TS6 - Chapter 16

Maybe she’d done enough for Earth.  It might be time to let the planet fend for itself for once.

That was the only thought filling Kat’s mind as the high heeled shoes she’d forced herself into pinched her toes.  Some sort of fancy music, either class or jazz, Kat couldn’t tell the difference and she didn’t really care to try, came out of speakers embedded all over the ball room.

Honestly?  Kat felt like she’d taken a handful of allergy pills and chased them with a pot of coffee.  Reality seemed to have broken at some point and no one appeared to have noticed.

She was at a formal soiree.  The fact that it was being hosted at a five star hotel owned by Grocorp hardly made Kat feel any more comfortable.  Here she was, without her armor or weapons, wearing a dress that didn’t even have pockets, all while trying to pretend to be at ease like the high society conventions surrounding her made a lick of sense.

Out on the dance floor, Dringbek was wearing what appeared to be the stallesp equivalent of a tuxedo, casually sipping some sort of alien mixed drink out of a martini glass while chatting with a team of hispanic samurai.  She’d heard of them before, an elite squad of high end mercenaries that worked mostly in Azteca Consumer Goods and JB Holdings territories down south.  They were the type of samurai that didn’t need to post videos from their jobs to impress employers or raise hype.  Everyone just knew that they were one of the best three or four active groups on the planet.

Right now, they looked utterly lost.  Someone had stuffed the six of them into tuxedos and dresses.  Part of Kat felt pity for the samurai, but another part couldn’t help but delight a little in their suffering as they seemed even more out of place than her.

Each and every one of the warriors sported heavy chrome or body modifications.  The only two that didn’t appear to have multiple limbs replaced with cyberware, a slim man and woman, both had done something to their eyes to give them the slit vertical pupil of a cat.

Really, the six of them gave Kat a pang of nostalgia for the Shell.  It felt like forever since she’d last visited the Shaum tower and as awful as the place had been, it had also been home.

The female in the samurai party seemed to feel Kat’s eyes on her and she looked back, her expression filled with quiet desperation as Dringbek kept telling some story about a tunnel complex filled with iridium back home.

Kat took pity on the woman and walked over toward the group.  When she was about three quarters of the way there, Dringbek noted her presence.

“Ah, so Mistress Debs approaches to scope out her competition.  Very adroit.  Very predatory.”

The samurai that had been looking at her opened her mouth and whispered, her voice so quiet that only Kat could hear.

“Ayudame.”

“Hello Dringbek,” she said, nodding to the stallesp.  “You seem to be enjoying the party.”

“Of course,” he said, taking a step back to invite Kat into the cluster of samurai that he’d been talking to.  “I am surprised that Clan Ahn took the initiative of organizing the first Conclave of Ascenders, but I have to say that I haven’t been disappointed by the result.  Your company has also been very helpful with organizing the party.  When you get a minute, I simply must talk with whomever it is that you used to track down the rest of the candidates.  Their skills are absolutely superb.”

That would be Belle.  Absolutely not.  Letting her talk to Jaalin in order to organize the event had been bad enough.  Kat was pretty sure the older Shareholder was already putting together a half dozen trade and intelligence sharing agreements with the alien despite having zero authority to do so.

“And no,” Kat replied, deflecting the stallesp’s request.  “I am not scoping out the competition.  I understand that the rules allow every human over level twelve to be here, but at this point I don’t think that most of the samurai in this room are reasonably in the running to reach level twenty four first.”

“Not to take your achievements away from you,” she said with a smile, nodding toward the nervous cluster of fighters standing around you.  “There’s a reason that we can hold this event in a fairly small conference room.  Unless there are a lot more samurai hiding in plain sight, only twenty four humans have made it to level twelve, and Mr. Jackson and I have worked with alien teams to do so.”

The stallesp’s face twitched slightly at the reference to Mr. Jackson, but before he could say anything, one of the larger hispanic men in their group, half of his face covered in black metal, replied.

“No offense taken Erinyes.  I’ve seen your work, and although I think our entire team could probably take you in a fair fight, you’re smart enough not to let a fight be fair.”

“Plus,” another man cut in, a hint of an accent seeping into his voice.  “I don’t think any of you can take you one on one.  We’re only here because Grocorp was fairly insistent that the aliens required everyone over level twelve to be here.  There were hints that bad things would happen to anyone who hid their status and didn’t attend.”

“That’s an inelegant way to phrase it,” Dringbek said, making a clicking sound deep in his throat as he shook his head.

“Then we didn’t have to come here?”  The man with his face covered in metal asked, perking up.  “Could we just leave now?  I’m sure that Whisper could charter a flight and-”

“Oh no,” Dringbek replied.  “Anyone who does not attend risks imprisonment, fine or censure when Earth is finally integrated.  More than that, any non-human party that is caught interfering with or encouraging a candidate to not attend will face much worse punishment.  The threats were simply stated in an impolite fashion.  It’s unsurprising that Clan Ahn would simply come out and state that there would be repercussions.  They have the delicacy of a supernova.”

The other six samurai in their group froze, unsure how to process the stallesp’s response, but Kat just sighed.  Maybe all of her time working with Belle had made her immune to Drinbek’s nonsense.

“Don’t worry about it too much and try to enjoy yourselves,” Kat said, trying to set the samurai at ease with a smile.  Unfortunately, the semi pained look from a shareholder only set the rest of the fighters more on edge.  “I suspect that the purpose of this meeting is to explain the rules for Earth entering the Galactic Consensus while giving the various candidates a chance to scope each other out.  Given how far behind your group is, just think of it as a chance to network and eat fancy food.  Regardless, it has been nice meeting the six of you.”

She nodded once to them before turning and walking away.  Whippoorwill and Heather were both standing near the end of the buffet snacking on houer d'oeuvres.  Neither of them were quite level twelve yet, but organizing the gala had some benefits and Kat had been able to add a couple people to the guest list.

Behind her, as she walked away, Kat heard one of the South American samurai whispering to himself.

“But I hate networking…”

That brought an actual smile to her face.  Months and months of etiquette training had heaped layers of sophistication atop her, but underneath it all, Kat was still the same junior employee running jobs for a local gangster to save up for a starter set of cyberware.

Networking was the worst.

“Hey,” Kat said as she approached Whip.  “Did the two of you manage to-”

“Yes,” Heather replied before Kat could finish.  “The package has been delivered and to the best of my knowledge, no one is the wiser.”

That was a relief.  Kat glanced over at a third group of people.  Mr. Jackson stood at the center of the cluster, a bald man with eyes set slightly too wide in his bulbous skull at his side.  The two of them seemed to be holding court as almost a dozen other samurai clustered around them, clamoring to draw their attention.

The package in question was a tracking device.  Kat’s engineers didn’t think that it would be detectable, mostly because it didn’t really do anything. A tiny chip with a sliver of a rare uranium isotope had been inserted in one of the snacks that had been served to Mr. Jackson.  It didn’t emit any signals, and once the chip managed to latch itself onto the inside of the man’s throat, it was completely inert outside of the trace signals given off by the slowly decaying uranium.

It had significant limitations.  Despite all their sophistication, the scientists working for Kat wouldn’t be able to track it in real time or to a specific location, let alone picking up sound or images through it.  Instead, they could slowly upgrade the Grocorp surveillance satellites one by one so that they would be able to isolate and track the unique radiation given off by the decaying uranium.

She might not be able to locate the specific building that Mr. Jackson was staying in, but with any luck she’d be able to track him to a region or city.  From there, more mundane surveillance would hopefully let her trace the slippery samurai back to his lair.

  From there-

Before Kat could finish the thought, a heavily amplified cough was projected from the public address speakers that lined the room, instantly overwhelming the annoying music that they had been piping in until a second ago.

Jaalin stepped into the center of the room, one of her upper hands holding what looked like a brooch or a pendant to her mouth.

“Testing, testing.”  Kat winced as the lokkel’s voice boomed from the speakers around her, devolving into a squeal of feedback before whoever was controlling the sound levels managed to fix the system.

“There we go,” Jaalin continued.  “I wanted to say a couple of words before letting everyone return to their drinks and food.”

She paused for a chuckle, but everyone at the party seemed to be too on edge to respond.

“Today is Earth’s first Conclave of Ascenders,” Jaalin continued.  “Until Earth successfully develops its own Ascender and enters the Galactic Consensus, we will continue to have a new Conclave every sixty of your planet’s days.  The purpose of these meetings is to provide a forum for ascension candidates to meet with themselves and any Consensus interest groups that may want to form a treaty or trade deal with Earth once it successfully enters the Consensus.”

Kat nodded along.  Jaalin had already told her everything that would be revealed at the party, but even if she hadn’t, it wasn’t like the information was new to her.  Technically, there wasn’t any need for a formal conclave until Earth had thirty six candidates, but once the process was started, everyone on Earth was bound to follow them.  In the background, Jaalin kept talking, but Kat’s attention was jumping from one samurai to the other, trying to see how the rest of Earth’s elite was responding to the revelations.

“The purpose of the Galactic Consensus is to foster dialogue and communication.  As such, all candidates are prohibited from trying to physically harm each other.  If you wish to provide aid to another candidate in the tower, that is absolutely allowed.  Further, Dringbek and I will be circulating around the party.  If you wish to talk to one of us to see what sponsorship by our group might entail, that is also encouraged even if the Consensus’ rules strictly prohibit anyone from providing material support to a candidate before Earth’s integration.”

Most of the other players seemed to be either nodding along or listening intently as Jaalin laid out the specifics of the ascension process.  Many of them lost quite a bit of enthusiasm once they realized that the ascension trials would only be made available to individuals who achieved level twenty four, and that those trials would only continue until the first human managed to pass them.  Given that only a couple of other people in the room had managed to reach level thirteen or fourteen, it was easy for them to conclude that they were out of the running.

Throughout the entire process, Mr. Jackson and his almost certainly alien influenced companion remained stoic, not letting a hint of their thoughts touch their face.  He only slipped up when Jaalin mentioned that candidates were not allowed to target each other, bringing the faintest hint of a sneer to his face.

Once the speech was over, the room lapsed into a gentle murmur.  Kat perked up a bit as she saw a pair of familiar faces.  Davis Stoller, Jasper’s chief of security, and Hestia, one of his former party mates, picked their way through the fairly diffuse crowd 

“Erinyes,” Stoller said with a curt nod, drawing a reply in kind.

“Merrimack.  It’s good to see you.  I knew that you’d retired, but I never realized that your team made it to level twelve before you called it quits.”

He sighed, looking around the room with a resigned expression on his face.

“Don’t like to advertise it, Erinyes,” Stoller replied unhappily.  “Everyone knows that I’m running security for the Haupts and everyone knows that I’m fairly high leveled.  If they don’t know my level, people will struggle to know my capabilities.  Half the mystique of a player is turning yourself into a mystery.  If no one knows exactly what you can do, they can make plans to account for you.  Now, I feel a little naked.  I understand why you called this meeting, but at the same time, I can’t help but wonder how many of my secrets have been leaked.”

“But don’t worry,” Hestia gushed.  “I’m more than happy enough for both of us to see you and Whippoorwill again.  Honestly?  I think the two of you are by far my favorite representatives of the younger generation, and I thought that even before I found out that you were in contention for whatever this is.”

Hestia waved generally at the ball room around them, never looking away from Kat.  At Kat’s side, she felt Whippoorwill shift unhappily through her gravity domain, but before Kat had a chance to address the older woman’s unsettling intensity, she picked up two pairs of measured footsteps approaching them from behind.

The hair stood up on the back of her neck, and Kat pivoted smoothly, her center of gravity dropping slightly as she prepared herself to dodge or spring into an attack at a moment’s notice.

Mr. Jackson was walking toward her, his bald and frankly inhuman companion at his side as he crossed the more or less empty gulf of the dance floor.  Around the room, conversations had stopped, and practically every samurai was focusing their attention on the two of them.

When he arrived, the only sound in the entire room was the slightly annoying warbling of the allegedly soothing music.

“Erinyes.”  When Mr. Jackson said the word, there wasn’t any heat or anger.  There also wasn’t any respect.  There was nothing.  It was like he was stating the name of a street or the temperature outside.

“Mr. Jackson,” she replied, doing her best and failing to duplicate his tone.  It was hard to keep herself perfectly still when she was well aware of the recent attempts he had made on her life.

The faintest hint of a smile flashed over his face before Mr. Jackson’s expression went completely blank once again.  Kat managed to suppress the pulse of frustration that welled up from her gut.  The last thing she wanted was to show any more weakness to the man.

“There sure were a lot of rules recited today,” Mr. Jackson said, shaking his head slowly.  “It seems like the Galactic Consensus does things differently than we do here on Earth. They have enough regulations and traditions to choke out any innovation or progress before it has the chance to manifest.  So many rules and restrictions, that I’m sure to forget one or two here or there.”

Kat didn’t reply.  The samurai clearly wanted to deliver some sort of message with his monologue, and she was going to let him.  They’d already managed to slip a bug into his body so the purpose for the meeting was complete.  Beyond that, any interaction with Mr. Jackson was just giving the man more information.

“All of this talk about cooperation and allies?”  He asked, clicking his tongue thoughtfully.  “It is like they expect me to invite you out for a cup of coffee.”

Mr. Jackson’s eyes grew cold.

“But of course,” he continued.  “You’ve already just had some coffee with a friend of mine.  A shame about how that turned out.  Oh well.  Next time maybe the experience will be more enjoyable.”

He turned and walked away, completely uncaring as Kat’s eyes bored a hole into the back of his skull.

Yeah.  Screw the Galactic Consensus and their rules.  That guy was going to try to kill her, and Kat was going to kill him first.

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