliding as the last of it’s insane speed was arrested.

  When he opened his eyes, his view ou
t of the window was upside-down, the sky below and the road above. Sooner or later the windshield had been shattered, but Dastou had been looking to the side or at the insides of his eyelids and didn’t notice until now. That was certainly exciting, or at least that’s what the Saint’s heart rate told him as the muscle pumped so hard he heard the whooshing of blood in his ears. Hays made eye-contact and smiled, an odd expression since he was upside-down. Sure, Dastou was in the same position, but it was still pretty weird.

  “Did you hold on like I said to?” the captain asked, his voice strained.

  “At the very least my bowels did.”

  “Good for your bowels,” Hays said as he went to unbuckle himself.

  Dastou reached up to do the same. With one hand and a grunt, he prepared to undo the clasp as the other hand was placed on the roof of the truck’s cab. The Saint thumbed the seat belt’s button and gravity pushed him down immediately and head first. His other arm stiffened at the same time and pushed his body slightly to the side with great effort, and Dastou hit the cab roof with a shoulder, and not nearly as hard as he could have. With a few more grunts, he moved his feet aside and crawled out of the truck on hands and knees. He stood up, thankful that he wasn’t seriously injured. There was a mild sting across his chest where his seat belt dug into him, but that wouldn’t last. Hays stood up, stretched to check for injuries, nodded in satisfaction, and jogged around the front of the truck.

  “Everything moving like it should?” Dastou asked Hays as they both jogged along the embassy wall.

  “I’m almost certain I bruised a rib. Otherwise, I’m absolutely fine.”

  Dastou looked to where the girl had been earlier and she was gone. Good work, kids, he thought to himself.

  “Good to hear agh!” Dastou said then exclaimed very quietly as he glanced through the Diplomatic Center’s missing glass front to see the end of a familiar cane enter the lobby from one of the offset corridors. The body that belonged to it would be right behind.

  Hays must have seen it too, because both of them picked up their speed to a run and rounded the corner of the building. They ignored the curtain placed on the wrecked office wall and kept going until they reached the volunteer door, where Nes was waiting for them.

  “The looks on your faces,” Nes said as he held the door open, “tell me that you saw Renker walking out to meet her people. And the fact that she’s not yelling her way here means she didn’t see you.”

  Dastou walked inside, Hays followed, and Nes closed the door.

  “Correct on both counts,” Hays said with some humor.

  The way Hays talked, it was as if nothing happened.

  “Why aren’t you out of breath?” Dastou asked the captain as he breathed hard.

  “I hide it better.”

  “You know you don’t have to wheeze like you’re dying, right?” Nes added.

  “I’m not wheezing,” Dastou said after taking a second to make sure he wasn’t. “Either way, I think I’m done with excitement for at least a few minutes.”

  “I’m one-hundred-percent in support of that sentiment,” Hays said.

  Nes snorted his agreement. “The Stroffs should have the girl in the Caravan by now,” he told them.

  “Good,” Dastou said, and then he pressed a button on his mic transceiver for a wider band. “Everyone tap in.”

  At that command, Dastou heard a series of static double-taps in his earpiece. They were orderly, from highest rank to lowest, so Saan would have been first. Following that were the five privates in alphabetical order, meaning that everyone could hear the Saint. As strange as it sometimes felt to him to be in a position of such obvious authority, this time what he said came naturally, as if the pieces of the situation had come together in his head and all he had to do was repeat what they revealed to him. Dastou hoped he’d never be completely comfortable giving orders, though – that went against the freedom-loving nature of his kind.

  “Saan,” Dastou began. “I’ll need you at the embassy door for some personnel switching. Privates Nudrenmbe and Melk, go to the Caravan. If anyone asks, you’re getting more medical supplies, but instead I need you two to stand guard at that girl’s med bay room. Crawford and the Stroffs, get to the lobby as soon as possible with filled triage bags to replace them.”

  “Sir,” Crawford started, probably annoyed at the changing in positions for them all. He was usually irked by something at any point in any day, so it wasn’t a surprise that he spoke up. “I think we should stay down here. What’s the point in all this shifting around?”

  Dastou sighed at having to say more – no one else was questioning him, after all. But if he wanted to not be questioned when giving odd orders, maybe he should make sure that people knows he’s not completely full of shit. Which he technically is sometimes, but not today.

  “I want the people that were hurt and took refuge here,” Dastou explained firmly, “to see as many of our faces as possible. I want our reputation of the day to be one of helping those in need, especially if we’re forced out of the city to avoid confrontation with the local Counterbalance. We’d provide assistance no matter what, though for this situation we need to play up our response, exaggerate our usefulness.”

  “How very political,” Nes commented, and he was right. There was absolutely no need to show off all of his uniformed students other than to win the hearts and minds of those affected by the bombing.

  “And us, sir?” asked Hays.

  “Me, you, and Nes, are going to be political, too. We’re going to tour the lobby and take a look at this strange new attack from those people.”

  “I can’t believe they flipped over a truck!” Nes said.

  “Exactly. After a couple minutes of annoying Renker, the privates should all be in position. We’ll meet Saan and head down to take a look at this witness. Everybody’s got their orders, get to it.”

  Dastou tapped the adhesive-backed patch on his throat three times to tell them he was done with his announcements, and then took a deep breath.

  “Let’s go perform the void out of this little play,” Dastou said to Hays and Nes, and started walking toward the lobby to convince Renker that he was so very astonished by this newest development.

  ~~~~