Hail to the King
07 Dec 2023Dayson Fane
((WARNING: This log entry contains content not suitable for those sensitive to extreme interrogation-related themes.))LOG UPDATE: CMDR DAYSON FANE
DATE: 11/23/3309
LOCATION: QINGANU SYSTEM
BEGIN TRANSCRIPTION:
Rory King was a confident man. He'd been scouted in his early twenties for his exceptional stealth capabilities, powers of perception, sharp intuition, and ability to follow digital signatures across the human-inhabited Bubble. His exploits had made him rich and, more importantly, had contributed to humanity's continued progress against the alien threat and its sympathizers. He had been behind the location, interrogation, and disposal of numerous Far God leaders, AEGIS researchers, and violent elements hampering the war effort within human society. Throughout his career, he had gained experience and improved his skills to the point where almost no ordinary human could match him in hand-to-hand combat, extraction of information, and digital tracking. He was the very definition of the word "enforcer."
Now, he was on his way to a derelict station where he expected to find what he hoped would finally lead him to his latest target. He'd followed this trail for weeks, now, identifying well-hidden digital signatures in stations along the Thargoid border near several Titans. As he exited hyperspace in the Qinganu system mercifully unmolested by Thargoids, he breathed a sigh of relief and set his course for Schiltberger Settlement - a damaged Coriolis starport long ago abandoned to the alien menace - where he hoped to find the logs that would let him trace his target's trajectory. His big break had been the unexpected return of a stasis pod containing a man who had been stabbed brutally in a Krait Mk II from that station, along with the abrupt disappearance of the person who had been teamed with him on the mission to stabilize that station in orbit for future recovery. Everything that he had observed led him to the conclusion that this other person was his target. He smiled to himself, twisting the scar over his lower lip so that it perfectly bisected his grin.
Rory King, unfortunately, had no idea what would come next. He was an excellent whitehat, but he left far more digital traces of himself than the blackhat he was pursuing. Furthermore, while he was focused exclusively on his target, he hadn't bothered to check if those traces had been followed by anyone else, thinking himself more secretive in his methods than any other ordinary human. He considered his own methods untraceable by normal human standards. Furthermore, he had fully expected that all involved superhuman hackers other than his target were firmly under his bosses' control. He had never been informed of Kanna's existence, so he hadn't prepared any defenses against her.
I had briefly considered the possibility that Exo was expecting me to eliminate his agent on my way to our mutual target - a way to mop up loose ends without using any of his own muscle. Certainly, Rory King had a history of prioritizing his own wealth and could be a security risk to Exo in the future. Perhaps Exo thought that it didn't matter whether it was I or Rory King who found his adversary, since he would benefit from any of the three of us being eliminated by the others.
Then I had decided that it didn't matter what my nemesis was hoping for. I'd come too far down this path to quit now, despite my own misgivings. I was either going to find and confront a threat to humanity, or I was going to find a new ally against my nemesis. If I couldn't do either of those things, I would die. That was what I had resolved myself for. With that decision made, I had called in some favors from Jessie Bane, one of my old contacts back in Tau Ceti, and loaded myself into a modified cargo canister she'd sent me that was designed to look just like an unprogrammed limpet drone. With Kanna's help, I'd camped out in this canister at the station where Rory King had docked to prepare for his mission and arranged to be one of the "limpets" he loaded for that purpose.
As soon as he had launched from the station, I had clambered out of the cargo canister and kicked, pulled, and floated my way out of the automated cargo transfer system to his SRV hangar, where I had then been able to enter the part of the ship meant to sustain living people. As soon as I had heard his FSD charge for jump, I had begun hacking the door from that hangar to let myself in. It would have been nice if the Thargoids had hyperdicted him to give me some extra time and another distraction, but it had all worked out. I won the proverbial coin-flip and managed to make it into the cockpit of Rory King's Asp Explorer undetected.
Now, as I entered through the hacked door and saw him look over his shoulder at me with a dumbstruck expression, I suppressed the urge to laugh maniacally. My P-15 was now aimed directly at his forehead. There was no escape.
He tried to create an opportunity by throwing the ship into a sudden spiral so that he could leave his seat and subdue me. It was an ultimately fruitless effort, though, since I'd been expecting that. Before he could turn the stick, I remotely activated an electromagnetic pulse device that I'd brought with me in the modified cargo pod. The Asp was well-shielded from the outside since it was expected to endure the fierce emissions of neutron stars to boost its jump range, but an attack from within its own cargo hold was nearly impossible to protect against in advance. Instead of turning, the ship shuddered as it abruptly dropped from supercruise and Rory King lurched forward in the pilot's seat.
I was on him in another moment, heaving him out of his chair by the throat and slamming him against the inside of his canopy. I watched his jaw work frantically while I put the gun to his temple.
"Swanson," I radioed back to my carrier command deck, "Start recording. Get ready to unshackle Kanna."
"Aye, sir," came the reply. An alert in my helmet display confirmed that I was transmitting audio and video.
Rory King was better than me at hand-to-hand combat. Even with the best trainers the True Cetians could assign to me, I'd only been able to come so far on that front. It was a simple matter for him to break my hold and knock the pistol from my hand before I could even blink.
I'd been counting on him to do that, though. The moment his hand struck mine to disarm me, a preprogrammed, reactive overload current fried his suit's critical systems and stunned him long enough for me to bind his arms and legs with graphene nanocoil. Now he dangled helplessly in microgravity while I sat in the chair he'd been occupying moments earlier, my legs crossed and my weapon twirling between my fingers as I watched him tumble in a perpetual circle.
"Ooough..." he moaned. "Wha... what the hell do you want?"
"I want what you know," I answered, matter-of-factly.
"And you think I'm just going to give it to you?" he spat. "I know who you are. You're that annoyance in blue who keeps flailing around looking for my boss. You can't begin to... GUH!"
He bounced off the deck, my punch having fractured his ribs as well as setting him rebounding continually from his floor and ceiling until he finally lost enough momentum to dangle again.
"Here's what's going to happen," I explained, casually shooting him through the right calf. "Either you're going to tell me everything I want to know before I kill you, or you're going to experience horrible, terrible pain before finally telling me everything I want to know... before I kill you."
"Eat shit," he hissed between clenched teeth, his face white from the pain.
I shot him through the other calf. Then I unslung a bag that I'd carried around my shoulder since leaving the cargo pod. It was full of wonderful tools - most prominently pliers, needles, and a surgical scalpel - that would help me get what I wanted. As I pinned him to the ground and marveled at how eerie his blood looked floating up from his wounds, I concentrated all of my mental and emotional focus on one thing: my hatred for this person's ultimate superior. All of my disgust and rage toward that individual now manifested against this agent. It helped me tolerate the horror I was resolved to visit upon him.
"I'll start with your fingernails," I said, cutting my way through the glove of his right hand. "One for every answer I'm not satisfied with."
He grimaced. "As if that will... GGRRRAAAAAAAAHHH!"
The first nail came off. It took the whole hand before he answered my first question.
"Who are you looking for?"
"G-G*@%!" he sputtered. "The target's name is G*@%. She broke out of a secure research facility, then torched it to hell. Now she's been hybridized with Thargoid biotech, and she's... we don't know what she's after, but the boss wants her back where we can keep track of her."
"What research facility?" I demanded. "Give me the location and the details."
"I can't!" he whined. "I don't know... GWAAAAH!"
He lost two more fingernails and spilled a few basic details before I believed he knew nothing else. I now knew that the one he'd been pursuing was part of a secret project to enhance humans beyond their normal limits even before being enhanced even more by hybridization with Thargoid tech.
"All right," I continued, pacing in front of the canopy and glancing outward cautiously. I didn't think any Thargoids would drop in on us here, but I couldn't be too careful in enemy territory. "So, let's say you don't know any more on that subject. Let's change it up, shall we? How about you tell me how you're keeping in contact with your boss? I sure would love to know all about that."
"Fuck you!" he spat. "Do you know what they'd do to me if I... Nnnnrrrrgh!"
A long, sinister spike had been embedded into his left kidney. I twisted it a bit to make my point. He wasn't doomed just yet, but his outlook was already quite grim.
"Hey," I said casually, "Did you know that you can lose roughly fifty percent of the blood in your body before you're irrevocably consigned to death? Pretty nifty, if you ask me. So long as I'm careful, I can keep this up basically forever. Say, how about we start on your teeth next? I'm bored of fingernails already."
The next twenty minutes were straight out of a horror film. By the end, a one-eyed, fork-tongued, half-toothless man with multiple needles through each kidney and testicle was struggling through tears to give me what I needed.
I now knew four important things: the code he was using to communicate with his coordinator - Exo's direct subordinate - along with that coordinator's current location, the superhuman nature of the test subject that Rory King had been sent to track down, and the existence and death of that test subject's sister. I now had a path that I could use to access the fragmented logs recovered from the destroyed testing site as well as solid leads on both Exo and the subject he wanted so badly.
"Enough... already..." said Rory King. He was in a sorry state, his blood continuing to bubble up in microgravity and fill the Asp's cockpit with a multitude of red droplets that oozed from his many wounds. "Just... end... it..."
"Your service to the rebellion is appreciated," I told him. "I will remember you, Rory King. Know that your death lead to great things on humanity's path to recovery."
I shot him three times in the throat. Just to be sure that he wasn't implanted with some kind of contingency protocol, I watched him bleed to death and stiffen as rigor mortis took him. When I was certain of his permanent demise, I radioed my carrier.
"Swanson," I ordered, "Jump to my location and have my Fer-de-Lance prepared for intercept operations."
******
Two hours later, I was on board Schiltberger Settlement. The station was in horrible shape, but it was stable. Numerous compartments were exposed to the vacuum of space and those that weren't were either on fire or melted by Thargoid corrosive agents, but it had so far avoided breaking apart or falling into the planet it was orbiting.
There wasn't much left from the logs, but I found traces of blood left in engineering along with some broken video files from the security cameras. The man in the video had a build that matched the description that Rory King had gotten from the station of origin in the Mahlina system. The woman's height and build also matched the description from that station's mission coordinator, though the fully-enclosed suit and helmet made it impossible to fully verify her identity. I checked her handiwork in the reactor control console. She had used an access code given to her by her mission coordinator, so hadn't needed to do much hacking, but her keystroke log matched patterns that Kanna had identified previously. This was the person that Rory King and I had been chasing, albeit for different reasons.
Unfortunately, she had left the station without leaving any indication of where she was going. The Krait Phantom she had been piloting had no record of any pre-defined course that had been set. There was no telling which system she might have jumped to from here.
Still...
"Swanson," I said, "Get any systems within single-jump range of here seeded with comm beacons. I've got a message to write."
*****
Receiving incoming data packet... done.
Decrypting...
ERROR: NETWORK BREACH DETECTED - SECURITY FILTERS OVERRIDDEN
Setting new relay administrator... done.
Deploying new firewalls... done.
Encrypting transmission source address... done.
Transmission range adjusted: all systems and beacons within 50 ly of ERROR: SYSTEM NAME REDACTED.
Transmission output adjusted: text and audio.
Starting broadcast...
"If you're listening to this, then our mutual friend didn't manage to find you before I did. Hopefully, I've thrown them off the trail enough to stall them for a few hours or days. Not that I think it'll help much, since I'm betting you're long gone from here. On the off chance that you're still nearby, though...
I'll be straightforward. The transmission you arranged to be leaked on the 21st of November this year was a godsend. It's put me closer than I ever dreamed I'd be to my goal of revenge and liberation. For that, you have my sincere gratitude. If you want to just stay hidden, I'll respect that and do everything I can to give our friend something else to focus on.
But just in case, I'll make this request: give me anything you can that relates to him, his operations, and any weaknesses he may have. The apparent usefulness of any individual fact or byte is irrelevant; with the data analysis expertise I have available, I may still be able to use the most insignificant-sounding things. In return, I'll share whatever intel I can that you might not have.
I realize you might not have full use of your own faculties at the moment. I only ask for anything you're able to willingly provide. If I need to take further action to secure that willingness, then so be it. Send the details and I'll do what I can. If it's not solidly nailed down, I'm confident I can obtain it. Odds are that I'll eventually obtain it anyway, given my specialty. Whatever you may need, it's worth the expense to me if I can pin down the bastard who skewered the person closest to me.
...
...
Sorry, just corralling my emotions, there. I have a particularly strong hatred for the other person after you.
If you have information I can use, then respond to this message using the attached encoded information for my secure channel. Your expertise should allow you to crack the code much faster than the sorry goons who've been after you. Otherwise... good luck. I don't know what you've been through, but I can only assume it's worthy of the deepest sympathy.
All right, I'm getting out of here before the 'Goids find me. Dayson Fane, out."
Broadcast ended.
WARNING: COMM RELAY SELF-DESTRUCT SEQUENCE INITIATED!
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